question posed to bill simmons aka the sports guy: 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 obssesion 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 eighteen, 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" and anna k's first wimbledon, and we're the same guys who counted down the months until the olsen twins' eighteenth 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.