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After any intense inspection, nothing seems all that appealing. I try to hide a lot and in a drunken mindset (that I tried to hide) I had a conversation with someone that left me thinking. Why is it that we feel a need to hide some of our cards upon approaching a relationship? I was told that you have to play hard to get sometimes and hold back some of your cards in order to prevent some people from being scared off. While I think this is a ridiculous course of action, I find myself taking on this course. On top of that, I feel badly for doing this. Perhaps dishonest, I feel as if this manner of social interaction is the one looked upon as the most safe and useful. What I don’t get is if we all have these cards we are hiding because we fear scaring away others, then we really have no right to get scared from the sight other people’s cards. If that makes sense at all.

I’m so young, I’m so god damned young…

Sex appeal has become a synecdoche for all appeal: People refer to a new restaurant or job as “sexy” when they mean hip or powerful. A U.S. Army general was quoted in The New Yorker regarding an air raid on the Taliban as saying “it was sexy stuff,” for instance; the New York Times ran a piece on the energy industry subheadlined “After Enron, Deregulation Is Looking Less Sexy.” For something to be noteworthy it must be “sexy.” Sexiness is no longer just about being arousing or alluring, it’s about being worthwhile.

Passion isn’t the point. The glossy, overheated thumping of sexuality in our culture isles about connection than consumption. Hotness has become our cultural currency, and a lot of people send a lot of time and a lot of regular, green currency trying to acquire it. Hot ness is not the same thing as beauty, which has been valued throughout history. Hot can mean popular. Hot can mean talked about. But when it pertains to women, hot means two things in particular: fuckable and salable. The literal job criteria for our role models, the stars of the sex industry.

And so sex work is frequently and specifically referenced by the style or speech or creative output of women in general. Consider the oeuvre of pop singer Christina Aguilera, who titled her 2003 album Stripped (the tour was sold out and pulled in $32 million), mud-wrestled in a humping fashion in her video Dirrty, and likes to wear assless chaps. “She’s a wonderful role model,” Aguilera’s mother proclaimed on a VH1 special about her daughter, “trying to change society so that a woman can do whatever men do.”

It is true that women are catching up with men in the historically masculine department of sexual opportunism; trying to get the best and the most for ourselves in that arena as we are everywhere else. But it’s not true that men parade around in their skivvies as a means to attaining power, at least not men in mainstream heterosexual American culture- they don’t have to. Jay Leno sits floppy faced and chunky in a loose suit behind his desk, confident that he is the kind of late night. When Katie Couric guest-hosted the Tonight Show in May 2003, she wore a low-cut dress and felt the need to emphasize her breasts by pointing at them and proclaiming “these are actually real!” Lest the leg men in the house feel under stimulated, Couric also had guys with power tools cut a hole in Leno’s desk so that the program could be a more complete peep show- a Google search for “Katie Couric legs” provides links to dozens of porn sits with her valves in close-up, in case you missed it. Even America’s morning TV sweetheart, a woman who interviews heads of state and is the highest paid person in television news- outearning Ted Koppel, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings, Mike Wallace, and her cohost Matt Lauer with her $65 million contract- has to dabble in exhibitionism to feel as though she’s really made it today.

Couric later commented that she wanted to show America her “fun” side on the Tonight Show, but in truth she was exposing more than being fun, or even being sexual. Really what she was showing was that she was open to a certain sort of attention- which is something that we specifically require if we are going to think of a woman as hot. Hotness doesn’t just yield approval. Proof that a woman actively seeks approval is a crucial criterion for hotness in the first place.

For women, and only for women, hotness requires projecting a kind of eagerness, offering a promise that any attention you receive for your physicality is welcome. When Leno did his stint at Couric’s post on the Today Show, he remained fully clothed. While Janet Jackson introduced Americans to her right nipple at the notorious 2004 Super Bowl half-time show, Justin Timerlake’s wardrobe managed not to malfunction. Not one male Olympian has found it necessary to show us his penis in the pages of a magazine. Proving that you are hot, worth of lust, and –necessarily- that you seek to provoke lust is still exclusively women’s work. It is not enough to be successful, right and accomplished: Even women like Couric and Jackson and world-champion swimmer Haley Clark, women at the pinnacle of their fields, feel compelled to display their solicitude. As that girl gone wild put it, this has become “like a reflex.”

-Ariel Levy

Big things are coming my way and I believe that if I keep on dreaming that they will happen, I will be content enough to survive. At least, so I hope. “Let’s do big things”, is what I will say when we meet. And we will. You can change me forever. We’ll be in love like dreamers often are (perhaps more so in our dreams than with each other) and we won’t ask for anything else.

Here is my post card to you all.