all the images seem homogenous. Every star interprets "sexy" the same way: lots of skin, lots of licking of teeth, lots of bending over. I find this oddly...boring.

I agree. I feel like the use of the word "sexy" has mutated away from shorthand for "sex appeal."

I forget which comic book it's from, but anyway, it's set in one of those "not-too-distant" futures (the kind that are not overtly dystopian, but certainly less ideal than one would hope) wherein the cutting edge of stripping technology is showing the inner workings of a woman's body as she dances naked on a raised stage, via some kind of holographic projection. The explanation is that people got bored of looking at the same perfect contours of the outside and over time became interested in the beauty of the outside and the inside in a literal fashion.

The heavy-handed message of course, is that escalation of titillation is what happens when people get bored and will of course veer into what people of the past might see as bizarre. While that may or may not be true, I do think that the divide between "sexy" and "sex appeal" is something that is real and that is growing and I really think it has to do with the frequency of human interaction as well as the quality of the human interaction many people experience today, at least in part.

One time in college, a friend and I were heading to his place and we saw a couple sitting on the hood of my friend's roommate's car. We said "hi" and my friend introduced me to them. I noticed the girl had a guitar and asked her about it and it turned out she was a jazz singer from France. Now, this girl wasn't exactly the kind of girl I'd be drawn to at first glance. Not that she was ugly; in fact, she was pretty but not in a way that I would notice while scanning a crowded room.

We got to talking and she offered to play me a song. She didn't know the one I wanted, so she played "Misty". As she played, I could feel my attitude toward her changing and by the end of the song, she was the most gorgeous girl I'd met in months. She offered to play me another, but her boyfriend stopped her and they left. If she'd been single, I would have propositioned her then and there.

That whole interaction threw me for a loop and I don't know that I've ever really recovered from it. Sexiness or sex appeal are augmented by physical appearance for sure, but it comes from somewhere else and I don't think it can be choreographed, much less broadcasted to millions of people in any sort of real way.