“Baby girl / what’s your name? / Let me talk to you / let me buy you a drink / I’m T-Pain / You know me / konvict music nappy boy like oh wee / I know the club close at three / what’s the chance of you rolling with me? / back to the crib / show you how I live / let’s get drunk forget what we did.”

Oh, you’re not interested? Oh. Ok ... well, um, check out my column!

Yeah, that’s right. This is a column about sexiness. Big, fat, sexy sexiness. And it starts out pretty badly, for two reasons. One, sexiness is inappropriate. Two, I’m speaking “white” English. Bombastic, bourgeois, SAT-tutor English. And while many attractive people sometimes speak this dialect, even during sex, there is nothing sexy about it. At least in our public culture. To the contrary, it suggests propriety and thus repression of desire. Repression of desire and, further, its sublimation to certain times and places, and onto certain Others.

Among us, the time for Desire is the party and its location is pop music. Pop music is sex, but it’s not good sex. Let me explain.

Walking to class, if you see a girl you think is attractive, you cannot mutter under your breath, “Hey, baby girl.” Even if such a phrase feels natural to you, I think on our campus you just can’t say it … even if you think you can really work some T-Pain game right then and there.

Cut to party. You see the same girl. You introduce yourself and consensually rub up on her behind (completely acceptable). Now Plies featuring T-Pain comes up on the speakers: “Baby girl / what’s your name? / Let me talk to you / let me buy you a drink.” And you sing along. Just a little bit. Just mutter it under your breath.

All of a sudden, by the powers of Mr. Pain and the pop music industry, you are sexy! Just for three and a half minutes. Now you can say stuff that, when you think about it, is really kind of gross. You can call a 21 year old woman “baby girl.” You can say whatever you want — or you can channel a little bit of that pop music industry sexiness through your unsexy self.

Now, T-Pain sounds very good with his voice auto-tuned (better than Kanye, at least), and he dresses cool and wears his hair in interesting ways. But that isn’t why he can say dirty stuff about sex in public. Or why he can have us believe him so much that we let him into our bedrooms and let the music between our grinding bodies. No, T-Pain gets in bed with us because he is endowed with ... capital!

Producers choose him and land him on MTV, just as many unknowing 13 year olds watch mannequin-like versions of college students grind up in Cancun to that very same music. The couch and the remote is our capitalist sex-ed.

When capitalism expands to subsume art, money is no longer a form of exchange. It is the power that defines sex. You’re going home with who you think you are ... and T-Pain, and his Benjamin Franklins. Which is a weird threesome.

If it’s weird that this sexy-music has become a part of our intimate lives, it may be even weirder what it says about our cultural values. Particularly, I mean the cherished American notion of hard work leading to success. It might be logical to assume that our music would express that, but notice that this music is not about that at all: The Protestant ethic is long dead with T.I. and “Whatever You Like.” Think about the girl from the chicken joint who dreams of flying on T.I.’s private jet in that music video. T.I. is laughing at the American dream, and he is laughing at the working class.

People of the ruling class are typically bored, so they worship the sexiness of those they oppress — a foreign, entertaining sexiness they can dominate. Since we deny our own desires in the name of propriety, we locate desire somewhere else, in some Other. European imperialists did it to the Arab woman of the harem, pinning all the desire on her. And at Cornell, which is a very nice and often open-minded bastion of the ruling class, we let way too much of what’s sexy get defined by the entertainment industry.

But screw all this, pardon the pun. We do not need MTV or T-Pain to tell us what is sexy. We are sexy because we are smart and interesting … or something.

By all means, keep the music coming — enjoy it. But think about it before you imitate it to be sexy, because it’s probably making you less sexy.

Baby girls and boys, we’re already plain old sexy. And maybe to be just plain old sexy is an act of resistance in and of itself. So, stay sexy CU!