"I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic. I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well"
About this Quote
The frustration she describes isn’t modesty; it’s misrecognition. “Sexy” here is less a compliment than a job title, a narrowing category that flattens a person into a surface. Mendes is careful with her wording: she doesn’t reject sex appeal, she rejects its monopoly. That distinction matters because it exposes how the culture reads women’s visibility as permission to reduce them. If you trade in glamour, the story goes, you can’t also demand depth. Mendes calls that bluff.
Her list - ambition, will, intellect, sense of humour - is strategic. It’s not a plea to be seen as “serious” in the prestige-film sense; it’s a demand for multiplicity, for the right to be contradictory and fully dimensional in public. Humour, especially, is a quiet flex: it signals timing, agency, a refusal to be merely looked at. The subtext is a negotiation with an audience trained to consume actresses as images first, people second. Mendes is asking for a rewrite of the frame, not an escape from it.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Mendes, Eva. (2026, January 17). I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic. I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-definitely-responsible-for-the-image-that-i-47313/
Chicago Style
Mendes, Eva. "I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic. I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-definitely-responsible-for-the-image-that-i-47313/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I'm definitely responsible for the image that I put out there. But it does become frustrating, because I don't want 'sexy' to be my defining characteristic. I'd love for my ambition and will and intellect and sense of humour to define me as well." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/im-definitely-responsible-for-the-image-that-i-47313/. Accessed 10 Feb. 2026.






