Charly Caruso/Arnolt and the Linear Championship of Beauty
When I was young, I was a huge boxing fan. In the past two decades, my interest in the sport has waned as the quality of competition has declined and my concerns about the role of violence in our society, including sports violence, have increased.
One of the things that led to the decline of boxing was the proliferation of titles and weight classes. Most competitive athletes are motivated by a desire to be a champion. When there are a dozen different organizations conferring championships and two dozen different weight classes, everyone who is halfway good can get their hands on a belt and claim to be a champion while avoiding the other good fighters, as opposed to the heyday of boxing when to be the champ, you had to beat the champ, so the best fighters had to face each other in their primes.
Ring Magazine tried to address this by creating their own title based on the Linear Champion concept, that to be the champ, you had to beat the champ. But Ring Magazine did not have sufficient influence to create a greater demand for their title than those of the corrupt boxing sanctioning bodies. But like Ring Magazine, I created a Linear Championship in my life: The Linear Championship of Beauty.
You have to get a few years into life before you can credibly declare anything “the greatest ever”, so I was 24 years old when I first identified any girl as the most beautiful I’d ever seen. We’re talking in real life here, not on television or in pictures. That girl was one-time Playboy model and television weather girl Monica Mesones.
In June 2000, just past midnight, I drove past the Voodoo Lounge, a bar in San Jose, California, and I saw Monica standing in line waiting to get in. I said to myself, “I’ve GOT to go into that bar and talk to THAT girl!”. So I did.
Monica was very nice and just as beautiful up close as she had been from a distance. But she said she had a boyfriend. Normally, when a girl says that, I consider it to be the end of the conversation and I politely excuse myself. But this time, I didn’t let it go at that and did something I’ve never done any other time. I asked her, “So where is he?”. She smiled and said, “He didn’t come out tonight.” (She was with a group of girlfriends).
I was about to walk away but she stopped me to tell me that she did the weather on TV and suggested that I should watch sometime. The next day, I tuned in to watch her and I was surprised to see that she was on Telemundo. I knew she was Latina obviously, but because she spoke perfect unaccented English, it didn’t occur to me she would be on Spanish-language television. This made me more curious about her so I went to Google and...
When I Googled her name, the first thing that came up was naked photos of her. I was like, “LOL, what the fuck?”. It was hilarious because that night on the way to the bar where I met her, my friend had asked me if I would ever date a girl who had been a pornstar or prostitute and we’d had a long conversation about it. Playboy isn’t porn obviously, but still it is somewhat ironic that I met a Playboy model minutes after having that conversation.
Not so much the Playboy photos (even though she looked smoking hot), but finding out that she did Spanish-language TV and was from Uruguay made me more interested in Monica, so I did something else I’ve rarely done: I sent her roses at the TV station. She didn’t call me, but a few days later on her weathercast, she wore a blouse with roses on it. I wonder, was that for me? If so, that was so cute!
My encounter with Monica was significant for another reason. I was only two months back from my emotionally devastating Africa trip with June. I was in a deep depression, and I got angry if anyone even suggested to me that I think about any other girl. Monica was the first girl other than June that I gave a second thought after Africa. That is what it took to get my mind off June for a few days: the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen.
Monica held the title for a good five years, five years during which I traveled to a lot of places known for having large populations of beautiful women. It wasn’t until 2005, when the law firm I was working for hired a new receptionist, that the title changed hands. Irony of ironies, her name was Scarlett. Like the middleweight boxing division had champions Sugar Ray Robinson and Sugar Ray Leonard, my Linear Championship of Beauty has champions Scarlett Johansson and Scarlett-Not-Johansson.
Scarlett-Not-Johansson, like Monica Mesones, was also Latina. She had some kind of complicated ethnicity. If I recall, I think she said she was half Mexican, one-quarter White and one-quarter Spanish.
Scarlett had dark hair and the most incredibly beautiful crystal blue eyes that I still think are the most beautiful feature I’ve seen on a human being. It was like they didn’t seem real, but not in a phony artificial way. In a surreal supernatural way. It was like Alexis Bledel in Sin City—her eyes made the rest of the world seem to be in black-and-white.
