A couple of readers suggested that men might not invest much effort into trying to make themselves sexier because women don’t want men who are trying that hard to do that. Effortless sexiness is the sexiest of them all — and the self-consciousness needed for self-improvement is a turn-off.
My former student Geoffrey Murry went into detail on this, from the Queer Eye viewpoint:
As a man who is intimately concerned with what makes a man sexy, I can say
that your friend Marilyn got it only partially right. Yes, boorish manners and a bad shirt can completely remove a man from the running. Yes, attention to the civilities of the day can give even the most aesthetically challenged man a shot at scoring a mate. . . .
[But] I find it is often a man’s resoluteness in the face of what I shall call here adversity that makes him sexy. It is his adamantine surety of place as he strides into a room that makes him noticed. Were he to be engaged in the
constant questioning of himself that Marilyn suggests, I reckon it might be more difficult for him to pull this off.
As an example, I offer what an observer of gay male culture might call the fetishization of the straight man. It is not that he, the straight man, is so much more attractive or well dressed than a gay man. Quite often the
opposite is true, with the average gay man perhaps being better groomed and tailored than the average straight man. Rather it is the sheer *effortlessness* with which an attractive straight man can achieve his attractiveness that makes him sexy; his insouciance wins the day.
Gay men simply try too hard, often attempting to look perfect, which always fails and leaves him looking simply . . . false, stilted, fabricated. The straight man (the metrosexual and Marilyn’s dream men aside) rarely goes
to this length, and it is the imperfection in his appearance that gives it the veracity of the virile.
“The veracity of the virile” — well put! More: “[I]t is self-confidence that yields sex appeal, not constant self-awareness and adjustment.”
Very interesting — I hadn’t thought of it this way; I suspect that many women’s perspective, conscious or not, is much like the gay man’s perspective that Geoffrey describes.
Of course, this means that one needs to adjust oneself so successfully that it looks like one isn’t trying to adjust oneself at all. The same is probably true for women, at least in some measure: The best makeup is the makeup that’s so good that it looks like you aren’t wearing any makeup.
But naturally this sort of self-improvement is much harder than the self-improvement Marilyn originally wrote me about — and the self-improvement she described might yield less payoff than one might at first think. So maybe the “I’ll just be me” slobs she describes are (sometimes) being more rational than we gave them credit for being.
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