FHM readers recently voted an Australian man on to their magazine’s famous 100 Sexiest Women in the World list for 2011 just because he looks like a Playboy pin-up. To me that’s like giving the local bag lady a Nobel Peace Prize because, when viewed from the right angle in favourable light, she bears a passing resemblance to Mother Teresa. Appearances are important, but any product should be fit for purpose if it wants to be taken seriously. Apart from the obvious, there’s a lot more to sexiness than looks.
Andrej Pejic, a 19-year-old Serbian-born Australian-raised youth who features as both a male and a female model in numerous top magazines, sneaked past the girls into 98th place on The List, just ahead of Lady Gaga and a single spot behind Israeli hottie Bar Rafaeli.
“We were trying to show the nudity of the sexes, that a man could look like a woman and a woman could look like a man,” says Turkish Vogue’s editor-in-chief, Seda Dominic, when explaining why he’d selected Andrej for a photo shoot. “The line between the sexes is becoming more and more blurred. Fashion is all about providing people with choices. It doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman.” I don’t know about you, but I’m reading from a different page here.
One wonders if FHM’s discerning readers realised that their selection of Andrej clearly placed the androgynous Aussie sex-bomb ahead of all but 97 of the 3,3-billion females on the planet in terms of desirability. There are going to be a lot of very, very outraged women out there when this finally sinks in. Who knows what the consequences will be when all those militant feminists and indignant housewives suddenly do an ideological U-turn and start marching for their right to be seen as sex symbols?
I think it serves us men right, though. For years we’ve allowed the girls to encroach on our turf by swearing like troopers and drinking like sailors, picking up strangers in pubs and dumping them in the morning, and then riding off over the horizon on Harley-Davidsons they bought, stripped, customised and rebuilt on their own.
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And, while they’ve been busy doing all that, we’ve allowed ourselves to be converted into caring, sharing, sensitive metrosexuals who buy men’s magazines full of advertisements for face washes, shampoo and aftershave, interspersed with articles on chest-waxing, interior decorating and child rearing.
This new gender-blurring thing possibly offers some benefits for us hairy-chested old troopies who grew up on a diet of Scope magazine, Klippies and Texan Plain. Having cast off the shackles of our masculinity we can, for instance, now safely wear pantyhose for warmth without being laughed at when we ride to the beauty salon on our Vespas, and we’ve surely earned the right to say “no” when we feel a headache coming on. We can complain if our partners leave the toilet seat down and we can take it for granted that the women who share our beds and our lives know how to quickly fix a leaking cistern and rewire a hairdryer before leaving for work at 5.30am on the busiest day of the month.
Andrej, of course, already enjoys the best of both worlds. He can get twice the number of modelling assignments that a male or female model would, he’s got double the chance of picking up somebody at a nightclub, and if he’s dressed right, men will always stop and do the necessary when he gets a puncture. Best of all, an evening in the pub need not be too expensive. “I may as well push it to the limits,” he told an interviewer last year. “I wouldn’t dress this way if I didn’t have fun with it.” – By Gavin Foster