Scarlett-Not-Johansson was smoking hot apart from her eyes, and like Monica, she was really nice. I chatted with her briefly a few times, but as transcendently beautiful as she was, I didn’t feel like there was compatibility or mutual interest there. But I must admit, on many occasions, over many years, I thought about how awesome it would be to wake up in the morning and for the first thing I see to be those eyes looking back at me.
My last day working at that job was a Friday, and that night I went out to a swanky nightclub I used to frequent called Stingaree. Surprise surprise, Scarlett was there. She was wearing a blue and silver sequin dress and she looked so...OMG “I can’t believe it” beautiful. Again, like the rest of the world was black-and-white and she was the only thing in color.
She seemed genuinely excited to see me. We talked briefly and she gave me a hug. I thought about trying to see if I could hang out with her for the night and see what might happen, but I let it go and I didn’t see her again. Did I drop the ball? Maybe, I don’t know. Later, we became Facebook friends and what I saw on her Facebook suggested to me that my assessment of non-compatibility was correct. But I don’t know. Maybe that was a missed opportunity. I’m such a dope.
Anyway, Scarlett-Not-Johansson held the title for another five years. Five years of me hanging out at San Diego’s beaches where the most beautiful girls in the world congregate. Five years of trips to Vegas. Five years of regular visits to swanky parts of LA where models and movie stars hang out. Scarlett-Not-Johansson remained the most beautiful girl I’d ever seen. And like Ted Williams, she finished her career with a home run, because that last time I saw her was the most beautiful she ever looked. The subsequent champions beat her on ONE occasion, but the way she looked that night is still in the top three of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.
The title did not go directly from Scarlett to Scarlett, and in fact, the strange thing is that the girl who unseated Scarlett-Not-Johansson was someone that I met just a few months after I met her. But unlike the other title holders who I crowned upon first sight, I knew this girl for almost five years before she ascended to the throne.
It is odd, because I remember the night I met Jessie, the first instant I saw her, and that night I didn’t particularly notice her beauty. Maybe it was that she was a friend of my girlfriend and I had kind of turned off my notice of other girls at that point.
A few months later, when my ex, Jessie and I went to see the movie Atonement, on the way, I was looking through my rearview mirror at her sitting in the back seat of my car, and I first noticed, “OMG, she’s so cute!”. But still, it wasn’t until August of 2010, when I looked at her in the lobby of the then brand-new Aria Hotel in Las Vegas and thought, “That is the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen”. She was standing at almost exactly the same spot where I would see Scarlett Johansson almost exactly two years later, and the new and current champion took the title.
I would sometimes wonder if what I was seeing when I looked at Jessie wasn’t real because I’d developed such a strong emotional attachment to her, and that was why I didn’t notice her at first. But no, there was evidence to refute this. When she became my friend on Facebook, three of my male friends wrote me to ask about her (Jessie, if they were worth your time, I’d have told you. These were the same scumbags who wanted to put actresses on the casting couch when we were trying to make my movie. Two of them were married). When we were in Vegas that weekend, rich guys with their model girlfriends were peeking over their shoulders at her.
No, my not noticing her beauty was because she was a friend of my girlfriend and it wasn’t until things had gone so bad with my ex that I knew the relationship was doomed that I opened my eyes to see what was in front of me. Indeed, my ex had another friend named Christy who was also one of the most beautiful women I’ve known in my life, and I didn’t really let myself notice that until the end.
So, the first three champions of beauty in my life were all Latina girls. In fact, the most important of the many reasons I started taking Spanish in 7th grade was my thinking, “I need to be able to communicate with THOSE girls!”. That is why it feels so odd to me now that the three most beautiful women in the world to me are two blonde Jewish girls and a White girl, when, though every group is represented, the majority of the women I’ve found most attractive in my life were Latina. The only reason this website doesn’t reflect that is that I don’t know the names of all the smoking hot girls on Telemundo and Estrella TV.
