It is a statement, which is increasingly heard in the popular media: “I am not a sex symbol.”

The most recent celebrity to make this claim is Mollie King of The Saturdays.

It is typically stated as an example of false modesty, because surely the only people who can make the statement “I am not a sex symbol” are sex symbols?

Look at the evidence.  Other people who have claimed not to be a sex symbol at various times in their career include Ariana Grande – sex symbol; Jenny McCarthy – sex symbol; Helen Mirren – sex symbol; and John Bercow – okay, so there always has to be one exception that proves the rule.

I posit that “I am not a sex symbol” is an example of the Liar Paradox, typically illustrated by the statements “I am lying” or “Everything I say is false”, and perhaps most eloquently depicted by René Magritte in his painting The Treachery of Images.

Did Mollie King realise when she said that “I am not a sex symbol” that she was dipping her sexy/unsexy toes into the waters of Gödel’s First Incompleteness Theorem and Tarski’s Undefinability Theorem?

I don’t know.  After all, “I am not a psychoanalyst.”

© Simon Turner-Tree

Simon Turner-Tree thinks he’s sexy.