...Sexiness is touch, smell, texture, feeling, weight, presence. All of which is quite delibrately removed by magazine photoshopping and replaced with generic symbols that only evoke sexiness through endless Pavlovian repitition.

Go to a museum and look at a nude by Renoir. The woman may have the brains of a Disney movie bunny, but she has real heft, real thighs, and real weight. That's sexy. The boneless, ghostly, wavery image on the Redbook cover is not sexy at all, it's just something we've been conditioned to believe is sexy.

You don't see it? Too bad for you, lost and castrated in your empty world of airless symbols and signifiers. You're like someone in a Philip K. Dick novel, drugged up to believe the shrieking alien spider on tv is your loving and wise leader. All those images on the magazine racks that you lust for are just unreal jokes on you; you would never fall for a woman who looked that, for the simple reason that you could never find a woman who looked like that. If you're spending your life wanting a woman who looks like that, you're just a fool.

Look at the orginal photo. The woman has beautiful and convincingly real and achingly touchable shoulders: there's a beautiful sweep that runs from her right shoulder and across her back and down her left arm. Look at it--don't you see it? That's how real people are, that's how real people attract each other. It's beautiful because the sweeping curve evokes a hug. And what is sexier than a hug?

The photoshopped version removes all of that; it breaks her bones and tears out her warm flesh and loses the sweep and it's all wavery and boneless and ghostly and there's no sweep. It's unreal, flat. There's nothing there, so there's no hug for you. It's just a stupid empty symbol. Who lusts for that?

In fact, all you're really supposed to see is just the face in a flash. It's for the supermarket rack, remember? And it's the same face you've seen a million times before, because they've deliberately made it the same face. All it evokes is a quick and empty and stupid Pavlovian response, if anything.

If you look at old fashion magazines, you can see very clearly how unreal and generally vampirish the women are, and if you have any sense you laugh at it. Who gets off on that? But today's magazines are just the same as the old magazines; all the women are highly unreal and they have to be unreal for the same reason that they were unreal in the old fashion magazines; you just can't show or sell real sexiness in supermarkets. You can't have people standing in supermarkets rubbing themselves, or, more likely, just feeling uncomfortable. You have to squeeze the sexiness out and convert it to a symbolic representation of sexiness just so you can put it on supermarket racks.

The sad part comes when real people begin to confuse symbolic sexiness with real sexiness--as so many people really do.