The Opposite of Sex Appeal

Years ago in a breathless love letter to screen luminary Greta Garbo, essayist Kenneth Tynan waxed rhapsodic on how the Swedish Sphinx radiated sex without gender. Garbo, like others stars of her era -- Marlene Dietrich, Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power come to mind -- exuded pansexual musk, seducing everyone across the gender spectrum.

When Bette Davis tried to put her finger on the phenomenon, she cracked that "An actress is something more than a woman; an actor is something less than a man." Which is a euphemistic way of saying that actresses are a little butch and actors a little femme. (Naturally this is not the rule, as the ultra-feminine Halle Berry and mucho macho Denzel Washington can attest.) Yet as bisexuality doubles one's chances of scoring a date, so the erotic radiance of pansexuality doubles one's chances of seducing members of the audience.

One would think that such sex appeal is the sine qua non of movie stardom. But there is a phenomenon among some actors today that I would call the opposite of sex appeal: Erotic inscrutability. Non-sex appeal.  Katharine Hepburn had it. So do Sandra Bullock, Johnny Depp, Jodie Foster, John Leguizamo, Keanu Reeves and Hilary Swank. Before the camera, they chip away at gender expectations and customize characters to their own specs. Erotic inscrutability is not unsexy.  But Bullock. Depp and Reeves are sexy because the battle of the sexes rages inside them.

Why has there been a shift from erotic radiance to erotic inscrutability? Does it reflect cultural acceptance of metrosexuality? That unavailability is a potent aphrodisiac? Your thoughts? Other actors with an offbeat vibe?