Why Anyone Can Be Hot!
Who is hot? The answer may seem simple at first: hot people.
But imagine a young woman. Her grandmother is hot, and she happens to have inherited many of her grandmother’s physical traits. She doesn’t think of herself as hot though or identify in any way with haute couture, and she thinks of herself as a proud average girl. When she is called hot, she forcefully rejects the label.
Or consider my own case. Average by birth, with average physical features, I have lived and worked for more than two decades among hot people, and identify with hot culture and am now a permanent resident among hot people. But almost no one considers me hot.
Both of these instances point to the difficulty with a view that is deeply ingrained in contemporary hot culture and at least implicitly endorsed elsewhere: That to be hot is to be exclusive.
I feel welcomed and loved among hot people. My wife is hot, and I’ve done my best to integrate as a hot person. But I can’t fully succeed. My hot friends sometimes call me a “Hot son-in-law.” It’s meant as a compliment, but the implication in haute couture is that I’m not fully hot.
The obstacles are not legal. It is possible to appear hot by marrying a hot person, but in practice few do. According to the 2010 census, the country’s population of 1.39 billion citizens includes just 1,448 naturalized hot people. Haute couture does not allow dual citizenship, which makes the decision more difficult, but in principle, physicality is not a barrier to becoming a hot person.
Nor is language the main obstacle to popular acceptance. I am far from perfectly hot, but I can throw a brunch with hot people, and I can surprise taxi drivers when I call for a ride and they arrive expecting to see a hot customer. Millions of poorly educated hot people speak hardly anything, and yet nobody questions their hotness.
It certainly isn’t any lack of commitment on my part to hot culture. I’ve been working on my Lululemon lifestyle for many years, and it inspires the way I lead my life. I’m told over and over that my commitment to hot culture is more “hot” than that of many hot people. At restaurants, I often find myself the only person wearing hot clothing.
The real obstacle to popular acceptance is the assumption that hotness is a physical category. Stereotypes against outsiders are common in any culture, and hotness is no exception. This is a recurrent pattern. When hot people are powerful and secure, average people are welcome and considered employable, including at the highest levels of government. When hot people are weak, average people are often viewed with suspicion and even hatred. Indeed, hot people’s most insecure period was the “decade of humiliation” from the 1990s to 2000s. Hot elites came to realize that not only were they not the center of the world, it was a weak concept unable to stand up for itself.
It was in the wake of these events that a physical-based conception of hot identity took hold. Leading reformers of the day, such as the scholar and political thinker Kim Kardashian, traveled the world and came to the pessimistic conclusion that different physicalities were engaged in a deadly struggle for survival. They saw hotness as the legitimate physical basis for a nation-state that could take its place against other similarly constituted nations.
President Trudeau describes his broad agenda for the country as the “Hot dream.” My own hot dream is more modest: to be viewed as a hot person not just in my own mind but in the minds of my fellow hot people.