It was Pimp (no surprise) who first hipped me to "Am I Hot or Not?" (www.amihotornot.com). It's similar to the ol' "Babe of the [whatever]" sites, only with a slight twist: You put your own pic in, male or female, and the public rates you from 'hot' (10) to 'not' (1).

So I started checking it out. We toyed a bit with the interface, checked to see if we could sandbag the counters and played the game, comparing our votes with the popular average. It was some sociological questions that began to surface that intrigued me the most.

As Pimp and I continued for a bit I noticed we were playing two different games. He was trying to assess the public's probable consensus of the persons 'hotness' and trying to peg the popular vote, while I was trying to make an individual valuation so as to compare myself to the norm.

Another thing I noticed is, where I started out regularly overbidding the popular vote, even though I was not trying to match the masses, my rankings slowly were growing more and more conservative and thus more in line with the average. It seemed that I was being subconsciously influenced by the public's collective definition of beauty. And if that were true, could my own opinion of what I find physically appealing be slowly being 'corrected' toward a more mainstream opinion?

At this point, my interest piqued, I threw one of my pix up to see how I'd fare among people that actually saw daylight on occasion. I decided on this one:

Things started out fair as my first few votes rolled in. They give you the option to send a URL to your friends that will link them directly to your page to presumably beef up your score. I sent it to one friend who said she gave me a ten (probably the first and last 10 I'd receive). My score started around 6.something and then slowly increased in humility down to 2.2 before recovering a little to stabilize around 2.5. "But just how ugly am I?" I wondered.

I started going thru the male scores and I couldn't find a single score over 5. In fact, on tabulating 50 male contenders in series, I found the range to be between 1.5 and 4.5 with the average being around 2.6 (in 50 females I found the range between 1.8 and 7.7 with a 4.2 avg*). So am I only a tenth of a point below average? And just what is attractive in a man? I decided to explore further.

I then submitted the following two images:

Both started very strong before beginning to dive. I didn't know whether or not to be surprised as Satan seemed to be able to hold his value better. This continued until Christ was "deactivated because we received a number of complaints," at which point Satan had edged out Christ in a score or 3.5 to 3.6. Shortly after that, Satan was "deactivated" as well. But what made Satan more popular? Was it his jovial smile? Is humor the key?

I submitted another picture of myself:

This picture (of me passed out at DefCon7) did noticeably better! I, like Satan, started out strong and slowly descended to a, nothing to be ashamed of, 3.1. This still left the question, why are all the scores in the lower register. Is this a phenomenon of this particular system having it's data skewed by dejected and homophobic male voters? The fact that all my tests so far had the largest number of votes in the 1 point pool seemed to imply that possibility. But perhaps the gap between hunk and plunk was more dynamic than I'd realized. Maybe grrlz do not find much gradation in guyz between being seductive and simply not being repulsive and I simply had yet to run across the former in my test cases.

As a final test, I decided to submit two models to try and test the upper range of our apparently either cynical or extremely choosy voters. It was also at this time that I began to really wish I had begun this test using female test subjects, as I think I might have found the process more enjoyable. But, so as not to skew the data, I began my search for male models.

I found two models that appear on romance novel covers. I...er...*might* have explicitly violated copyright notices here, so I'm not gonna show you who I used, but here are the results nevertheless. The first, a muscular black guy, kicked serious ass with a 4.4 (the female high score of 7.7 I tracked to this lingerie sight*). That was what I had expected and supports my sandbag-voting hypothesis. What wasn't expected was the second model, a similarly built white guy, scoring a 3! Ha! I'm 'hotter' than that passed out on a lawn chair! Somebody gimmie the name of a romance novel publisher 'cause they need to know that I'll work for the alkihol!

- TexorcisT

* - female statistics were gathered after the original study and not used in the original findings other that to show co-relation after the fact.