Sexiest Man Living 2007

Who: Sean Penn
Age: 47
Know him as: Actor/director/activist

Proof of Sean Penn's sexiness? He can actually pull off -- without irony -- the single most challenging facial accouterment known to man: the mustache. From Baghdad to Houston, millions of men around the world try to sport the mustache. And let's face it, for 99.99999 percent of them, it is a swing and a miss. You look like a cop. Or the cowboy in the Village People. Or just an asshole. True, a small, lucky percentage will break even on the deal. Those mustaches are not particularly irritating, I suppose, or in some benign cases, not overly distracting. But precious few men actually look even more sexy with a mustache than without. Burt Reynolds, in his prime, was one of the obvious exceptions. Tom Selleck goes in the break-even category -- but only because his mustache has become a permanent facet of the American psyche. If he shaved it off, gravity would probably reverse itself or something. Deep inside my mind there is a furious ongoing debate about Jason Schwartzman's mustache in "Hotel Chevalier." But so far it is a hung jury, since I can't decide about the irony thing. And the fact that Natalie Portman finds it sexy is an obviously complicating factor. Plus, the Schwartzman mustache appears during the 13 coolest minutes ever captured on film, making the whole thing a puzzle inside an enigma.

For most men, so terrifying is the mustache attempt that, only once or twice in a lifetime they will shave their lip last, in the privacy of their bathroom, out of sheer, morbid curiosity. Like wanting to see a dead body. After turning the head this way and that at the freak staring back in the mirror, few of these intrepid explorers will even step away from the sink, open the bathroom door and shock their wives with the horror, horror of it all.

But not only is Sean Penn sexier with a mustache -- have you seen the style of mustache that Sean Penn has the massive cojones to walk out the door wearing? I've seen Sean Penn in magazines, his twisted mug in that semi-smile/semi-glower, staring lazily at the camera through squinty eyes with a pencil-thin Zorro clinging daintily to the ridge of his upper lip.

Are you kidding me?

Absolutely nobody should be able to do that. It would be like me, a half Jew, tugging on a pair of cowboy boots, perhaps the most fashion-risky footwear to tread the earth since the moccasin.

The smoking thing is a riddle too. To all you kids out there wondering if you look cool with a cigarette, you don't. Plus it smells. Plus it will kill you.

So why is it, when I see Sean Penn smoking, I want a cigarette? Or to be him? Or his cigarette? Or something. Why why why why why?

-- Mark Benjamin

Who: Junot Diaz
Age: 39
Know him as: Author

When even Michiko Kakutani calls someone "irresistible," you know his appeal is potent. Eleven long years after his riveting first short story collection, "Drown," appeared, Diaz's debut novel "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" arrived this fall to the kind of acclaim that leaves critics scrambling for superlatives.

Diaz writes about race and sex and the most brutal parts of history and the way all these things seep into our experience of life -- the kind of stuff that can, in unskilled hands, turn into Hallmark Channel dreck. But what makes Diaz beguiling isn't just that his story of Oscar, a guy he calls "a big dork in New Jersey," is so joyous and painful and funny and deeply sincere. It isn't just that he writes with such a pitch-perfect ear for the idiosyncratic rhythms of his characters' voices and their limitless mash-up of pop culture obsessions. Or that he doesn't even italicize his Spanish -- that's how much of a linguistic badass he is.

It's all that, combined with his wiry, close-cropped good looks, the distinctive Dominican lilt in his voice. It's the courtly way he thanks his audience at readings, the soft-spokenness in media appearances, the way a guy who can write so astutely, and with such romantic bravado, can appear so humbly oblivious to his own supreme attractiveness.

Diaz writes, "Love is a rare thing, easily confused with a million other things," with the conviction of a man who knows a rare and "wondrous" thing when he sees it. So do we.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

Who: Alec Baldwin
Age: 49
Know him as: Actor

The Long Island lilt. The arrogance. The temper. The paunch. The propensity to play louts.

Oh, Alec Baldwin.

He got me most recently with his imitation of chifforobe-busting Tom Robinson from "To Kill a Mockingbird." Baldwin was playing Jack Donaghy on "30 Rock," and in the midst of an episode about network-whipped television cowards who refuse to take political risks, Baldwin launched into an ear-popping tirade that incorporated every racial and vocal cliché available: from "Sanford and Son" to "Good Times" to Harper Lee's revered story of racial intolerance.

Dy-no-mite!

The scene's circuitous subversion may have been the product of Fey's fevered brain, but only Baldwin and his balls of steel could have pulled it off with such damn-the-torpedoes gusto. One of the things that makes Baldwin so appealing in his latest incarnation is the willingness (nay, relish) with which he serves the whims of his new young female boss.

Fey may be the improbable foil of Baldwin's dreams, but the man has been around for a while. And while it may not be correct, politically or otherwise, to fantasize about Long Island's brashest, bloviating bear of an actor and short-fused father, I've never been able to help it. From his brief turn as Melanie Griffith's scuzzy rat-bastard boyfriend in "Working Girl" through his current renaissance, Baldwin is one of those damnable men whose sex appeal has increased (see also, James Gandolfini) at the same pace as his age and his girth.

Baldwin has always had the hotness to be a matinee idol of a certain sort -- the rough, stubbly, working-class sort -- but has repeatedly chosen quirkier, less obviously appealing roles. He played men named "Cucumber" Frank De Marco, Old Man Dunphy ... Jimmy Swaggart. He's been 15 flavors of jerk, 16 shades of bad guy. And through it all, his big bulging brains have shone from underneath his hirsute exterior.

If loving Alec Baldwin is wrong, I don't want to be right.

-- Rebecca Traister

Who: Flight of the Conchords (Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement)
Age: McKenzie: 31; Clement: 33
Know them as: Stars of an eponymous HBO show

A guy with a guitar is hot. A guy with an accent is hot. And a guy who can make us laugh is really, really hot. What, then, could be better than a man who embodies all of the above? Two men who do.

From the moment "New Zealand's fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo" arrived on HBO this summer with their bone-dry brand of humor, Bret McKenzie (the bearded one) and Jemaine Clement (the one with the sideburns) crooned their way into our nerd-chasing hearts. How can you not fall a little in love with men who offer a dirty little toy-piano ditty about getting lewd with food called "If You're Into It," or an exuberantly nonsensical Gallic pastiche titled "Foux Da Fa Fa"?

Separately, they're adorable, but together, they enter a pantheon of witty troubadours that includes Jonathan Richman, They Might Be Giants and Jonathan Coulton -- men who are a little bit Bruce, a little bit Groucho, and more than a little appealing. And though we may love Bret for his reedy shyness and Jemaine for his inexplicable overconfidence, what we love best about them is how appealing they are together. Because that's what we're into.

-- Mary Elizabeth Williams

Next page: "I've been described as cool, awesome, hot"