The sexy star of Mad Men — and Esquire’s all-new issue devoted to women — has a few things she’d like to get off her chest. Also, watermelon.

We love your body. If we’re in love with you, we love your body. Your potbelly, everything. Even if you’re insecure about something, we love your body. You feel like you’re not this or that? We love your body. We embrace everything. Because it’s you.

Speaking of your body, you don’t understand the power of your own smell. Any woman who is currently with a man is with him partly because she loves the way he smells. And if we haven’t smelled you for a day or two and then we suddenly are within inches of you, we swoon. We get light-headed. It’s intoxicating. It’s heady.

We remember forever what you say about the bodies of other women. When you mention in passing that a certain woman is attractive — could be someone in the office, a woman on the street, a celebrity, any woman in the world, really — your comment goes into a steel box and it stays there forever. We will file the comment under “Women He Finds Attractive.” It’s not about whether or not we approve of the comment. It’s about learning what you think is sexy and how we might be able to convey it. It’s about keeping our man by knowing what he likes.

We also remember everything you say about our bodies, be it good or bad. Doesn’t matter if it’s a compliment. Could be just a comment. Those things you say are stored away in the steel box, and we remember these things verbatim. We remember what you were wearing and the street corner you were standing on when you said it.

Never complain about our friends — even if we do. No matter how many times we say a friend of ours is driving us crazy, you are not to pile on. Not because it offends us. But because it adds to the weight that we carry around about her.

Remember what we like. When I first started dating my husband, I had this weird fascination with the circus and clowns and old carnival things and sideshow freaks and all that. About a month after we started dating, he bought me this amazing black-and-white photo book on the circus in the 1930s, and I started sobbing. Which freaked him out. I thought, Oh, my God, I mentioned this three or four weeks ago and talked about it briefly, but he was really listening to me. And he actually went out and researched and found this thing for me. It was amazing.

We want you to order Scotch. It’s the most impressive drink order. It’s classic. It’s sexy. Such a rich color. The glass, the smell. It’s not watered down with fruit juice. It’s Scotch. And you ordered it.

Stand up, open a door, offer a jacket. We talk about it with our friends after you do it. We say, “Can you believe he stood up when I approached the table?” It makes us feel important. And it makes you important because we talk about it.

No shorts that go below the knee. The ones almost like capri pants, the ones that hover somewhere between the kneecap and the calf? Enough with those shorts. They are the most embarrassing pants in the world. They should never be worn. No woman likes those.

Also, no tank tops. In public at least. A tank top is underwear. You’re walking around in your underwear. Too much.

No man should be on Facebook. It’s an invasion of everyone’s privacy. I really cannot stand it.

You don’t know this, but when we come back from a date, we feel awkward about that transition from our cute outfit into sexy lingerie. We don’t know how to do this gracefully. It’s embarrassing. We have to find a way to slip into another room, put on the outfit as if it all happened very easily, and then come out and it’s: Look at me! Look at the sexy thing I’ve done! For you, it’s the blink of an eye. It’s all very embarrassing. Just so you know.

Panties is a wonderful word. When did you stop saying “panties”? It’s sexy. It’s girlie. It’s naughty. Say it more.

About ogling: The men who look, they really look. It doesn’t insult us. It doesn’t faze us, really. It’s just — well, it’s a little infantile. Which is ironic, isn’t it? The men who constantly stare at our breasts are never the men we’re attracted to.

There are better words than beautiful. Radiant, for instance. It’s an underused word. It’s a very special word. “You are radiant.” Also, enchanting, smoldering, intoxicating, charming, fetching.

Marriage changes very little. The only things that will get a married man laid that won’t get a single man laid are adultery and whores. Intelligence and humor (and your smell) are what get you laid. That’s what got you laid when you were single. That’s what gets you laid when you’re married. Everything still works in marriage: especially intelligence and humor. Because the sexiest thing is to know you.

© Esquire

Rachel Bilson and Mad Men babe Christina Hendricks celebrate the new Ann Taylor Fall 2010 collection at NYC’s Ace Hotel on Thursday night (March 25).

Christina, 34, wore a classic Ann Taylor LBD and was accompanied by her husband, actor Geoffrey Arend.

Rachel, 28, wore a fun Ann Taylor sweater and jewelry (she wore a belt as a necklace!). She finished off her look with Top Shop shorts and Christian Louboutin pumps.

View pics here. I haven’t been able to find any others than on their site.

