If you google my parents’ names, you’ll see one of their magazine covers. IRON MAN—OUR AMAZING SEX ISSUE hovers in big block letters over my mother’s curled, perfectly styled hair and my father’s flexed bicep. There are dozens of covers just like that one: my mom with tweezed eyebrows and shimmer smeared over bedroom eyes, my dad coated in baby oil smiling his Superman grin. It always felt strange to see them in that state—manicured and glossed and posed like little Barbies. In my freshman year of high school, I opened the mailbox to find a bundle of handwritten letters, tied with twine, from a man in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He’d provided his name, address, occupation, and a pleading request for my mother to write back to her dearest fan. He praised her in his loopy, almost drunken script: in college, he’d had posters of her plastered all over his dorm room and he still kept a Kinko’s printout of her headshot on his bedside table. In the bundle, he’d included his favorite photo of her—with an autograph request. I was more scared than my mother was. She was only surprised that he’d found her home address—something she’d managed to keep secret from the fans and prisoners who sent letters to her P.O. box in West L.A. I wasn’t just afraid for her: I was jealous. I wanted more than anything for someone to see me like that, for an image of me to still exist in the mind of a stranger, long after I’d retreated from their eyes. I asked my mom what it felt like to be made to look perfect, to be described in block letters as sexy, sizzling, hot, hot, hot.
Shaking her head, she told me she wasn’t a fan. Makeup and hairspray and fake tan and lingerie didn’t make her feel the way that she was described in print. Gazes from strangers on the street didn’t make her feel sexy. How can you feel sexy? What does that word even mean? Is it the kind of pride that an actor feels when he bows at the end of a play, grinning at his skillful imitation of something he’s not? I didn’t understand why my mother kicked aside her pedestal. I’d be grateful to be made up that way—shellacked with hairspray and varnish, all glittery and alluring and perfect.
I don’t look much like my parents. I don’t have a body you’d make an action figure of or my mother’s green eyes. No bleach blonde hair, and no brown skin—I think I have one of those faces that Julius Caesar would find untrustworthy, that lean and hungry look. I’m insecure and I’m vain, but it’s not my parents’ fault. Middle school Julian was someone you’d avert your eyes from, all pimples and unibrow and splotchy uneven skin—not something that you’d put in print, even buried in the back pages between toothpaste ads and clothing trends already past their prime. Kids in school would ask if I was really related to my parents, if I was sure I wasn’t adopted. It might’ve been because I’m four shades paler than my dad, or because I don’t have my mom’s plump, flushed cheeks, but I took it another way. I thought I was ugly and imperfect and not at all like my mom and dad.
I thought of becoming like them: pumping iron, drinking powdery protein shakes and getting that Hollywood body type, really earning that title—son of sexy, sizzling, hot hot hot. I watched their daily routines—spins on the assault bike, deadlifts at Gold’s Gym, miles and miles of hiking in the Santa Monica mountains—all discipline, all the time. I inherited that from them, that tendency for determined, relentless pursuit, but I knew that their path wasn’t really mine. I had my own plan.
I treated my body like a bonsai tree, meant to be cut and trimmed with methodical, determined precision. Tweeze my unibrow. Snip. Stop parting my hair to the side. Snip. Learn to put in the contacts that made me cry in the optometrist’s office. Snip. Pierce through the soft flesh of my earlobes. Snip. Take off the Under Armour shorts, put on those jeans that I stole from my mom. Snip. Scrutinize myself in the mirror. Put on my stage makeup. Run through my lines one more time. Snip, snip, snip. If I cut away at myself just right, I could inherit the legacy of sexy.
I studied sexy. Like Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, I figured out exactly what it would take to be seen as the “Cool Girl.” To impress the wannabe rockstar, I’d casually mention the awful guitarist he liked to think nobody else knows about, curate a playlist of songs with an equal ratio of esoteric rock and mainstream hits so he’d be impressed but not intimidated, style myself like the Pinterest guys he follows on Instagram and play coy—but not too coy. For the prototypical damaged artist, I’d leave paint splotches on my wrists, expose my endearing and performative vulnerabilities every time I seem too good for him, sing karaoke, talk too much about my niche but strategic interests, and maintain the manic pixie dream boy persona. If I could pretend to be something other than myself, being sexy would be easy.
I can think of a million scenarios for my sexiest moments. It could be the midnight lagoon party, looking up with pouty lips at a boy I already knew wanted me. It could be the night of the double date when my skin was slick and lit up blue from the pool. It could be dancing in my sailor costume, hips brushing a boy I knew was watching. But none of those moments made me feel sexy.
It wasn’t until recently that I understood what my mom meant: to be seen as sexy isn’t the same as feeling it. I’d feel a bit of pride at my successful deception—this is sexy, this is me—but when the performance was over and I’d scrubbed away the stage makeup, all I was left with was raw skin and self-loathing. It didn’t matter that for a brief moment I was seen and I was sexy; the real me would be the only one there for all the other moments, after the curtain dropped. I was done playing pretend. There aren’t any award shows for playing sexy, no mansion in the hills to retire to after a job well done. One performance always requires an encore, and another, and another. When I understood that, I understood why my mom quit sexy.
She’d retired to a life I hadn’t fully appreciated until now. Gone were the tanning oil, thong bikinis, and icy eyeshadow that made her look like Christina Aguilera. Gone, too, were the magazine covers, the attention, and curated“perfection. She’d given up on conforming to that warped version of sexy—that caricature of a woman who only existed in the wet dreams of scummy twentysomethings—and embraced herself. It’d be a Freudian brand of strange to say that my mother is sexy—so I won’t. Instead, I’ll say that she’s perfect and confident and sure of herself in a way that draws people in. She still gets fan mail from the people enamored with that bygone persona, but I have the privilege of really seeing her. She laughs, hard. Her hair gets tangled in the Santa Ana winds, she’s crass and too friendly to strangers, the summer sun turns her neck red and burnt, she always gets tipsy off a thimble of wine, and she is solid in herself like dried cement. I no longer aspire to be how she was in the magazines—a 2D image of bleach blonde and glitter. I aspire to be her the way she really is, unabashedly sure of herself and brimming with life.
I feel sexiest when I’m entirely myself. I try to, at least. There’ll always be that urge in me to perform. When others ask what makes me truly feel the sexiest, that urge blazes forth. I think of saying something erotic and performative—I feel the sexiest when you can see my nipples through my shirt or when I’m wearing my low-rise jeans commando. But that isn’t the truth. I love the way my eyelashes clump together when my face is wet, how my sweatpants rest just below my hips when I’m just out of bed, how I can feel the arched contour of my lips as I put on free chapstick from the Chaplain’s Office. Someone told me recently that they thought my greatest fear would be growing old—my hair going grey and my skin wrinkling up like an old leather boot—and I told them that they were wrong. I hope they were wrong.
