What Makes Sexy?

Woman walks into a cafe.

She’s wearing a retro outfit with a stylish 40’s-era hat that bathes her face in shadow. She’s got great lines. She’s noir, pure film noir.

I’m deep in thought and barely notice her.

She acknowledges me, unsmiling, and passes by.

Only then do I realize: I know this person and hadn’t recognized her because she was all tangled up in noir.

And I think to myself: My, that was a vision!

*****

We all live with this dichotomy, I think. There’s folks just being folks and then, behind the scrim, there’s this other world, this place of storied essences. It’s where hardboiled detectives live, and femmes fatales, and ingenues, and divine sluts, and dumb jocks, and hookers with a heart of gold, and all the rest of them.

This world leaks. The archetypes we carry about within us can can be overlays that intrude on the business of living. Yet we’re also constantly seeking them. Yearning, even. Something about these archetypes feels essential and more true than what we experience in the usual mundane reality.

We’re real in one way. (Mortally.)

They’re real in another. (Eternal.)

These archetypes are masks of the Goddess. And the God.

And we’re looking for God. And Goddess.

Always.

This is why the gumshoe falls in love with the woman who he knows, deep down inside, will eventually destroy him. She’s the Goddess who will take him away from the tawdriness he daily inhabits.

In that unguarded moment when that vision in noir passed me by, I was ambushed by the archetypal, so profoundly that I was blinded to the person underneath. I was transported to a world that’s exciting, mysterious and timeless.

A world the opposite of ours where there’s no humdrum and no mortality, and where attraction’s allure is forever.

So what’s sexy?

Vision is sexy.

(Vision the Intruder.)

Escape is sexy.

What’s not of this world is sexy.