Last Friday at a dinner party the conversation turned to Fred Thompson, and whether or not he is actually sexy. The guests were primarily political reporters, including one who’d just come back from following Thompson on the campaign trail, where, the reporter insisted, older women seemed to really dig the 65-year-old actor and former Senator.

For months I’ve been hearing from The Pundits That Be about how masculine Thompson supposedly is. Chris Matthews has plumbed this topic in some detail:

Does [Fred Thompson] have sex appeal? … Gene, do you think there’s a sex appeal for this guy, this sort of mature, older man, you know? … Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.

But the idea that Thompson is some kind of swoon-inducing example of mature masculinity strikes me as a classic example of how straight men are completely unable to assess each other’s visual appeal.

Straight women, on the other hand, are very acute judges of masculine appeal (even if we still date schlubs for other reasons), and there’s been a quiet rebellion brewing among the female political columnists against the idea that Thompson looks like anything other than how he actually looks, which is like a rather run-down older man. (See Michelle Cottle here and Gail Collins here.)

At best, Thompson is what we women refer to as tall. (I’ll give him that.) But possessing greater than average verticality is a very different thing from being sexy, even as it can be a contributing factor. I think there’s got to be some kind of objective standards brought into play here. “Sexy for Iowa politics” or “sexy for a 65-year-old man” just are not the same thing as “sexy.”

So here are a couple of examples, which I hope should clarify the apparently confusing case of Masculine American Archetypes v. Thompson.

Rugged (L), Thompson (R):

firefighters.jpgfred in little havana.jpg

Virile (L), Thompson (R):

images-1.jpgfred-thompson1.thumbnail.jpg

Any questions?

P.S. English Leather and Aqua Velva are both disgusting after-shave fragrances, cheap relics from a different era of fragrance-making, really, and I wouldn’t put it past Matthews to have been subtly insulting Thompson in the guise of talking him up by mentioning those two brands. They’re the sort of thing worn in the contemporary world only by men who don’t know better, and teenagers who’ve just started shaving and are looking to impress girls.

P.P.S. Apparently Belle Waring of Crooked Timber was an early resister of the theory of sexy-Fred.