What Is Sexy?

It’s 3 p.m. on a slow Friday afternoon and I’m browsing the Web. I’m searching for the secret of sex appeal, and I’m not exactly sure what this maze we call the Internet has to offer on the subject, much less where to find it.

But I persevere.

And suddenly my original intent ceases to matter.

For I stumble across the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue site (www.cnnsi.com/features/1997/swimsuit/). I find myself welcomed to something called “Bikini World,” which invites me to “Circumnavigate the Globe on a Navel Expedition…”

I begin to laugh. But the chuckle catches in my throat as, dressed (so to speak) in a red-and-pink polka-dot bikini, appears Tyra Banks…

…whose thumbs are hooked on the side straps of her swimsuit bottom, as if she were considering a quick exit…

…whose caramel-colored body is a glowing contrast to the sand, sea and sky background that frames her…

…who seems to be staring at me …

…at only me …

And in that instant I’m as aware of a feeling as much as I ever have been:

Life is good.

I ADMIT IT. WOMEN turn me on.

And this feeling doesn’t apply just to the Tyra Banks of the world. My fantasy life is as active as the next person’s, but the truth is that I respond to women, period.

I love the way they look, the way they smell, the way they move, the way they feel. I love the way they challenge my intellect, and the way they arouse my emotions.

For all the things that they are, and for all the things that I need them to be, women fill a void in my soul.

I’ve been fortunate in this respect, which is good, because I wouldn’t want to live without a woman in my life.

Suppose, though, that my tastes didn’t run to women. Suppose I responded sexually to men. Or suppose that my preferences did include women, but I responded only to certain types of women - tall ones or short ones, light ones or dark ones, those who wore a size 2 or those whose dress size more closely matched the number of games in a regular NFL season (you’re right, 16 it is).

Well, my life might be more exciting, it might be less exciting, or it might be the same as it is now. Overall, though, my emotional processes and physical reactions likely wouldn’t change.

Charles Darwin understood that.

Yes, that Charles Darwin. In his 1872 book “The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,” the great English naturalist proved to be a master of understatement.

“When lovers meet,” he wrote, “we know that their hearts beat quickly, their breathing is hurried, and their faces flush; for this love is not inactive like that of a mother for her infant.”

Decoding Darwin’s Victorian sensibilities, it’s clear that he’s talking about sexual attraction, not love.

In his book “The Human Animal,” talk-show host Phil Donahue put the notion in more modern terms.

“If the people who wrote love songs were true to human anatomy, they’d be writing songs not about the heart or even the eyes but about the hypothalamus.”

So consider this something of a universal truth: Love and sexual attraction are not necessarily connected.

Consider this, too: There’s nothing wrong with this.

Just as long as we know how to tell the difference - which, of course, is the challenge.

IT’S NOW JUST PAST 4 on the same Friday afternoon. I have graduated from swimsuit babes to supermodels. And I am unimpressed.

That’s hardly surprising. I’m a fashion ignoramus. Whether it emanates from Paris, Milan or New York, high fashion to me has always seemed to be the province of a few too-cool-for-school misogynists.

So I have little hope that I’ll find anything on the fashion runway to help me understand the secret of sex appeal.

Pretty soon, I locate “the latest Versace Haute Couture Collection for Fall Winter 1997…” The site, normally accessible for a fee, is free today as a tribute to the recently murdered Gianni Versace, who is described as “one of Italy’s greatest modern designers.”

This seems like a good place to start, so I locate the “just click here!” icon and…

…up comes the first eight of 180 bona-fide Versace designs…

…one is a skimpy black number that looks as if it had been spray-painted by a gang of kindergarten-age graffiti artists…

…a second toga-like creation looks like a reject from the court of Caligula…

…the third seems identical to the first, only with beige rhinestones in place of the graffiti (yee-haw, ride ‘em cowboy)…

… No. 4 looks like a variation on No. 3, only with the top half replaced by sheer, see-through fabric (just the thing for that next budget meeting)…

As I click through the entire line, I see women dressed like astronauts, like motorcycle mamas, like nuns from an alternate dimension (complete with crucifix), like Mafiosa and like actresses auditioning to play Catwoman.

I find only a few even halfway attractive and none even remotely sexy, so I know that I must be missing something. These costumed women are veritable icons of contemporary sexiness, right?

What is wrong with me that I can’t see it?

DOING DARWIN ONE BETTER, consider this understatement: Opinions range widely on just what constitutes sexual attractiveness.

Elizabeth Taylor, for example, once said that Richard Burton, a man she loved so much that she married him twice, was “a very sexy man. He’s got that sort of jungle essence that one can sense.”

Burton, who we can presume loved Taylor as well, wasn’t one to always repay a compliment.

