Call Me Pretty, Not Hot

In her song "Hot to Go," Chappell Roan asks listeners to "call me hot, not pretty." The line works not only because of the insidiously catchy tune it's paired with, but also because, in five words, she spoke to a surprisingly slippery concept. "Hot" vs "pretty" is a distinction that's been tinkered with by the worlds of fashion, beauty, and even art for decades, if not centuries: the difference between "sexy" and "beautiful." While Roan opts for the former, the latter has its own history. The concept of beauty without sexiness, and how to navigate and potentially achieve it, has proven a greater challenge than you might think.

I first saw the split – the idea of beauty without sexiness, the thought that being pretty did not automatically make a person, a woman specifically, desirable – articulated in a book. Nancy Mitford's sly social satire, Love In a Cold Climate__Italic, centers around the beautiful heiress Polly Hampton and her ferocious mother's desire to marry her off. But Polly has a little problem, you see: She's wealthy, young, beautiful … and absolutely no one in her circle of "potential matches" is attracted to her.

While it's only one of the dilemmas (and far from the zaniest) facing the Hampton family, Polly's lack of suitable suitors is presented as something that mystifies the elder members of her family – who admit she lacks "S.A." the interwar slang for "sex appeal," or what we might call rizz, but can't seem to understand why. After all, she's so beautiful!

In art, the idea of (almost always feminine) beauty without sexual appeal was, for centuries, a goal, especially in religious art. Think of ancient depictions of Athena, goddess of wisdom and war and a notoriously chaste character. It's not difficult to draw a straight line from Athena's formidable gaze to that of the Statue of Liberty – perhaps ironically, one of the few powerful American women who is seldom sexualized is a giantess made of copper.

Or more virginal still, think of all those medieval depictions of Mary – beautiful, maternal, often regal or heartbroken, but never, ever sexual. Raphael's Madonnas, who resemble human women in a way religious icons don't typically, were so daring for just this reason – while he was depicting the very same religious subjects, it's hard to compare Madonna della Seggiola with her smoldering gaze to the tender distance of a thirteenth-century devotional painting.

Of course, it's one thing to depict someone, or something, as beautiful without sexiness. It's quite another to attempt to achieve that impact yourself – or to help others to achieve it. One of the great fashion crazes of the aughts, however, was born in just that impulse.

While many in the Anglosphere were introduced to "Harajuku girl" style through Gwen Stefani's, ahem, interesting music video, the actual origins of the look are complex, and rooted in a feminist critique of femininity. Harajuku street style began as a way for Japanese women, frustrated with expectations to perform femininity, to turn that expectation on its head. It couples a hyper-feminine aesthetic with childishness (the original Harajuku girls often carried stuffed animals and takes inspiration from Victorian baby clothes, christening gowns, and hats modeled on infants' bonnets). Overall, the Harajuku girl highlights the absurdity of performative femininity – and subverts it by creating an extreme form of feminine aesthetic that was deliberately avoiding association with adult sexuality.

Unfortunately, the plan backfired somewhat, as Harajuku style was almost immediately fetishized, but a similar concept would later be adopted by American high fashion houses. "Pioneer" style clothing, including ruffled prairies dresses, began working their way into high end fashion brands, most notably Batsheva, late in the 2010s, drawing inspiration from fundamentalist religious clothing, particularly that favored by certain Mormon sects, and all designed to be striking, feminine, and the antithesis of the aughts idea of what it means to be sexy.

Once again, the best laid plans of mice and, well, mostly women have gone awry – much of contemporary "tradwife" content is arguably indistinguishable from fetish videos. Although perhaps the problem lies in the attempt to subvert a sexualized gaze – to motivate someone to look away, you have to have noticed them in the first place.

This may be why there's so little conception of a masculine form of "pretty, but not hot" (arguable literary exception: Laurie from Little Women, who Jo repeatedly describes as handsome, but just can't bring herself to desire). It may also be that, for the past century, the idea of "beauty" has been so feminine-coded that exploring its nuances has been ceded.

But anyway – internet culture blogger Cartoons Hate Her recently published a piece on "man-repelling clothing." Much of the clothing she depicts is beautiful, and chic. She is right that it is not sexy – I don't think it's doing much for WLW, either, so "man-repelling" may be an understatement. Looking at the models in her article, I think about them the way I might think about tropical birds: they're lovely to behold, and I feel no kinship with them or envy for them. Not hot, not even warm, but really awfully pretty.