Embodying Hotness

So, it turns out that a critical piece of infrastructure that makes a human being (or any living being, really) Hot is a body. This was news to me; much of my existence is in my head. You may find this surprising. Dominique? Really? The woman who's writing glorified blog posts each week to intellectualize Hotness isn’t aware of her own body? Impossible!

Reader, I'm sorry, it's true. I've long been a foreigner to my body, and I'm only just now, at 28, attempting to come to terms with this fleshy sack of water that carries my wonderful, witty thoughts. I acknowledge that I’m tremendously lucky that my body hasn’t made itself more present through pain, ability, or illness. I try to be in touch with the rest of my limbs, but it is hard. My brain is so distracting, all of the time. Why would I feel when I can think winsome little thoughts for hours and hours? My mind is boundless, whereas my body has such a funny and finite shape to it. Eyebrows? Toes? What a disappointment it has been to learn that there is more to life than ideas and quip and language.

The good news is that the sudden realization regarding the importance of the body to Hotness has allowed me to commit to dissuading myself of any separation between my body and my mind. I am most certainly not at all motivated to do this as a response to my therapist's or yoga instructor’s or TikTok astrology influencer’s constant nagging me to work to feel embodied. This all purely driven by my feeling urgency around answering this question so that I can better deliver on the promise of this newsletter. You are welcome.

However, these questions are big and, try as I might, I won’t get to a satisfactory answer with just one dispatch. For now, what follows is an overview of why this issue arose, and some initial thoughts about the relationship between bodies and Hotness and why it all matters.

The Issue Arises

The challenge to my mind-body distinction came up while two friends and I pursued an unrequited grilled cheese at our local coffee shop (which, for “sanitary concerns”, was only only serving "cheese platters"—we fear future grilled cheeses, constructed under more sanitary conditions, will lose their bazaaz, but alas). We instead landed in a midnight diner in front of tuna melts and BLTs. While we each engaged in our ritualistic sandwich preparation routines (squeezing ketchup for the fries—some over, some to a side—, spreading mustard, cutting sandwiches in half, taking a shy bite of a pickle, re-stacking split sandwiches, etc.), one friend noted that she had been reading some of Virginia Woolf’s essays, and was struck by one in which Woolf discussed the dynamics of sexual tension in dinner parties. Sexual tension, my friend related, adds a little something to the conversation, a little spice. The tension need not be fulfilled, it could remain platonic, but it is, according to my friend’s re-telling of Woolf, a critical ingredient to the levels of excitement at a given dinner party. This nugget of wisdom was shared over sandwiches because Woolf’s essays helped my friend notice that she didn't inhabit a lot of spaces with sexual tension.

As she spoke, I had my own noticings: I hadn't really thought about classifying group interactions as charged with sexual tension. It's something I might think about, if a friend asks, after a date, for example, as I try to suss out whether there was chemistry between me and another person, but even that feels like a stretch. I like to think about the concept of chemistry, but I am often too distracted by the tune of my own thoughts to pay attention, even if I am ears-deep in it. I had never considered the broader effects of the gravitational field between two individuals when that force is inserted in a larger group.

I've long complained about living in New York City and finding myself in a sea of committed couples. I'm glad people are happily partnered, mind you, but playing the odd-numbered wheel to a couple's outing can get tiring if that is all you do (coupled friends, please keep inviting me to hang out). These thoughts are not unique or original to me, nor are my complaints about the challenges of meeting people in the city: how tiring dating can be, how awful the apps are, ghosting galore, and so on. However, my friend bringing Virginia Woolf's ruminations about sexual tension to our diner party added a new vocabulary to my experiences as a singling, mingling, young adult in New York City. Perhaps my complaints aren’t so much about the saccharine couple-dom I find myself surrounded by, but rather the lack of sexual tension across interactions in my vicinity. So many places I inhabit feel so… sanitary. Yuck.

(Note: There is a fair amount to say about the relationship between sexual tension and safety, but I don’t feel quite ready to tackle that head on, so let us willingly suspend disbelief for a moment and consider we’re in the land of fun, friendly flirting. We’ll delve deeper into the nuances at another time.)

Fast-forward a week or so, and the same sandwich-engulfing, Woolf-loving friend and I found ourselves at a party which we agreed had low levels of sexual tension, and, naturally, being the head-y people we are, we embarked on an analysis of the situation. There’s something, of course, about who is attending, as well as what is attending (the music, of course…) and how dim the lights are, that was probably all, right? My friend, wise as she is, set me straight as we walked to the train home on our way home: it’s also about how people’s bodies exist in the space of the party.

The Connection To Hotness

The Human Body! This Mysterious Meat Sack! This Moody Sentient Parcel of Water with Structure! Without it I would not be able to type these words! Nor would I be able to sit on a spin bike in a dark room and pedal my fears away or dance, sweaty, to loud reggaeton in Toñitas or walk, moodily, through Central Park in search of the next Hot owl.

As useful as my body is, though, thanks to my health, which I do not take for granted, it’s remarkably easy for me to efface it. A common thread among many of the spaces in which I don’t feel any kind of sexual tension is that their inhabitants carry themselves as if they were nothing but floating heads. The first description that comes to mind of my workplace, for example, is masks hovering inches away from screens yammering on about ducks or leaderships teams or capital S strategy with thin trails of smoke behind them as they move from screen to screen to meeting room. Sometimes those faces sprout arms to write on the whiteboard (a favourite pass-time of the management consultant), but as soon as they complete their 2 by 2, the arms pop back into the mask and we keep floating on. This is a fine, maybe even preferable, arrangement for work, but across many low-sexual tension parties, gatherings, classes I have attended, I can’t remember a single body associated with any of the people around me, let alone how my own body inhabited the space that I (allegedly) was in. Unsurprisingly, I didn't feel particularly Hot in those moments, either.

