This week, I shared this photo on Facebook of the beautiful Argentinian model and showgirl Belen Rodriguez, one of the velline at this year’s San Remo. Not surprisingly,  the (male) reactions were explosive.   I seriously thought my PC was going to catch fire with all the high temperatures.

Once all the men recovered from drooling all over their computer screens, and the predictable sexual jokes and innuendos had subsided, I couldn’t stop wondering why such a beautiful woman would feel the need to deliberately show us her, erm, butterfly.

Of course, when women roll their eyes at the sight of other women exposing too much skin we are immediately accused of being envious.  OK, there might be some grain of truth in that because Belen is, without a doubt, gorgeous, with an impossibly perfect figure.  Do we gnash our teeth and shake our fist at the gods who seem to have bestowed all their gifts on this goddess? Yeah, sure, for a minute or two, maybe.  Most of us normal earthlings who struggle on a daily basis to look halfway decent, look at her image and despair.  Let’s face it, Belen would probably even look breathtaking wearing a potato sack.

Looking at her photos and seeing her on TV, she doesn’t seem to have a single physical flaw. It is precisely for this reason that her decision to lift her skirt to one side and show us her strategically-placed tattoo leaves me puzzled. (The debate as to whether she was actually wearing panties is still on.)

I often feel this way when I see stunning women flaunting their sexuality in such an “in your face” kind of way  – why do they do it?     Do they become so blase at men gawking at them that they need to keep showing more and more of their body in order to keep getting that buzz of constantly being the centre of attention?  Or do they fear that the attention will soon stop as they (inevitably) get older, and so they need to keep thinking up new ways of retaining the media’s focus?

Most of the women who commented felt Belen simply looked tacky and vulgar, even as they too joined in the jokes about the butterfly.

Of course the argument of what is sexy vs what is just trashy is one which can be debated to death. Rihanna’s recent dress at the Grammy’s for example, shown below, was in my opinion, just sexy enough without crossing the line into tacky territory.

I think Belen Rodriguez, however, went just that little bit too far when she decided to strut down the stairs and give the millions of viewers watching a display of what was under her dress.  I really did not need to see her tattoo on her pelvic bone, or to know she was wearing barely nothing underneath – it was truly a case of too much information.