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The other side of the coin.

Now that we've talked about overage girls ... Bill Simmons (ESPN's The Sports Guy) addresses very delicately a question from a reader and I thought I'd share.

What is the cutoff age of young female celebrities for guys not to be considered total "pervs" in thinking they are hot? For example, a lot of my male friends looove Lindsay Lohan. Now that she just turned 18 and is "legal," does this make their obsession with her non-taboo? Or, should age only be a secondary factor, combined with how old the actresses appear to look along with the age of the male in question?
-- Brigid, Kalamazoo, Mich.

SG: I would say the answer has to be 18, since that's the legal age and all. With that said, we're the same guys who look back nostalgically on Britney's "Oops, I did it again" Era, Alicia Silverstone in "The Crush" [Doug's Side Note: It's funny that he should mention this, because Alicia Silverstone is older than me by at least 5 years and was one of the first slighty-'older' women I thought was cute, along with Melissa Joan Hart wacky-lazy-eye and all.] and Anna K's first Wimbledon, and we're the same guys who counted down the months until the Olsen twins' 18th birthday and spent entire days exchanging e-mails on whether Lohan bought implants or not (my buddy Raff and I have spent hours arguing about this -- I still say no). The point is that the vast majority of guys are "total pervs." That's just who we are. And women know this.

I think there's a bigger question here: When did this stuff become socially acceptable to even discuss? To borrow a phrase from Malcolm Gladwell, what was the tipping point? For instance, Nicole Eggert was smoking-hot on "Charles in Charge" back in the '80s, but I doubt adult males were openly lusting after her like they would now. Was it the birth of the Internet? The growth of these pseudo-Playboy mags like "Stuff" and "Maxim"? Did Kournikova start this whole thing? Britney?

I would argue that it goes back to "Beautiful Girls." Remember that movie? The one where Timothy Hutton (searching for himself in his late-20s) returns home for a few weeks, hangs out with some old buddies, and ends up in a bizarre mental love affair with a 13 year-old Natalie Portman? Romantics would argue that Hutton's character appreciated the purity of Portman's personality -- she was untainted by life, wise beyond her years, and maybe three more years from being smoking-hot -- and it was easy to have a harmless crush on someone like that. Cynics would argue that this was a romantic comedy about a budding pedophiliac. The truth probably lies somewhere in between.

Here's the point: Every guy thinks that Natalie Portman was hot in that movie.

And again, she was like 13 at the time. Which is really, REALLY creepy. But that was the whole point of the movie -- Hutton's character was beaten down by life and relationships, and the Portman character symbolized a fresh start for him. He just had to wait until she was legal. That's how desperate he was to find true love -- he would rather wait on the potential of the "Token Hot Girl Everyone Loved Back in the 8th Grade" (mine was Tina Salomon) and the "Token Unattainable Hot Blonde" (Uma Thurman's character) over rolling the dice with the above-average, unexciting relationship he was already involved in. And yes, I liked this movie. Maybe it was predictable, maybe it cheesy, and maybe there were lines in it like "Don't let her go, man," but this was a pretty good portrait of a tortured guy in his late-20s. And a good example of why guys are "total pervs." On behalf of the entire male race, I apologize.

--

Having unloaded that long long article on you, here's my take. When you're 12 years old, you start really jonesing for girls, and you develop an aesthetic. At the time, that aesthetic is what you see around you, 12 year old girls. As you get older, that aesthetic archetype changes, but not nearly as fast as you change. When you're 16, you still think the 12 years old matches decently with the archetype you've formed. When you're 20, the 16 year old does. So it takes awhile until you're completely out of the woods in terms of not being a pedophillic pervert.

And everybody's rate of aesthetic archetype drag is different and changes as the years progess, but for the most part, I think the mid-to-late 20s thing holds true where you come to terms with the fact that jonesing for a "Barely Legal" is gross. The key to not becoming a pedophile before you reach that realization is not doing anything about any thoughts you might have and recognizing that it's gross (or even just that other people think it's gross is good enough, I suppose. Whatever keeps you from touching little girls.) Afterall, you may think about beating the snot out of the guy who just cut you off on the freeway, but you're not a felon until you get out of your car and do it.

Anyway, I turned 23 yesterday (Even though I still look 16 and there's another problem that I won't get into), and I realized yesterday that I've cleared the drag from all that, and probably have been clear for some time now. It doesn't hurt that I've got a beautiful mature (as in looks-clearly-legal) woman I love either. Anyway, it's something of a relief to realize you're not as much of a perv as you thought you were. A Happy 23rd Birthday to myself, I guess.

posted by Doug 4:35 PM

Not a GMILF, but flattering nonetheless.

Grandmother? *shudders* Got hit on by a 70 year old woman today, which was, actually, sort of flattering. We talked about the weather, housing prices etc while I was doing my appraisal of her newly-dead mother's home.

As I was leaving, she says "Oh you're all done? Shame about that. You're a charming young fellow. Easy on the eyes too. A real looker. *laughs* If I was 40 years younger, I'm not sure I'd have the guts to say that. Might come across as too flirty. But I'm old, so I can say it."

Nice to know I've still got it.

posted by Doug 7:00 PM

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