Christina Aguilera has some advice for you: Don't try to be sexy. That seems sound enough. Squeezing our differently-shaped bodies into teeny tiny tube dresses and teasing our hair to Kardashian-level heights isn't necessary to be sexy. (Thank you, every issue of Cosmo since 1992.) Aguilera took this gold nugget of advice to a men's magazine who released this choice cutlet of their interview. In response to the question, "How do you define sexy?", Christina Aguilera told Maxim:
I’m such a down-to-earth girl, I’m comfortable in just a jersey and boy’s underwear. Trying too hard to be sexy is the worst thing you can do. Sexiness should be effortless.
Is anyone else taking a second to unfurl their thoroughly wrinkled brow? Xtina, the mistress of spandex, push-up bras, bleach, and war paint, is suggesting that trying to be sexy is "the worst thing you can do." Let me just whip out a big ol' can of really?! for just a second. The Maxim cover girl not only seems to ignore this piece of advice in everything she's done since 1999 (while Britney was sporting pink lip gloss in her music videos, Christina was donning blood red lipstick), her example of "effortless" sexiness is a complete and total construct.
Wearing "just a jersey and boy's underwear" is a move right out of the "how to please your man" handbook. It goes right along with the "guys prefer girls without makeup" and "ask lots of questions about sports" dating tips. Did she also invite over her best girl pals to wear boy's underwear and have pillow fights while everyone drinks champagne and giggles?
Aguilera didn't say she feels sexy when she's just sitting at home in the sweatpants she wore in so well they feel like a flimsy, faded second skin while she watches some iteration of Real Housewives and works on her night cheese. She's not challenging a social construct here. She's playing right into it.
Now, there is nothing wrong with wanting to promote a healthy image of what "sexiness" is. It is, however, really difficult to believe that Aguilera, whose carefully-worded quote is juxtaposed against images of her spilling out of a red dress with sex hair covering her face, truly believes what she's saying. We'd be hard-pressed to find a single example of her going even slightly natural or low-maintenance, and as such, it cheapens what should be an empowering quote.
The nail in the coffin is the fact that she's put this out there for a men's magazine. The sheer calculated nature of her answer screams, "Say this to entice men!" and suggests that were she speaking to a woman's magazine, the answer would have been entirely different.
True, interviews like this are largely fluff anyway, conducted to legitimize an overly sexy photo shoot, but when the woman who taught us we are beautiful in every single way continues to lead by the opposite example of her words, there's only so much we can do to keep from crying foul.
