At any moment there are dozens of actresses and models all trying to become famous. Why Cindy Crawford and not another All-American blonde becomes a supermodel is probably a story about business -- iron-clad ambition, being in the right place at the right time, good agent, lucky break, etc. Unlike Janis Joplin -- or Tina Turner, an even greater singer -- Crawford doesn't seem to have any particular individual qualities or talents. I find it hard to imagine that people find either her or Naomi Campell sexy, although I suppose they do. But to me they are both too plastic. But maybe that is what many people like now: women who look like they've had cosmetic surgery, even if they haven't. Bionic women. Cyborg women. Maybe that's an icon we should talk about!

Deep down, I can only guess, we are sadly hungry for a little Mt. Olympus of secular gods to ponder and emulate. We read those campy mythologizing profiles of celebrities in the magazines -- and their faces sell more issues -- because we want to imagine these special, unearthly beings walking among us. By the time they are sacrificed, they are barely human anymore. Just an ideal. Gwyneth Paltrow and Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy both seem to be on this path. And in a sense, by creating a fictional movie star named Allegra Coleman in Esquire this month, I wanted to say that someone entirely made up would be just as real as our notion of who Gwyneth Paltrow is.

Having said that, I do miss the experience of getting to discover one of these creatures on my own -- falling in love slowly with a new icon. Now there's very much a climate of desperation for newness and instant superstardom in the media. It's accompanied by an endless and rather nauseating stream of hype.

And it can backfire. Didn't we assume that Gwyneth Paltrow was hopelessly untalented after seeing her face all summer long on all those magazine covers? Don't we now associate that kind of build-up with a sense of disappointment and bitterness? (I am thinking of the dreadfully bad Julia Ormond.)

The weird thing is, Gwyneth turns out to be an okay actress. She's actually quite lovely, and brilliantly restrained. Restraint is the key here. To become a movie goddess of the most potent type, a sex goddess like Marilyn Monroe or Garbo, you have to have a rare talent -- an extraordinary instinct for how to fill quiet spaces. Even somebody as sensible and uninteresting as Cindy Crawford exudes something we are all craving. And exude is the right word, because it's a silent, animal thing. A knowingness. Being a sex goddess doesn't mean being an idiot -- or, as E.B. White once wrote, "a beautiful but comprehensible creature who does not destroy a perfect situation by forming a complete sentence" -- but being sexy does mean having a kind of knowledge about when to shut up. It's about knowing how to stand still and be an object of desire. Movie stars all complain about their one-dimensional images -- but it's the flatness and silence and stillness that allows us a big place to rest our fantasies.

What's the best formula? It's possible to be a sex goddess without a "heart rending story," as you call it. But if you aren't a sex goddess you sure as hell better have one. Women who aren't utterly compelling on the outside need to demonstrate their extraordinary abilities lurking within. To go back to Greek mythology, there are ideals -- gods and goddesses --and then there are demi-deities and heroes who are flawed but fabulously interesting. (The Gods are all a little too perfect.) And demi-deities need to be tested constantly, like characters in any novel. Bad things have to happen to them, and they have to overcome them. I don't really agree so much with your list here -- Sharon Tate and Janis Joplin failed to overcome their trials. But I think a glance at the covers of People Magazine will tell you which women are overcoming and succeeding against odds: Gloria Estefan, The Judds, Dolly Parton, Princess Diana, Oprah.

Roseanne is very surely in this category. Her flaws are as stunning as her gifts, and she seems able to overcome anything, like Hercules. She's an ugly duckling who transforms herself into some degree of attractiveness. (Okay, so it's a small degree.) She was once insane -- maybe still is -- but channels it into creativity. She was once oppressed, now is the oppressor. (This is how I think of her, anyway.) Once infertile, now a new mother. Once poor, now rich. Once uneducated and uncultured, now a consultant to the New Yorker. It goes on and on.

Nowadays the media hasn't a clue as to who is going to click. Without values or rules that hold us together as individuals, families or communities, we are hungry for an image of that secret quality that will get us seen, admired, loved, respected. What is it? Today it is surface beauty. No one really cares whether Cindy Crawford is a good person. What we feed on when we see her image is just that, her inescapable, drop dead beauty that guarantees she could never be invisible. Now, if we had that kind of beauty, we too would be taken in by adoring eyes, or so we think. We would feel nourished by adoration instead of suffering a sense of invisibility.

