Read the latest from Marie Claire columnist Chris Addison

By Chris Addison  on Tuesday 31 May 2011

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What’s sexy? In women? Zooey Deschanel. Can I go now? Oh, all right, I’ll go on, because I’ve spent a lot of my life defending the male sex against the charge that we are all animalistic brutes who are only led by the wishes of our gentleman’s gentleman. It’s a tedious assumption you see a lot of in chick lit, advertising and the witterings of Kathy Lette.

Although I will confess that most of us are capable of being a bit like that once in a while depending on such varied factors as the time of year, the phase of the moon, how long it’s been since we last had sex, how close the telly remote is to our hand and whether or not Nigella’s just been on.

But my definition of ‘sexy’ really depends on how I’m feeling at the time. So let’s try whittling it down: some things are never sexy; things which either think they are or are assumed to be sexy but are right up there with a threesome with Norman Lamont in the hubba-hubba stakes. This is my list…
Women in R’n’B videos. Not sexy. As manufacturers of blow-up dolls attempt to make them more lifelike, so the
directors of these videos attempt to make the women in them look more like blow-up dolls.
Eventually they’ll meet in the middle and Nelly will die as his harem unexpectedly explodes mid-frot.
Next up: when girls put a finger in a scarlet lipsticked mouth and slowly draw it out. Seriously, if you do that, the next thing you do had better be putting it up in the air to test the direction of the wind.
Outfits from Ann Summers. I know they’re on every high street so they must be doing something right, but they’re the Clinton Cards of erotica. 

On the other hand, some things are always sexy. I mean always. You could have run three marathons in 48 hours, gone through DVDs of all five seasons of The Wire and eaten a roast, yet some things would still instantly bring you to wide-eyed, heart-thumping life. A woman in a well-cut, shortish mac for one; a girl in a light floaty summer dress or simply Natalie Portman. These will all do.

But there’s something more fundamental. The women that I have always found beguiling, the ones who have made me have to go into the gents and rest my forehead against the cold tiles, have all had one thing in common: they had their own sense of style. ‘Having her own style’ is all too often a euphemism for ‘deluded lunatic with a legwarmers fixation’, but I don’t mean that. I mean truly stylish, confident women who’ve drawn their look from what they liked and what suited their bodies rather than what they were told to like. From my unrequited boyhood crushes through my unrequited teenage lusts past the unrequited pant-stirrers of my twenties right up to the astonishing woman I married, they’ve all had that combination of the strength to resist the diktats of the fashionista and the flair to effortlessly sort the whole shebang out for themselves.

That sort of woman is, in my experience, without fail, funny, sparkly and energetic – a combination that people who find women a bit frightening often refer to as ‘feisty’. But, man, is feisty sexy. That ‘come along with me or don’t – I don’t care cos I’m going anyway’ attitude that I’d so love to have myself, as opposed to my ‘someone tell me where we’re going – no, you keep hold of the map’ one. This, I guess, is why I’ve so often felt out of my league with the women I’ve fancied. Because I have been.
(Oh, and also I quite like it if they have nice tits too.)

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