Askmen.com Top 99: The Olympics of babe-aliciousness can make you feel wretched

  Reader Sheila suggested I take a look at the AskMen.com Top 99 list of women who are ranked to the decimal point by their desirability score. Oh yes! Beauty is an Olympic sport at AskMen.com as each lady gets gymnastic type scores based on her ability to drive drool gawking men wild. Officially, this is how they calculate the desirability score:

"A woman's ranking on the Top 99 list is determined by the value of her Desirability Score; the higher the value, the higher her place on the list. Desirability Scores, in turn, were determined by a month-long vote hosted on AskMen.com. Readers were asked to rate each of 150 finalists on a scale of 1 to 10. These results were then averaged out with AskMen.com's staff's own Desirability ratings. The highest median 99 Desirability Scores were then set aside to comprise 2007's Top 99 list."

*NOTE: 8.5 million votes were cast for 2007's Top 99 Most Desirable Women list.

That's a whole lotta people voting which is a whole lotta superficial scariness.

What is frightening about this Top 99 list for female viewers is how it makes you feel after looking at the list. To view the list in it's entirety, you must click through each women 1-99 where along with her score you get tidbits of information on what makes her so hot. Sometimes you even get body measurements because for some women that is their most valuable asset.

Now, as you go through each profile from 99 to 1, your mood starts to change. You may start out happy and confident in yourself as you start at #99 Ivanka Trump, but by the time you get to the top 10 where Jessica Alba and Beyonce reside, your confidence has dwindled and you have feelings have either depression, inadequacy, disgust, or self-loathing. You now feel like something is wrong or not enough with you because you can't measure to these ladies, and if women like Reese Witherspoon and Cameron Diaz can't even make the list, what chance in the world do you have?

But why? Why has some silly list created by a bunch of juvenile buffoons made you feel worse about yourself? You've been brainwashed and you know it, and it will take a few hours or some days to shake off the "You're not good enough" effects of the Top 99 list. That's the power that images and context in the media can have on us even when we don't realize it.