Attractive vs. Sexy

I wrote on Monday about the realization I've come to recently that it's not wrong to want to be attractive. In coming to this realization, I had to struggle with the ability of a woman to be attractive to a man without "causing him to sin" (a phrase I think we over us anyway) because God clearly commands men (and women) not to lust. To me attractiveness and sexiness are two different things. Even by looking at the dictionary definitions we can see they are different. Dictionary.com defines attractive as "providing pleasure or delight, esp. in appearance or manner; pleasing; charming; alluring" while it defines sexy as "concerned predominantly or excessively with sex." Clearly, being attractive and being sexy are two very different things. However, I still couldn't find a very good real-life example of the difference. That is, I couldn't until I was on my way to school last month. The day before while waiting for the bus I overheard some guy trying to "pick up" a girl (something I hear way more often then I care to). He kept telling her that she was sexy and he'd like her to come home with him. She responded, as almost every woman does in that situation, by ignoring him. This only caused him to get angry and frustrated and more crude. You could tell from the young woman's face that she just wanted the bus to come. But that day, while on the subway, I overheard a man telling a young lady that he "just wanted to tell her he though she was beautiful." Now, clearly, that wasn't all he wanted. But he certainly had a better concept of what women want to hear than the guy at the bus stop. Because, while the woman still didn't go home with him or even give him her number, she didn't ignore him either. She thanked him and had a silly smile on her face for the rest of the train ride. Why? Because women want to be attractive, we want to be thought of as beautiful. But we don't want to be a sex object. That's the difference. And a man can think a woman is beautiful without thinking of her as sexy. Because they're two different things.

Keep on singing,