“We’re really spoiled on Mad Men. Lots of television actors use the down season to go out and get creatively fulfilled, but I feel the opposite,” Christina said. “Anything else I get to do is just icing.”

As for questions about her figure, she said, “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth.” Christina continued, “Back when I was modeling, if someone said ‘I’m fasting,’ I would say, ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’”

And more from JustJared.com

Woman of the Hourglass
Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks finds talk of her body boring. A minority opinion, to be sure. Particularly this season.

Christina Hendricks thinks all the talk about her body is a little embarrassing. It’s not as if she has an extra limb, after all. She just has an especially attractive version of the same thing women have had forever—curves—but she happens to have them in a profession where women haven’t for quite some time.

“It kind of hurt my feelings at first,” she says. “Anytime someone talks about your figure constantly, you get nervous, you get really self-conscious. I was working my butt off on the show, and then all anyone was talking about was my body!”

You can see why all the focus on how big the chest, how narrow the waist, how round the hips could drive an actor—anyone—insane, but people were only noticing Christina Hendricks’s body because they were finally noticing Christina Hendricks. Her portrayal of Joan Holloway, the complicated office queen of Sterling Cooper (Draper Pryce!), on Mad Men is properly captivating for its combination of total competence and heartbreaking vulnerability. And she delivers the spectacular performance while looking extremely different from the other women we’ve grown used to seeing on television, in movies, on the covers of magazines. “It might sound silly,” she says, “but I didn’t realize I was so different. I was just oblivious. Sometimes I would go on an audition and someone would say something like, Girl, you’re refreshing! That was it.”

And it’s not Hendricks’s fault that she’s come to everyone’s attention as an actress at a time when bodies are very much an issue—if not the issue—as far as fashion is concerned. There are the various attempts by fashion cities like São Paulo and Milan to police model weight; there are press conferences, BMI restrictions, mandatory turkey sandwiches backstage at every show. But lately there have also been baby steps taken toward the (unfortunately) radical idea that looking good need not involve so much rejection of the naturally occurring female shape. Glamour has begun to mix models of various sizes into its regular editorial shoots. A recent issue of V concerned itself with shape, pointing out that clothes—even fashion clothes—can look good on differently sized people.

But too often the size discussion becomes almost grotesque, as if the only alternative to being as lean as a skinless Perdue chicken breast is to veer wildly (and unhealthily) in the opposite direction (Gabourey Sidibe, Beth Ditto). One can’t help wonder if the fashion world’s obsession with those two women, both of whom deserve prominent coverage for their talent first and foremost, isn’t in some sense overcompensation, an attempt to atone for the terribly thin models who still hold sway everywhere. Either way, it becomes a game of extremes.

There is a spectacular other path. And Hendricks working the Emmy’s red carpet in formfitting L’Wren Scott is terrific PR for the opinion that Hollywood success should not be determined by one’s ability to Pilates one’s hips up, off, and away. None of this is meant to suggest that Hendricks is big. She is not. (That the New York Times seemed to endorse a stylist’s description of her as “a big girl” in its coverage of the Golden Globes was mystifying and strange.) It is also not to suggest that her figure is attainable to the average duck. She looks the way movie stars used to look. She is, in that sense, proof of how certain bodies go in and out of fashion.

It is perhaps ironic then that Hendricks actually started out as a model—catalogues, mostly, but there was one season on the London runway that ended when her agent said, “Darling, did your boobs grow?” (One imagines that future seasons might see the question posed in the opposite direction.) Now, she is a fully working actor, with three new films in the can and several more under consideration. Curiously, she keeps getting called in to audition for roles as the mothers of people she isn’t nearly old enough, at 34, to have birthed—which has a lot to do with what she wears on TV. “The way we dress on Mad Men is so associated with old photographs, with people’s parents and grandparents,” she says. “In person, I wear jeans and flip-flops and people are so shocked. They tell me I look so much younger than they expected.”

Work on a new season of Mad Men is about to begin. “We’re really spoiled on Mad Men,” she says. “Lots of television actors use the down season to go out and get creatively fulfilled, but I feel the opposite. Anything else I get to do is just icing.”

As for the body question, she’ll answer it when asked, but mostly it bores her. “It just leaves a bad taste in my mouth,” she says. “Back when I was modeling, if someone said ‘I’m fasting,’ I would say, ‘Can’t we talk about something else?’”

© NY Mag

Christina Hendricks redefines va-va-voomy in a traffic-stopping fire-engine red Carolina Herrera gown.

And don’t forget about the contest!