What is Sexy? (An Image Atlas Comparison)

Yesterday on Planet Fitness' treadmill I was stuck watching the very horrible Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines on TNT.  I hopped on towards the movie's beginning, when Kristanna Loken sees the Victoria Secret "What is Sexy" billboard and sexy-fies herself.  (And that's where the franchise jumped the shark.  To me, nothing beyond Arnold's thumbs-up in Terminator 2 happened).

Later last night, I read a New York Times Magazine blog post discussing the late Internet activist Aaron Swartz's collaboration, Image Atlas.  It's a fun little site.  Essentially, the way is works is that you enter a search term which is then translated into the primary language of several countries.  Several image search results are then returned to you grouped by country using the most popular search service in each respective county.  The idea of your grouped results is that you're given what you would see as if you were searching for the term in each county listed.  Thus, you're able to compare not only differences in the culture understanding of the term (assuming your word translated appropriately) but also how governmental censorship might affect which images you're given.

I searched several terms: happiness, justice, heaven - broad concepts.  Because I still had Terminator 3 on the brain, I also searched "sexy".  I was interested in how conceptions of aesthetics and beauty might vary by culture (also interesting, searching "beauty".  Very weird, searching "ugly)".

Below are ten image returns for "sexy".  Most Middle Eastern countries returned conceptual, non-person images, which I didn't include.  Interestingly, the United States and Spain returned two of the exact same images.  North Korea returned "No images found."

ImageAtlas(.org) return images for "Sexy" corresponding to U.S./Spain, Brazil, China, France, Israel, Kenya, New Zealand, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and U.S./Spain