seananmcguire:

“I have a thing for Vincent Price. I don’t just mean that I enjoy his body of work. I mean I feel desire for his body. You may be asking what, exactly, my feelings for a deceased horror icon have to do with the work we do at Scarleteen. The answer is that it gets me thinking about desire and how even those of us who consider ourselves enlightened can fall into old traps when it comes to attraction. Because I’ve been puzzling over why, whenever I make the above confession, I feel like the kid revealing a deep dark secret at a sleepover during a game of truth or dare. I’m an adult, and a sex educator to boot. I should know that desire is a weird, nebulous creature. So why am I sheepish about my feelings? A part of it is, I’m not just attracted to young, matinee idol Price. I’m attracted more to older Price, who often looks downright odd in his movies. But even that doesn’t get at the core of the matter. I started to think back to middle school, to the years when many of us first discover that we feel the desire to get sexy with other people. I remember the teen magazines I read, which frequently featured lists of “the 50 cutest celebrities.” I would also read copies of Maxim (ironically, I did in fact read them for the articles). Those had “hot lists” as well, and while the tone was decidedly different than what you’d find in my copies of YM, they had similar goals. They were forming, in my mind and many others, an idea of what an attractive person looked like. They told us what traits made someone worth drooling over. The unspoken parts of those articles were, of course, that there were traits (or the absence of traits) that weren’t drool-worthy.”

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Hey Hot Stuff:  On Attraction, Desirability, and “Types”

We’re over halfway to Halloween, so why not take a peek at what an icon of horror can teach us about attraction and having a type?

(via hellyeahscarleteen)