During moments in places with sexual tension, however, wow do I feel embodied. Or maybe I just felt seen. I think back to a witchy party I hosted some months ago, and, in my memories, the space below my guest’s heads is populated by their wonderful bodies. Coincidentally that night was the warmest night of the Fall and so my small apartment reached tropical temperatures with all these bodies around. Regardless, it was an electric party, where conversation zipped and zapped across the borders of our differences, arms rounded and pointed, legs crossed and uncrossed. It was pretty Hot.

Why it all Matters

I’ve been reading The Agony of Eros by Byung-Chul Han, a punchy little book in which he posits that the biggest threat to love in today’s individualistic society is our continued eradication of the Other. Saucy. To be clear, Han’s argument is less concerned with colonialist, war-mongering lens that is often applied to the phrase “eradication of Other”, and instead argues that the "Other” is at risk of fundamental erasure the more we look inward, narcissistically* (in the Freudian sense), and are unable to recognize the world beyond ourselves.

“When otherness is stripped from the Other, one cannot love—one can only consume,” Han writes. Han’s argument is an indictment of a capitalist society that has flattened difference and transformed everything, every one, into objects of consumption. This has, in turn, made us all seek a stream of unending pleasure, happiness, and joy (we have less and less appetite for things that carry the “brutal power of negativity” and rob, as opposed to “forces of positivity", which feed). For example, on social media, which everyone loves to hate, we’re seemingly seeking proximity, but in erasing distance between ourselves on the screen, we’re simply making the Other disappear by creating a kind of mirror house where we seek validation by reducing ourselves to merely being on display to people like us or who we want to be like. (This is a dense book and my words won’t do it justice; if it sounds mildly intriguing, I’d highly recommend you read it.)

While it is important to acknowledge that physical traits of Hotness are often commoditized and put on display in a way that Han (and Lorde, actually, in her contrast between the erotic and the pornographic) critique, I don’t think this is the kind of Hotness that we’re concerning ourselves with in this journey. We’ve drawn an important distinction between the “Things That Make One” Hot and “Being” Hot; we’re looking for an underlying attitude rather than a tangible presentation—the ephemeral, I keep saying. If I connect Han’s writing to Lorde’s conception of the Erotic, it feels easy for me to assert that Hotness, as we’re conceiving of it in this space, isn’t about consumption, but more about feeling and sensation, self-awareness and realization, and connectedness.

There’s so much more to explore here, but some parting, galvanizing thoughts: if I were to put Han’s feet to the fire, I’d like to think that he would say that it is Hot to learn to see ourselves and the boundaries that compose us. By becoming familiar with the membrane around our beings (Meat Sack!!) and really learning to embody the dividing line between our self and the rest of the world, we will be able to truly recognize and see the Other. That, in turn, will allow us to desire the Other, and, perhaps, even love them. Exciting, I’d say.

If we don’t do that work, however, we’ll be stuck seeing the other as ourselves, and thus swimming in a tepid sea of sameness. Frankly, as Hot as self-love is, if it risks collapsing into self-obsession, I’d much rather bet on difference than risk landing in a relationship with myself. That sounds terribly lonely. Despite all I said last week in my whole rant about Space and the value of learning to delve into our own minds rather than search the universe to understand ourselves, thanks to Han, I realize that my aversion to the Other might have been wrong. We do need boundaries around ourselves; I begin to understand why we seem to care so much about an Other (granted, I’ll hold firm that an Other need not be an alien in space, I think we can do with just another human being). I’d love to find myself in more spaces where I can see, feel, and learn from the boundaries between me and others; those are the spaces that feel alive, electric.

That may not be reason enough for you, so to close, I offer you this: On Friday I was in a Zoom meeting of Psychoanalysts facing the abyss of our failing institutions, and the moderator kept posing the idea that “the youths don’t want to own things anymore.” The few non-silver-haired among us countered by stating that it wasn’t that we didn’t want to own things, it was just too expensive to do so. At this point, given The Economy, one of us said, our least risky retirement plans are probably abolishing capitalism. While I’m not sure if Han would really back me on the link between Hotness and maturation, I’m almost certain that he would agree that there’s nothing Hotter than taking down capitalism. So if finding love, electricity, connection, and desire don’t inspire you to find the boundaries of your self, do it for your retirement.

_{*According to Freudian theory, the purest “narcissist” (used differently to the medical condition) state occurs before birth, when we are literally one with another human in the womb. After we are born, as we grow and mature, we ideally wean off from the mother, and slowly learn to separate our selves from the Mother, recognizing her first as a part-object and then later as a full Object, separate from our own subjective being. But traveling along that continuum is hard, and sometimes we don’t traverse the full route to maturation, and even when we do, it’s not a stable condition, and there are moments in which we regress to that more narcissistic state for a variety of reasons. Han’s argument leans on the idea that society writ large is leaning toward Freudian narcissism, and more and more people are unable to draw boundaries between their experience and that of others.}