The Decline of the Sex Symbol

A couple of years ago, perusing a list of the more popular keyword searches, I noticed that those searches for persons, especially those from the world of entertainment, tended to concern people who became famous in the earlier part of the century (or even the last century) rather than more recently--and noticed, too, that they were for the most part women of noted physical attractiveness and appeal.

In that there was a reminder of not just the decline of "household name"-caliber celebrity, but of what may be the even more marked decline of "the sex symbol," an individual with such name recognition who is acknowledged as embodying a particular ideal and fantasy for much of the public.

Considering that it seems relevant that the media universe was more limited, so that household name status was less elusive, but that was not the only thing that was more "limited." The sex symbol belongs to a conceptual world of sex rather than gender, and just two sexes at that, with "heteronormativity" so much taken for granted that the word was scarcely ever spoken, and that particular expectations about how men and women think and feel and act, and of course look, being openly and widely held, such that people could openly and widely hold that particular persons may be regarded as embodying the ideal.

The prevailing view also held that for granted that, just as women's ideals and fantasies are not always pleasing to men, the opposite also holds true (Lee Major's song the "Unknown Stuntman" sums it up, the leading man and not the stuntman getting the girl, while men long for those famed sex symbols Farrah and Bo and Cheryl and Raquel), and that the appropriate response for both men and women is a measure of, if not urbanity, then at least tolerance, regarding the matter.

However one feels about this "traditionalist" view of these matters and their pop cultural implications, there is no question that it is more challenged than ever, and that the challenge has complicated what a sex symbol needs beyond name recognition such that they could not be a "symbol" without it--that broad acknowledgment of their having exactly this kind of appeal, precisely because even those who may not feel very good about, for example, conventional standards of beauty, are at least ready to admit that, yes, they indeed exist, and yes, a particular actress is by that standard extraordinary, because those who admire the beauty in question feel free to express it publicly.

Anything like that is less likely to be seen in the relevant parts of the media these days, especially insofar as tolerance and urbanity are cast to the wind as it tends toward a more open sex-negativity and hostility to the "male gaze," and challenges to the existence of "gender norms" as such, and insistence upon "inclusiveness" and "body positivity" in media imagery, and anyone desirous of mainstream media respectability required to adhere to the associated rules. Indeed, looking at the media's products these days--film, TV, advertising across the media spectrum--it can often seem as if the acknowledgment of any conventional ideals or fantasies is purely negative in nature, evident in decisions regarding script or casting refusing them, as if saying "We know exactly what you expect to see here, what you want to see here, and we're making a point of giving you the diametrical opposite! In your face! Ha!"--and this so relentlessly that Sydney Sweeney's merely showing a bit of cleavage on Saturday Night Live sufficed to whip up a storm of intensely politicized online chatter in a way that makes a contrast with the reaction to that undisputed sex symbol of the day (to go by the prominence of her name in the search result list, our day too) Pamela Anderson getting naked during the monologue she gave when she was the guest host in 1997.

Such tempests of the Internet only underline the idea of the old-fashioned sex symbol as having been a casualty of the culture war-ization of everything.

In turn, I suspect, the decline of the sex symbol has probably taken its toll on the institution of celebrity as such--ideals and fantasy, after all, being what a significant part of celebrity has always been about.