Surely you don't believe that. The media never, ever creates a trend before the fans do. There were fans who realised our ludicrously long history of false dawns and falls from promising positions (not to mention straight up bad luck like dodgy lasagnas and losing our best player to a goddamn literal f*cking bolt of lightning) made us a less consistent, more wobbly team than most when high up chasing success, and the media ran with it from there.
Roy Keane was a Spurs fan long before he uttered that 'Spurs will always let you down' phrase on air. If anything, attributing to the term 'sexy' to the nasty evil meanie TV media and press fellows, while believing that 'some' Spurs fans were then duped by those entities into adopting it, is only ensuring that the problem itself will never, ever go away.
I'm with
@Jurgen the German on this: only the team can end the term, by actually winning things over a long period of time and not falling at the final hurdle. But it absolutely does exist, and is a valid term to use considering our history of mental fragility and let-downs (not just losses: 'sexy' means more that that, it's about the bloody context of those losses) . Is it a self-reinforcing belief? Maybe, but it's difficult to see how to mitigate the bad effects of calling a spade a spade, because that's what it is.
Edit: I wonder how many of the posters who now angrily claim that the term 'sexy' is obsolescent and unnecessary were around when we lost 4-3 to a ten-man, pre-Mansour Emirates Marketing Project after leading 3-0 at half-time. It was one of the very best comebacks in FA Cup history, a part of City folklore...and I watched that happen, as did many of you, I'm sure. How many of you were also around when we threw away a
thirteen-point lead over Arsenal ('mind the gap!' cried our giddy supporters) and finished fourth....only to be the only team in PL history to ever have been knocked into the Europa League because a lower team pulled off one of the unlikeliest feats of all time and won the CL but finished sixth. How many of you.....ah, forget it.
If you don't think we're uniquely cursed with the ability to fail in macabre, horrifying ways after getting ourselves into good positions, fair enough. But to also think that other fans are only being deceived by the yeevil TV media, while great fonts of wisdom like yourselves are resistant to such temptations....that's only burying one's head in the sand in the face of the grim evidence of incidents like the above.