I hate to drop it on all of you, but ugly male/pretty female pairings happen rarely and only for good reason. In the 50s Elizabeth Taylor married Eddie Fisher (but she's nuts). Marilyn Monroe married Arthur Miller (but she was nuts and really in love with Joe DiMaggio, anyway), Jeanne married Casey Kasem (he's rich). And Christie Brinkley married an insomniac otter, Billy Joel, for reasons that remain a mystery to all, but you can be sure it wasn't for his scores at the video arcades.

This pointless fantasizing about babes seems part of this cultural revival of the oafish male, the same trend that brought us The Man Show, Tim Allen, "gentlemen's clubs," cigars and fart jokes. Now we celebrate our bad habits as emblems of manhood. Belching, loafing, insensitivity, simple-mindedness, chauvinism, and leering horniness are no longer behaviors of an unreconstructed pig, but male bonding rituals. Burned by repeated, failed attempts to be an ideal man for women, we seem to have retreated into the comfort of becoming a woman's worst nightmare. And if that weren't lame-brained enough, we add to the mix this delusion that such behavior attracts bubble-breasted and air-headed women. Bimbos are a natural part of the mix, as if curvaceous ladies with perfect hair really prefer flatulent beer-guzzlers who take them to martial arts movies. Now that's way out there.

Perhaps it has gone unnoticed by members of this neo-jerk movement that the booth babes, strippers, and "girls on trampolines" who provide the flesh for this fantasy ARE ONLY THERE BECAUSE THEY'RE BEING PAID TO BE THERE! Their fake smiles aren't even very convincing. The Playboy bunnies I saw in the recent E3 shots looked like they were being forced to pose with toxic waste. The poor Lara "Tomb Raider" Croft model had to let these mutants ride shotgun on her motorcycle for the souvenir shots. She looked downright desperate to find the ejector seat button - for herself. When paired with game journalists, these ladies look genuinely pained - the same way they looked in high school when they drew these kind of guys as lab partners.

To add to the absurdity many of the mags and zines actually brought their own booth babes this year - as if to ensure that there was someone attractive in the exhibit hall who might talk to their own staff. Kudos to CNet's Gamecenter, which seemed to understand the real politics of babehood. GC assigned its own models to Webcast reports from the show floor - mostly interviews with other booth babes. But that's as God intended. Pretty young things that trade principally on their looks tend to flock together, at least until the millionaire walks in the room. In other words, John Carmack was the only guy in that convention hall who had half a chance.

Editor