“Elizabeth is a pretty girl,” he said, “but she has a double chin and an overdeveloped chest, and she’s rather short in the leg. So, I can hardly describe her as the most beautiful creature I’ve ever seen.”

Burton was, if nothing else, a product of his culture.

For as Isadora Allman says, “Our society gives a very, very narrow view to not only what is beautiful but what is sexy. All you have to do is look at the cover of GQ or Cosmo and this is it.”

According to Allman, a San Francisco-based sexologist and advice-columnist, that ideal notion of cultural beauty involves such specifics as having a full head of hair, of being able-bodied, glossy-toothed, young, slender and toned.

“Any deviation of this is seen as less and less sexy and less and less beautiful,” she says.

Furthermore, “beautiful” doesn’t necessarily equate with “sexy.” In the 1950s, for example, Grace Kelly was seen as the epitome of classic beauty. The star of such Alfred Hitchcock films as “Rear Window,” “Dial M for Murder” and “To Catch a Thief,” Kelly was celebrated for her blond hair, blue eyes and a face so perfectly symmetrical that it seemed sculpted.

Not everyone, however, considered Kelly sexy.

“I can say she is beautiful and add that I think she had zippo sexual appeal,” Allman says. “I don’t find ice-maiden-type beauties attractive. But Hitchcock did, and what we got was Hitchcock’s sexual stereotype thrust at us.”

Clearly, then, Hitchcock helped make Kelly (and, by extension, the rest of his ice maidens - Kim Novak, Eva Marie Saint, Tippi Hedrin, etc.) a cultural ideal of beauty and, to some extent, sexual allure. Just as clearly, however, it didn’t - and still doesn’t - work for everyone.

“Sexiness is indeed in the eye of the beholder,” Allman says. “If you love somebody and they have a freckled left buttock, ever after freckled buttocks are going to turn you on because they’re going to be associated with all the things you love about that person.”

To illustrate: “I have a friend who has a real passion for women who have what is customarily called ‘piano legs,”’ Allman says. “Really thick legs. He was a late child of a Polish-born mother, and he remembers crawling around the floor among all these thick-ankled older women, all these women of Polish peasant stock, getting his first sniff of the female body.”

So that’s it? Early childhood experiences can forever shape our sexual longings?

“It’s as good a guess as any,” Allman says. The rest, she adds, is “lost in the mists of our own history.”

Darwin might agree. Phil Donahue certainly would.

IT ALL BEGINS with biology.

While no one can argue the obvious differences between the sexes, the fact is that those differences don’t show up until five or six weeks after conception. It’s then that hormones flow through our bodies, guiding development of, among other things, genitalia.

In his book “The Human Animal,” talk-show-host/author Donahue addresses the way the feeling we call love is transmitted (Donahue researched his book by interviewing a number of noted biologists, including a number of Nobel Prize-winners). It begins, he wrote, in the hypothalamus, a specific section of the forebrain.

Here’s one likely theory about what occurs: When you are sexually attracted to someone, chemicals flow to your pituitary gland, which then, according to Donahue, “releases hormones that fly through the bloodstream like messengers with good news.”

That “good news” causes the production of even more hormones (estrogen, progesterone and testosterone), whose effects include tingling muscles, shortness of breath, increased heartbeat, a hardening of nipples and other physical manifestations with which most of us are well familiar.

But let’s rewind the videotape a bit. What about the attraction? What causes that? Why was Hitchcock obsessed with Grace Kelly (especially when she played a character in threat of harm), a woman who holds no sexual appeal for others? Why do I like looking at Tyra Banks?

One convenient theory, which is hotly debated, holds that we humans develop a romantic ideal between our fifth and eighth years. These “lovemaps,” as Johns Hopkins University professor Dr. Josh Money calls them, can change. But their essence - thick-ankled Polish women, Hitchcock ice maidens, curvy African-American supermodels, et al - stays with us.

Forever.

At least theoretically.

BUT THERE’S MORE to the story.

Biological urges notwithstanding, we humans remain a thinking species. We’ve created whole philosophical systems to explain away the push/pull of sex. And one long-held method has been - as we’ve already seen - to separate love from sex.

Just look at popular culture: We hide sex in plain sight - in television sitcoms, in magazine advertisements, in movies and best-selling books, in rock songs and even in fairy tales (Joseph Campbell and Robert Bly made that clear enough).

Example: The September issue of InStyle magazine features a cover story on “What’s Sexy Now.” Inside, various stars offer their ideas on what’s sexy - Demi Moore says she finds “truth” sexy, for Kevin Bacon it’s “music” and for the well-muscled Antonio Sabato Jr. it’s “boxing.”

Example: The Sept. 29 People boasts a cover story on “big” women such as Oprah Winfrey, Rosie O’Donnell and Delta Burke.

