How to Think More About Sex (The School of Life)

If we appreciate Madame Devaucay’s beauty, it is surely not just because we assess her as being healthy, but also because we are moved by her entire character as it skilfully expresses itself to us via the features of her face.

Like many other outstanding examples of the genre, Ingres’s portrait teaches us that appearance can be a bearer of authentic meaning. Portraiture is instructive precisely because so much of a subject really is right there on the surface. The outer, bodily self does not always have to be at odds with an inner, deeper persona lurking beneath the skin; the two can be integrated and coincident. Our wanting to sleep with certain people because we find them physically seductive doesn’t hence have to mean that we are ignoring who they ‘really are’. Rather, we may be aroused by, and feel eager to get closer to, an exciting kind of goodness – or, in Stendhal’s formulation, a promise of happiness – that we have correctly discerned in their lips, skin, mouth and eyes.

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The psychological aspect of an impression of ‘sexiness’ is also evident in the context of clothing, especially women’s high fashion. Turning once again to the evolutionary–biological point of view, we might draw an easy comparison between couture’s presentation of its product and the mating displays of tropical birds. Just as the quality of the plumage of these birds can indicate the presence or absence of particular blood parasites and thereby swiftly communicate a message about health to a prospective mate, so can fashion seem, at least from a distance, to be narrowly focused on accentuating signs of biological fitness, especially as these are manifest in legs, hips, breasts and shoulders.

However, fashion would be a rather one-dimensional business if it spoke to us only of health. There wouldn’t be such intriguing differences between the wares turned out by companies and designers such as Dolce & Gabbana and Donna Karan, or Céline and Marni, or Max Mara and Miu Miu. The foregrounding of health may be one part of the mission of fashion, but on a more ambitious level, this art form also provides women with clothes that support a range of views about what it means to be an interesting and desirable human being. In all their infinite permutations, clothes make statements about values, ethics and psychological dispositions, and we judge them to be either ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’ depending on whether we approve or disapprove of the messages they carry. To pronounce a certain outfit ‘sexy’ is not just to remark on the possibility that its wearer might be able to produce thriving children; it is also to acknowledge that we are turned on by the philosophy of existence it represents.

In a given season, we may look at any designer’s collection and consider how we are being invited by it to think of virtue. Dior, for example, may be urging us to remember the importance of such elements as craftsmanship, preindustrial society and feminine modesty; Donna Karan may be stressing the need for independence, professional competence and the excitements of urban life; and Marni may be making a case for quirkiness, calculated immaturity and left-wing politics.