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This video frame grab shows Rachel Uchitel with her attorney Gloria Allred (L) at Los Angeles International Airport - Source: Reuters -
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What is sexy? When does sexy become skanky?
For those lucky readers who don't know what that last term means, 'skanky' is a vernacular adjective used to indicate sexual licence on the part, always, of a woman. The noun skank will only be applied to a man - so far as I've heard it - to defame his masculinity.
The above question has surfaced in the past weeks as Tiger Woods' double life edged his golfing prowess to the margins. With mistress number 14, a so-called 'cougar' (or sexually voracious woman in middle age) being named as Theresa Rogers, the pattern of his focus is confirmed.
She must be blond, bottle or natural, it doesn't matter. She must be Caucasian. She could have a piercing or two (as Jamie Grubbs and Jamie Jungers did). She ought to be bosomy. Some financial distress is not an aphrodisiac.
And (Theresa Rogers aside) her name must be oddly musical in that purely American Southern California way. Kalika Moquin. Rachel Uchitel. Jamie Grubbs. Jamie Jungers.
Tiger's women evince what amounts to a boilerplate definition of contemporary sexy: titivated, available, textable, convenient. And perhaps suburban. It seems for Tiger's purposes, she must be from the nocturnal classes (waitress, night club hostess, porn actress). Many of the girls appear, if not to have been or dated reality show contestants as Jamie Grubbs did, to look as if they might have.
What an odd moment. Reality shows, which purport to reflect the attitudes and aspirations of a particular group, now form a standard that reality must conform to.
A common judgement I've heard from women on the matter is that Tiger's harem is, um, common. But a Harvard MBA serving on the board of several charities and running a company that trades carbon futures, well, they usually don't hang around in the places where Tiger hunted.
Are they sexy, or skanky? Skanky suggests a hardness, a whiff of tragedy. I don't think Rachel Uchitel, for example, alleged mistress number one who supposedly got away with a million-dollar-plus hush money, is entirely skanky. But she's not exactly sexy either. Jamie Jungers? Well once her putative madam printed her tax details in the New York Post, she burst through the crust of skank, and left herself open to an even more unsavoury classification.
Ho no you don't, I'm not in the nude for it.
Notably, President Obama has weighed in today, both speaking out, and disqualifying himself from serious contention as someone who knows anything about the topic with his declaration of what is sexy.
Insulating your home, apparently.
My sympathies to Michelle Obama, and the President is resembling Jimmy Carter more and more with each passing day.
Tiger Woods on the other hand is beginning to resemble Bill Wyman, the bassist from the Rolling Stones who claimed to have bedded 5000-plus women. Wyman was also, by general consent, the dullest Stone.
If there is a dullness to Tiger's preferences, it's the dullness of desire. Desire always wants trifle, rather than broccoli. It never wants water, and cries for champagne. Desire likes to stay up late. Desire drives too fast and never apologises. And why should it?
So, to answer the question. Sexy suggests variation. A cook in the bedroom, a whore in the kitchen, that kind of thing. Skanky? That's just repetitious
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