“I represent a lot of women who will never be a size 8, and that’s OK,” says country singer Wynonna. “You have to remember there are some things in life more important than fabulous thighs.”

Example: Cosmopolitan’s September issue includes such title pieces as “Why men split the morning after - and what makes them stick around”; “Easy orgasms - how to make them mind-blowing and a lot less work”; “150 sexiest fall looks.”

And if you wonder just who reads such stories, Keith Blanchard will tell you. In Cosmo, the writer explains just how much he has “learned” about women by reading their magazines.

“For a young, single guy trying to make sense of the weird world of romance,” Blanchard wrote, “women’s magazines offered a tantalizing inside look at all the girls I was trying to score with. And while my guy friends were doomed to stumble blindly, I realized I could boost my odds of success significantly by snagging this undiscovered treasure trove of insider tips.”

Here’s some irony: It’s Blanchard, a sexual schemer if ever there was one, who brings up the notion of romance.

THE INSTYLE STORY did one thing right. Even in the midst of its fashionable self-promotion, the article equates sex appeal with something other than body type.

Some of the readers who responded to my call for their personal explanations about sex appeal did the same thing.

In addition to liking a man “who takes care of himself physically, that exercises regularly,” reader Jennifer Bauman thinks a man sexy who “treats other people with kindness and respect. Someone that is confident but not cocky. Someone that cares for other people and that is not completely self-absorbed.”

There were those who did stress physical characteristics.

Mary Jones, for instance. “Forty seven years ago I defined sex appeal as a pretty baby face on a man’s body,” she says. “That’s still it for me today.”

By contrast, Jim Nelson is obviously a 1940s movie fan. “Sex appeal emitted by a woman is many things,” he says, “including just the right touch of perfume mixed with laughter, a smile and a sensuous, sultry voice, combined with purposeful body language. I can’t speak for the perfume, but Lauren Bacall sure fits this description.”

But perhaps the most moving definition of sexiness came from Sherry Karuza Waldrip, whose e-mail description of her husband Jerry included not one mention of a physical characteristic.

“One of the most passionate moments of our marriage was in the middle of the night just days before my cancer surgery,” Waldrip wrote. “Waking up to find my husband’s hand gently touching me as he whispered his deep love for me to the Lord, beseeching Him to not take me from him and our sons. It was the most intimate of moments that I couldn’t possibly interrupt. I had such a longing to evaporate and melt inside his body, to somehow become even closer to this man that I’ve loved for over half my life. That’s real passion and it can’t be bought or built. It’s a blessing, it’s a gift and it’s intense.”

I’M TOUCHED BY WALDRIP’S candor. Yet I’m still confused.

I shut off my computer and continue searching. I leave work and cruise supermarkets, book stores, shopping malls, the aisles of Spokane Public Library, the streets of downtown Spokane. I watch television and movies, I listen to pop radio and I buy a new CD or two.

Everywhere I go, I am confronted by sexually suggestive images.

I call a professor of communications at Washington State University, one Richard F. Taflinger, who has written an as-yet-unpublished book linking sex and advertising.

Taflinger reaffirms the contention that standards of beauty are based on a longstanding tradition of shifting cultural norms.

“If you take a look at Reubens, the ideal woman (of his era) was one who was approximately as wide as she was tall,” he says. Taflinger urges me to “look at those cultures that don’t have the American advantages of supermarkets. There, the definition of beauty is an amply endowed women, which illustrates that she has resources.”

I talk to a psychologist who tries to further explain the complex factors involved in early attachment, etc.

Both make perfect sense. Still, I suspect something is missing.

And then, when I least expect it, a thought comes to me with a distinct, yet familiar, thud: I realize, finally, that sexologist Allman was right: There is no single answer to the question of what constitutes sex appeal.

Yes, like most of our adult drives, it develops early. Yes, in one way or another we deal with it all our lives. Yes, it ensures the survival of our species and offers each of us a profoundly intimate way to make complete our connection with another.

But for some it’s personified by a Grace Kelly or a Harrison Ford, while others see it as a Michael Jordan or a Toni Braxton. For some it’s a kind gesture or a calm presence, while others see it as a versatile mind and a compassionate heart.

And for a few of us it can be found in the warm body of the person we reach for when the night is at its darkest and the demons have come knocking. At those moments in particular, sexual attraction has nothing whatsoever to do with a Tyra Banks calendar photo.

At those moments, in fact, it’s definitely hard to untangle it from love - which remains the kind of sexual attraction I like best.

Even so… I can’t deny Banks’ beach-bingo appeal. Which leads me to the e-mail from reader D. Coles, whose view sums up the complex nature of sex appeal as well as anything I’ve found.

“Like with art,” Coles says, “I don’t know what it is, but I know what I like.”

Tyra, you see, can be spelled many ways.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Staff illustration by Bridget Sawicki