People Magazine announced that the sexiest man alive this year was Mr John Legend. You must be confused right now, wondering where that leaves your crush, that tall, handsome, athletic gentleman over there who sets your soul singing, your heart dancing and your various other attributes attributing themselves in potentially embarrassing ways. That dude is sexier than John Legend as far as you are concerned. But if People Magazine says John Legend is the sexiest man alive, does that mean your crush is dead?

Don’t panic. Let me explain.

The Sexiest Man Alive is an annual marketing stunt pulled by an American publication called People Magazine. If you can judge a mag from its cover you can issue a verdict on People Magazine right from the title. It appears to claim to be a magazine for people but it mostly only serves American people. You and I and the rest of the world can take a seat in the back and be silent. 

And that is just the top third of the cover.

The rest is just as dubious. Sexiest Man Alive? How did they know? When was the vote? What size and colour were the ballot papers and who was the returning officer? 

Or was there a laboratory where they analysed the DNA samples of each and every one? 

Where did they get their data? From Facebook? Must have been from Facebook. Facebook has all the personal data of every human on earth, whether you are subscribed to it or not. If you have been within a kilometre of an internet-enabled computing device, Facebook has spied on you and created a dossier. It was Facebook that told them. The Facebook computer algorithm collected all the data on all the men in the world, eliminated the less sexy ones, then ran the biodata and the vital statistics of the sexy dudes through a demanding and rigorous programme that crunched the numbers and then came up with a decisive result: John Legend has a sexiness quotient of 45,677,324 MegaSlays. Eight thousand five hundred and nine point two more than his closest competitor, your crush who still hasn’t noticed that you changed your perfume. Yet you imported that Chanel fragrance especially for him. Why won’t he notice you? What is wrong with you?

Nothing’s wrong with you, sis. Something is wrong with him. Let me tell you an open secret, sis. Men are idiots. You can’t sit there and wait. Just go there and shoot your shot directly. Tell him, "Dude, I am feeling you, okay? So let’s go to dinner Saturday night and we see if you are as cool as I think you are. I’ll pick you up at eight.” 

It’s 2019, sis. You can’t leave things to chance any more. 

But we were talking about how John Legend came to be named Sexiest Man Alive yet compared to your crush, John Legend is as sexy as a wet snail in a gutter.

I was saying that we will assume that there was some sort of reasonable, reliable process that went into making this decision, and that Facebook, the world’s top data-mining institution must have been responsible. But that is not it at all.

The editors of People Magazine told CNN that the process is carried out by means of polls and focus groups among their subscribers. The results are debated and considered and discussed by People’s editors (this part is not in the CNN report. I’m just imagining this part. Obviously) a dark, secret, sexy-consideration chamber of the American Capitalist Media Industry Complex Tower of Propaganda, and then, in the end they pick the person they think will make the most magazine sales amongst their American market.

Someone surprising and unexpected but not so much as to be controversial, someone popular but not overexposed, someone middle-aged so they can appeal to both older and younger demographics, someone who is well-known and accessible enough for several other news outlets to reference and in doing so market People Magazine.

So John Legend is not the sexiest man alive in 2019. He is the sexiest People Magazine Marketing Mascot alive of 2019. Your crush is still the sexiest man alive. Shoot your shot. Before someone else does. Hurry.