Hot Tips From the Cool Media?

It was with great amusement that I read “Just What Is Sexy?” (Feb. 17). It is odd (that) modern media have deemed it necessary to tell their vacuous followers who’s sexy and who’s not, as if in our great haste to electronic utopia we’ve lost the very basic ability to sense pheromones.

Of course, this is nothing new. A rather dowdy authoress named Elinor Glynn started this modern merchandising cycle 70 years ago by declaring that film flapper Clara Bow had It. Your latter-day Elinors have gained the privilege to be more graphic: “These men for all seasons handle gunplay and foreplay with equal aplomb”--an opinion that begs to be personally verified, no doubt.

It’s a shame that pseudo-intellectual outlets, such as the Los Angeles Times, now feel compelled to give us in-depth analyses on superfluous subjects, such as coming up with no less than 19 ways to be sexy, with obligatory examples.

Do I dare see if our tastes tally? The psychological implication would be tremendous if one scored a four out of 40 people as I did, especially if the ones that supposed to arouse me are either “weird sexy” or “senior sexy.”

Let’s see . . . Anthony Hopkins, Richard Farnsworth, Winona Ryder, Meg Ryan. Maybe I could find Schwarzenegger sexy, since he’s worth at least 10 public opinion points and that should get me into the passing percentile.

Please clarify my results, for I just can’t afford the fees for the therapy it’ll take to overcome this.

DANIEL NAUMAN, Ventura