Speaking of beautiful Latina girls on television, I’m flipping channels and I see a stunningly beautiful girl on a panel show on ESPN. I have to find out her name. The show is just ending and I only find out her first name—Charly. I go to Google and I find out that it is Charly Caruso...Arnolt...even the internet doesn’t seem sure what her name is. I don’t know if she just got married or just got divorced or what. So I’ll just call her Charly.
I go to Google Image search for Charly and I’m SHOCKED. From just seeing her face on ESPN, I’m thinking Charly’s a former model or something like that. So imagine my surprise when I see that she is a former professional wrestling girl and a...muscle babe? Is that an inappropriate term to use?
I’ve always found muscular women attractive. I talked about this in my “Unusual Traits...” post. Some guys aren’t into it. I am. Obviously, with anything, there is a point where too much is too much. But Charly...OMG...
So look, I’ve described my Scarlett Johansson encounter this way: if there was such a thing as God, and God said, “Michael, you’ve been pretty good, so I’m going to make a special girl just for you. Be in the lobby of the Aria Hotel at 9:15pm on August 31, 2012”. So I’m there and Scarlett walks by, and God asks me, “So, what do you think?”, my response would have been, “She’s PERFECT.”.
There is an exercise I used to do in my head (mostly before I saw Scarlett), where I would try to imagine what my perfectly beautiful girl would look like. I usually started with a Latina girl or June as a template. I tried to imagine Jessie with Scarlett-Not-Johansson’s eyes. I tried to imagine cobbling together my favorite features from different girls, but it didn’t work. Jessie was perfect just how she was, June was perfect just how she was, and Scarlett-Not-Johansson was perfect just how she was.
I tried to imagine making this change or that change to the girls I’d found most attractive but it felt wrong. I loved them just as they were. I tried to imagine building the perfectly beautiful girl from a blank slate, but I couldn’t.
Scarlett Johansson still holds the title as the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen and I don’t think that record could be broken. But here is my honest reaction when I looked at pictures of Charly, particularly her Twitter profile photo where she is wearing that leopard-print minidress. If God decided She wasn’t done after making Scarlett Johansson, and said, “Michael, you’ve been REALLY good, so I’m also going to make for you the most physically attractive girl possible. Google ESPN Charly.” And then I go, and I look at her pictures, and God asks, “Well, what do you think?”. My answer is, she’s PERFECT.
The prototype of the most physically attractive woman possible that I was trying to build in my head, that’s her, Charly Caruso...Arnolt...whatever. Charly SMOKING HOT PERFECT is more like it. Charly is the most physically attractive girl I have ever seen. And I don’t really need to see her in person for her to win that title.
Our society has so many taboos and euphemisms, so many things you aren’t allowed to talk about or aren’t allowed to say, and part of the mission of this blog is to combat that. So I need to be clear and say what I’m saying unambiguously: Charly is the most sexually attractive girl I’ve ever seen. Is that wrong for me to say that? Well, we’re going to explore that question...
In other pieces on this site, I’ve talked about my having two distinctly different types of attraction. When I look at Charly, I realize there are actually three, maybe four. There is the Scarlett Johansson attraction, which is RELATIONSHIP attraction. There is the Taylor Swift attraction, which is AESTHETIC attraction. And then there is Charly, which is SEXUAL attraction. I mean, I wouldn’t want Charly to think that I ONLY see her sexually and that I she doesn’t rank highly on my aesthetic beauty scale. She’s both. I wouldn’t want Scarlett to think I don’t find her sexually attractive because I do. When we’re talking about girls at the level of those I’ve discussed on this site, while there may be a PRIMARY attraction type that I associate them with, most of them rank highly in at least two of those attraction types. Scarlett ranks highly in all three.
But throughout my life, I have suppressed my sexual attraction because I was so brainwashed by the Ugly Girl Wing of the feminist movement that I believed I needed consent to even have sexual THOUGHTS about a girl, and I had been brainwashed to think it was bad to be sexually attracted to a woman if I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with her. But if I DID want to spend the rest of my life with a girl, I still didn’t believe I should think about sex with her because relationships were supposed to be about “more substantive” things than that. So, Ugly Girl Feminism is actually an ANTI-SEX ideology masquerading as a pro-girl ideology. And I fell for it.
