Naomi Andrews

Thank you.

Thanks for having me.

Well, I think mostly has to do with the idea of perceiving oneself as kind of sexy.

So being able to actually feel like, you know what, I'm attractive or relatively attracted.

But it's also taken on this interesting other kind of meaning that it also indicates some level of lust or arousal as well.

But they oftentimes co-occur.

So, someone might say, I'm feeling sexy because they feel like they are sexual and therefore are turning other people on, but also aroused by that particular process.

Well, that's a concept I put forward about 10, 15 years ago in a theoretical paper.

And basically has to do with this idea that you have a perception of yourself as an object of desire.

Feeling like you're actually turning someone on because of the way you look or what you're doing and so on and so forth.

And then we developed a theory around that.

and how it relates to sexuality.

And we also suggest that there might be some gender differences.

Men and women differ in terms of how object of desire becomes part of their sexual scripts or part of their way of thinking about sexuality and so on.

I think it's mostly learned, but there might be some biological component to it.

And we also put forward that on average, women are more likely to have objective desires, self-consciousness as part of their social rules and sexual scripts and so on and so forth.

So it's more linked to, we thought, women's sexuality than men's, although it probably is incorporated into both at times.

And we actually did some interesting research looking at fantasies related to sexuality, and women were more likely to incorporate some level of object of desire elements in their sexual fantasies versus men, but we never really looked at language per se.

And so we thought, hey, you know, this feel sexy phrase is really a kind of cool phrase that captures being an object of desire

and also maybe having certain arousal associated with that feeling of being an object of desire.