I have never been handsome. Sure, girlfriends occasionally told me their grandmothers thought I was cute or that my skin was clearing up nicely, but those were not the kind of self-confidence boosters I could parlay into hitting on women in bars. Or parties. Or senior centers, where, looking back, I probably could have done all right, because of my ability to play bridge.
So my intentions for this column were not as self-aggrandizing as my normal ideas, like the one that would print out my entire DNA code. Instead, this exercise was meant to put me back in my rightful place. I figured I'd go to amihotornot.com a website where masochists and narcissists alike post their photos anonymously and let visitors rate them on a scale of 1 to 10. Because high school kids like to go to the site and scan in yearbook pictures from the Most Likely to Keep Using the Thyroid-Problem Excuse category--or snapshots of their shirtless dads--I thought I'd get a 6 or even a 7. Then, feeling cocky, I'd ask my girlfriend Cassandra to post her picture so I could find out whether to trade her in for something hotter, kind of like a cyber-Temptation Island without any women running around in bikinis. Really nothing like Temptation Island, but my editor likes me to drop in topical cultural references.
Cassandra, as our friends and my relatives are always eager to point out, is far better looking than I, and would certainly get an 8 or 9. Then we'd all learn a valuable lesson about vanity, shallowness and the fact that I, through wit and charm alone, landed a smoking-hot girlfriend.
Unfortunately, my photo got a 9.1. I cannot explain this except to guess that the retired have got online in even bigger numbers than previously suspected. Even worse, Cassandra's photo scored an 8.4. I don't know how many of you are familiar with women, but let's just say this did not make things pleasant at home.
The next day, in a desperate attempt to save my relationship, I put up a bad picture of myself, a picture that caused a staggering number of people to say I eerily resembled the '80s lesbian cross-dressing singer Phranc. Even people who didn't know who Phranc was used words like '80s, cross-dressing and lesbian vocal stylist. And my girlfriend came home from work that night, shoved a camera at me and went in the bathroom vowing to cake on makeup until she looked "like more of a whore than Pam Anderson." It was a scary yet incredibly exciting time in our relationship.
By exposing some stomach and pouting a lot, Cassandra got a 9.0. Unfortunately, Phranc also got a 9.0. To Cassandra this meant we were an evenly matched couple. To me, it meant that if I went to the right kind of bar in that Phranc outfit, I could bring home some serious lesbian-babe action.
We worked out the potentially dangerous paradigm shift in our relationship by rationalizing that women rate men much more generously than men rate women. But I think both of us wonder if I have somehow, Linda Tripp-like, magically transformed into a smoking hottie. I'm planning to turn up the insecurity by rigging a victory at amigreatinbedornot.com