What Makes an Object Sexy?

“I cannot say of any consumer product I have bought that it ‘gets me here,’ if here is someplace new,” the novelist Sheila Heti wrote in a 2018 essay on consumerism. Therein lies the inherent tragedy of shopping: the candle or sweater that throbs with our power to purchase it becomes “inert with being owned.” My friends and I, still relatively new to the world of material adulthood when we encountered Heti’s analysis, were so struck by it that we distributed a batch of postcards printed with her cycle of material entrapment: Buying > Waiting > Limbo > Unreality > Magical thinking > Disappointment > Need > Buying.