I remember the first time I watched Britney Spears’ video “I’m a slave for you”. I was 15 years old, and it was also the first time I wished I looked like someone else – I wished I looked like her.

It was not the first time I thought of her as a beautiful girl, because I had been listening to her music and watching her videos for a few years before that. But there was something different about that video, something had changed in her image and the way she carried herself, and it was not until that moment that I was introduced with a new concept in my life: sexy.

The way superstars’ image, and therefore the image we often want to copy as their audience, transitions from “innocent” to “sexy” was not new when Britney did it, it’s definitely not new now that Miley does it, and it won’t be new in a few years when someone who is 12 years old today does it.

I am not sure a lot has changed since I was teenager, and in fact, some people would say things are even getting worse when it comes to the way women are represented in the media – Watch the documentary Miss Representation, PLEASE! (it’s on Netflix and you can watch the trailer here )

Some might be a little more hopeful and say that there are people making efforts that are trying different takes on “sexy” – “curvier” women, no Photoshop retouches, wrinkles, stretch marks, freckles, tattoos, confidence, multicultural portrayals, and evenbrainy, geeky, dorky are considered the “new sexy” in some (still few) movies, tv shows, magazines, and advertisements.

I don’t intend to diminish those efforts, and while I’m on board with the idea of making our views of sexy broader, I’m starting to believe that maybe the root of the problem is our obsession with sexy to begin with.

Maybe we don’t need to find the “new sexy”, maybe we should just decrease our longing for sexy. Not everything and everyone in this world needs to be sexy, wants to be sexy, or is sexy. This sexy-centred vision of ours leaves the door open for all kinds of issues, including hypersexualisation, body issues, anxiety disorders, rape, etc.

We need to stop creating our image and shaping our minds around the idea that everything we do needs to be turn into some sort of points in the sexy scale. Because ultimately that makes everything we do evolve around sex, and I’m sure there’s so much more in being a human than just sex.

I want to believe that brainy is just smart, pretty is just beautiful, well-read is enlightening, bubbly is cheerful. I want to stop searching for new definitions of sexy and I don’t want to bring it back, I want to bring it down just enough so we can see that there’s more in this life for us to feel valuable and precious than being sexy.

-Daniela

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