'It's All so Sugarless'

Not enough people have seen "Don Jon." I've felt this way since the Joseph Gordon-Levitt film came out last year and the feeling's only gotten stronger, especially in light of the release of Kim Kardashian West's Paper magazine layout.

The film is about a porn-obsessed young man trying to make a real-life relationship work with a woman who knows how to use what she has to get what she wants. They're both using each other for their own personal gain – him for the status of having a hot girlfriend and her for the status of having a boyfriend she can control – because that's what they think they're supposed to do.

Sex is everywhere in this movie, in commercials on TV, in the club where Jon works, the conversations with his friends and, of course, the porn he watches on his computer and phone. What he comes to realize is that none of this is sexy because none of it is real, it's all airbrushed, Photoshopped, scripted, manipulated, distorted, empty.

That's what I thought when I saw the new pictures of Kim Kardashian West. How is that supposed to be sexy? The magazine is trying so hard to be shocking by showing the world KIM KARDASHIAN WEST NAKED but took all the beauty and sexiness out of it. She's a piece of plastic, so smooth and shiny and human-like but not really human at all.

You need a little something extra to be truly sexy, it's not necessarily about beauty but more about attitude and personality and charisma. It's energy and confidence. It's in the way a person walks into the room, how easily they can carry on a conversation. It's in their laugh and opinions and talents and interests and successes and disappointments.

True sexiness can't be created in Photoshop. As I learned from these photos in Paper, sexiness can be filtered away, softened and faded until it becomes more sexy-like than sexy-true, the suggestion of sex rather than sex itself (and the billion things tied up in that tiny word). Kim Kardashian West probably is a very sexy woman in real life, beautiful and poised and successful, a mother, a mogul, a wife.

Those things are too hard to capture on film. Those things don't fill headlines for days on end. Instead we're given something cheap, something fake. Sadly, some people see this and think that's what sexy is. I hope someday they'll discover the real thing.