Back in the early days of film and television, when publicists could control the image of our icons, the stars were kept under wraps. Yes, they were beautiful, but they were portrayed as also having substance. The public rarely knew that the figures they loved on screen were alcoholics or child molesters. They were never seen as they really were, much less photographed, unless they were dressed as "the icon." Back then, society had rules, families held together and the icons came to represent either Good Girls or Bad Girls, Hero or Villain. Those were the roles they played, as well as the way they looked. Individuals picked their kind of man or woman, the exciting Bad (meaning sexual) woman or man or the Good as exemplified by Gregory Peck or Greer Garson. Viewers fantasized lying in their arms, especially if their own lives were without romantic or sexual love.

Today? Today we project ourselves onto Cindy Crawford or Kate Moss -- models who give no evidence of being more than an Empty Package -- because society/media has shown us that beauty alone wins everything. We ignore the shallowness, arrogance, stupidity of our icons. Why would we stop adoring them? Our society abounds with cruelty, deceit, lack of loyalty etc. -- in reality and on the screen. Corporate leaders, generals, politicians lie and cheat. A president betrays his people and everyone shrugs. The only icons worth studying are the sexual beauties whose visibility alone draws attention/love/desire which we so sorely miss and long for.

Beauty may indeed be only skin deep, but we have lost sight of the important values that should lie beneath it.

Our social environment imprints its priorities (economic, moral, physical, psychological and intellectual) on the objects of our desire. It therefore constructs -- and continually restructures -- our erotic icons to embody (in a very literal manner) at least one, but usually a combination of whatever qualities most efficiently express the power of ownership -- for within the framework of our current economic system, ownership is the supreme source of personal power. Ownership also validates the desires of others. Only such objects of desire as those who have the power to own actually desire to own, have value. The media transform the most prevalent variations of the desire to own into erotic iconography to exploit our ambient polymorphic sexual energies into a narrowly focused desire to own a body "worth spending for."

In our society ownership is still largely a male prerogative. Only those men who are clearly able to "own" a media-constructed erotic icon (often the potential is enough) are seen as the heroes, as men of power. Those on their way up have to buy their way into power by means of direct conquest. When Pamela Anderson became Pamela Lee, she became, in the general public's perception, Tommy's special trophy (as Heather Locklear did before her). Now Tommy has media power well beyond the world of rock. In today's society, long-term marriage is no longer very important as evidence of the ability to own: therefore conquest is all. Prolonged ownership of an erotic icons is old-fashioned; the corporate-raider ethic is in. Once acquired by a man of power, the erotic icon gains stature as a model for other women. After this she can be discarded by the man of power, either to be forgotten by the public, or to be recycled to embody the erotic value of ownership once again.

For this reason our media do not celebrate as erotic icons men who do not want to, or are definitively unable to, own; or women who refuse to be owned (each given the proper expenditure on the part of the male). In the case of a woman who refuses to be owned, the media usually create the public perception that, in fact, the woman in question "doesn't really have what it takes to turn a man on" (in other words, that she doesn't -- or does no longer -- have the sexual bargaining power that would lead a man to want to "conquer" her). Madonna gained popularity while she seemed available. When her apparent availability made her super wealthy (and therefore independent of masculine power), her popularity began to wane. To reassure her public that she was still available as a fantasy figure she took to wearing shackles and chains (and to crawling around on all fours) in her videos. That helped very little to keep her in the past. As Evita, she is now being retooled to become a marketable female martyr. Self-torture, the public acceptance of physical maltreatment (in today's fashion environment, advanced anorexia is the manifestation of choice of this compliance), being murdered (i.e. being wasted), dying gracefully, or quietly stepping aside (without wasting too much of anyone's money) are still the main roads to female media martyrdom.

Simply put, both the Sex Pots and the Tragic Heroines produced by our media are invidious expressions of the eros of ownership. The sex goddesses show women how to look and how to behave if they want to dream of being bought by a powerful owner, and the tragic heroines of popular culture show women how to destroy or efface themselves if they want to gain "individual identity" in the public eye. Sadly, to be an ambulant acknowledgment of your willingness to be owned, or otherwise to demonstrate, through a variety of forms of martyrdom, your willingness not to interfere with the processes of ownership, still represent for virtually every woman the binary choices available if she wants to gain what is often mistaken for "agency" in today's media world.