If you’re still using “sexy” and “unsexy” to describe your line of work

Yesterday morning, while checking the batch of emails that always seems to arrive in my inbox overnight, I encountered a newsletter for some sort of nonprofit logistics company. That’s the best I can do; they wrote seventeen paragraphs and I remain completely unclear about what, exactly, their business is. Perhaps that’s unfair, given that my brain froze after the first sentence:

I get it: there can be a perverse thrill in being deliberately uncool. Even the cool kids do it now. What else is the return of 90’s dad fashion if not the rush of being nondescript, of traipsing around in light-wash jeans and worn white sneakers as though the subway took tokens and Seinfeld still topped the ratings?

Relishing the unsexy–again, whatever that means–feels like a sublimation of an inferiority complex, like somebody watched too many episodes of Doug and forgot that he had a rich interior life, or saw a picture of Pixies and ignored the entire concept of audiovisual irony. I’ve seen this happen in nonprofit conferences, with presenters writing honest-to-god odes celebrating the nobly uncool work that happens in my current subfield, near-rhymes filling the hotel conference room as captive attendees half-assedly work through eggs and potatoes. I tend to think there’s better ways to say your work is important without the self-neg, the unsolicited confession that your line of operations or admin or compliance is dull-verging-on-very-dull. We focus on the machinery so you can focus on what you truly care about: there, that’s one. Our behind-the-scenes work lets you take center stage: hey, there’s another.

To this end, I think this is the same issue as when anything in the wonkiverse is described as sexy: sexy numbers, sexy policy, sexy methods. What is so sexy about a set of statistics? Are you going to do the hanky panky with a proposed amendment to federal code? It’s patently absurd and whether someone is deeming work as “sexy” or “unsexy,” I’m left with uncharitable views on what these people actually think sex entails. But who knows: maybe logistics gets someone off!

Off the clock, I am a horndog, a freak, a perv, et cetera, but during working hours I tend to think a general tone of asexuality is a good for all involved. I don’t need anyone to think of the thrills I chase, cheap or otherwise, when I’m assessing a program pitch or looking at three-year budgets or conducting an interview. Calling your focus “sexy” or “unsexy” evades what it really is: work. Nonprofits already have enough trouble with that as it is.