I find Ask Men’s 99 Most Desirable Women to be interesting, beyond my general XY-generated interest in the opposite gender. I’m not surprised by how often “desirable” means “being under 25 with a fashionable figure”. What I am surprised by is how ugly a lot of these women are. Thanks to airbrushing, surgery or makeup, many of them have facial features that are almost alien. It’s kind of creepy, actually. Megan Fox is, in many ways, the paradigm of the type. Great figure but an unattractive face (and tiny brain and bad personality to boot).

The older women in the sample far outshine their younger counterparts. Heidi Klum, with 36 years and four kids, looks better than almost all of them (and she seems to actually have something behind her eyes). Monica Bellucci, at 45, puts the 20-year-olds to shame (and can also act and speak four languages).

Smart is sexy too. Natalie Portman is better looking than just about all the “models”. She’s also a talented actress and a Harvard grad. The same, to a lesser degree, could be said of Anne Hathaway, Erin Andrews, Erin Burnett and a dozen other women on the list. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you broke them into groups by intelligence, the smarter women would be more attractive than the dumber ones — or at least less alien-looking. If you broke them up by profession, the models would be the most fake-looking (and to my eyes, the least attractive). Think of Portman on one end and Kim Kardashian on the other. No question which is smarter and which is more attractive.

(Interestingly, there is a porn star on the list — Sasha Grey. But Grey is an atypical porn star — slender but not anorexic, unaltered surgically and rumored to be intelligent. She certainly held her own acting in Steven Soderbergh’s latest mainstream film. More from Beradinelli here.)