Somewhere along the conversation, the talk turned into a chorus of unequivocal agreement when someone mentioned Charlize Theron.
We all love Charlize Theron. She was mentioned independently by three of us, over a span of three days, in the course of our talks. We have watched films for the sake of Charlize Theron, both to look at the vision that she is, and as a sign of our allegiance to her phenomenal womanhood. So, there. But this sparked a different thought in my head. Why exactly do we like Charlize Theron? What is it that makes us the fan of a particular person? A person like her, to be more specific?
An author once famously observed that Indians are of two types: polite sex-starved, and impolite sex-starved. We the authors and readers here belong to the first category. We do not look at girls on the street [male{cis(hetero)} author here], we (even in our 20s) do not watch steamy scenes in films in front of our parents, we refer to things like erection, ejaculation or masturbation as ‘that’ or ‘those’. The second category people do things like going to seedy C-grade movies and wolf-whistling after women on the road. The skin is very different indeed. But the core is the same: unnatural suppressions leading to unnatural complexes. In our land, admission of anything fornicatory is forbidden— even if you are a non-human.
So, naturally, no one ever admits to liking someone simply because they find the person sexy.
The action of liking someone has been elevated to a complex, Platonical idea from the simple thing that it used to be. Words can have a whole host of potential meanings. Earlier, in any given instance, we used to depend on the context of a word to home in on the exact meaning that’s intended. Now, there is a growing trend of attaching fixed, sanitized, unoffending meanings to words, which is making our language vague and our thoughts insincere and shallow. — Today, if a boy admits to liking a girl, he has to make it clear that his affinity is purely to the girl’s ‘inner qualities.’ God forbid someone likes you because you’re pretty.
But I am old-fashioned, and I like to think that likings can be of different flavours, shades and tones. So I thought about it, and this is what I came to understand.
You could like someone because of their inner qualities— their talent, their dedication, their character, their kindness. That would be an admiration, a gesture of appreciation, an expression of respect.
Then, you could like someone because of how they look— their beauty, their physique, their appearance, their bearing. Sometimes this liking takes the form of attraction; you see someone and find them sexy. Sometimes it is not sexual— it is just your appreciation for how they look. But in both cases, you like them because of something physical.
Sometimes, you like someone in both ways— you are drawn to how they look; also, you respect them because of their inner qualities. Our feelings about Charlize Theron is of this kind. The same can be said of Hedy Lamarr, Natalie Portman or Keanu Reeves.
And finally, I could discern another type of liking that we have for some people. This is when you like someone because of how they look, but you also respect them because of the way they actively maintain and preserve their physical appearance. In this case, both respect and attraction are about the same thing— their body.
Take Britney Spears. I always thought Britney was a very attractive woman, but I never was her fan. That is, I wasn’t a fan of her music. I do not have that kind of ‘respect’ for her, I merely like to ogle her when she shows her body off. A good example of this is the Michael Jackson-Britney Spears duet that took place on Sept 7 2001, at New York’s Madison Square Garden. Every time I go back to this video, I drink in how terrific Britney looks, but no one has any doubt about her musical contribution (or lack of it) to the performance.
It is unnecessary to cite examples of people whom I respect because of inner qualities— those names are obvious and numerous. From Rabindranath Tagore to Rosalind Franklin— take your pick and there you are.
A good example of someone whom I both respect and find singularly attractive is Yelena Isinbayeva. She’s one of the greatest athletes of our time— I grew up watching her smash through all those records one after the other. You cannot not respect her. But she was also one of my big boyhood crushes; looking at her photos, I used to feel she’s the sexiest woman in the world. Yelena is a point where my veneration and my amorousness converged.
Although Yelena is an athlete, and her body is the primary medium of her work, my admiration for her is not because of her physique, it’s because of her drive, her dedication, her fortitude and her talent. It is because she is a great sportsperson. My fascination for her body is independent of this admiration. The two things are on different wavelengths. — And then there’s the other group of people who inspire both my admiration and my arousal, but both feelings are owed to how they look. Cory Everson would be a good example of this, so would be Bojana Vasiljevic, or Dani Speegle. Cory is an international star— I personally feel Hollywood owed her the same chance it offered Arnold Schwarzenegger; both were bodybuilders, both took a shot at becoming an actor, and neither were naturally gifted when it came to acting. But while Arnold was aided by fortune and social forces, Cory apparently was not. She was confined to small, stereotypical roles which never had any major traction in popular culture.
Bojana Vasiljevic is a contemporary athlete who competes in the Figure division of IFBB contests. She is also a coach, and has a background in gymnastics and equestrian sports. I have been in awe of her physique since I first saw her pictures almost a decade ago. She is a strikingly pretty woman, with a body that seems to have been sculpted by Amazonians. Dani Elle Speegle, on the other hand, is a crossfit athlete to whom the words ravishing, powerful and voluptuous apply equally well. I cannot but respect her for the body she has built (and keeps improving day after day), and I cannot help finding her irresistibly sexy.
Apart from Cory, Bojana and Dani, I should name another athlete here, — for the sake of integrity, if not anything else. Crossfit athlete Alanna Fisk Colon is one of the most beautiful-looking people I have seen on the Gram. I’m not talking about her physique here— I chose the word ‘beautiful’ on purpose. It’s not a discrete aspect of her body, her eyes, her smile or her carriage, — it is the moving, combined effect of it all that makes me use that rare adjective. There is a non-physical element to it too; I’ve been partial to her ever since I discovered she is a hilarious physical comedian and has wonderful comic sense.
Two more names and I call it a night. Rafaela Montanaro, who belongs to the same category as Yelena, as I respect her immensely as an athlete and a dancer, while finding her rivetingly attractive; and Eleonora Dobrinina, who can be justly described as a Michelangelo marble in the flesh. Rafaela is a world champion pole-dancer, and Eleonora is an IFBB athlete who also works extensively as a trainer and coach. Eleonora is perhaps the supreme example of a person whose body can command your awe and attraction at the same time. Her collaboration with photographer Kai York produced one of the most breathtaking series of portraits I have seen, and it is her unearthly physique that made it so. Being a bodybuilder, her own body is her canvas, her own physique is her work of art. When I see that, it hits home.
And at that level of atavistic instinct, the heart and the hormones move as one — in agreement and in step, like gathered old friends.