The Ugly Girl Feminists had me so screwed up that I still have trouble seeing the girls I love most in a sexual light, which is absurd. I want to point out to all those girls that had they ever chosen to show me that side of themselves, that wall would have instantly come down. But I wouldn’t allow myself to face the sexual attraction I had for you until you gave me permission to reveal it.
The Ugly Girl Feminists had me believing that women don’t really like sex and that it was something that they only performed as a chore for men. But I finally figured out that this was a lie. A lot of men are sexually selfish and inept and girls don’t like THAT sex. But when a man wants to make sex enjoyable for the girl and knows how, girls like that kind of sex as much as men do. So, of course girls want to be sexually desired by their partner, though they obviously want to be desired and respected for their other qualities.
I was sending the wrong message to girls by trying to scrub my mind of sexual thoughts about them. Maybe girls really can read minds and I was subconsciously telling the girls I liked that I didn’t want to sleep with them when I desperately did. But I wanted them to know that I valued them in every other way unlike so many men who ONLY seemed to care about sex. I was so screwed up. I’m still working to deprogram myself, but it is a long, slow process trying to work through this by myself. Maybe Charly would like to help me with this rehab...
But the upshot of all this is that when I saw girls that I felt a strong sexual attraction for, in the absence of relationship attraction, I dismissed and ignored it as something that was inherently superficial, and naughty since I didn’t believe casual sex was for me. But that was the wrong way to think about things.
One of the things I’ve noticed about these fitness girls—my attraction to them isn’t just visual. On the occasions that I’ve come into physical contact with them, I’ve noticed that...well...again, there is no way to say it without saying it—they FEEL sexy. There was this girl I used to work with who was of this type, and every time she’d hug me at office parties or happy hours I would think, “OMG, she feels so good! I wish I had permission to touch her more!”. So Charly...I can’t even imagine it. It’s TOO hot!
Even in light of all that, why was I still hesitant to post this about Charly? Because, as I discussed in “The Rule” and “Unusual Traits...” where I talked about my attraction to athletic and muscular women, my attraction to these girls NEVER seems to be mutual. One hundred percent of the time, when I see a muscular girl with a guy, he is a guy like her. And I get it. It’s a lifestyle and they want someone with whom they have lifestyle compatibility.
But beyond that, in my experience, the personalities of girls who are athletes or hardcore fitness girls just usually don’t mesh with me. These girls seem to tend to be “fitness snobs” and to them, if you aren’t ripped, you’re a fat slob. Most of them seem to be only attracted not just to the male athlete body, but to the male athlete cocky swagger, and that’s not me at all. And most of them tend not to have developed their mind as much as their body, which is also a problem in my world.
And I also think a higher percentage of these girls are gay. I’ve had two different female athletes, one a soccer player and one a basketball player, tell me that most of their teammates were gay. But as I’ve said half-jokingly, if a girl is a lesbian, given many of my feminine tendencies, I might have a better chance with her than a straight girl.
It’s not that I’m posting this specifically as a personal ad to Charly such that I’d be deterred from posting it just because I’m not her type. This blog is about truth and it is important that I talk about the reaction I had when I saw her. But I do have an ego, and the ego doesn’t like the idea of posting extensively about my attraction to a girl who belongs to a group that I perceive as NEVER being attracted to me. But maybe I’m looking at this the wrong way...
One thing I’ve noticed about Latina girls (and Jewish girls) is that they don’t seem to be addicted to muscular guys the way White and Black girls are. I often see smoking hot Latina girls with fat boyfriends, and it’s VERY rare that I see that with White girls. And I’m not even actually fat right now. It’s just that you can tell that I was.
I’ve often said, I want to be ripped at least one day in my life, and right now, with about 6 months of intense training I could probably do it. Maybe Charly would think it was fun to help me out with that. I’d much rather have a girl personal trainer than a guy. My hatred for male gym culture is part of the reason why I was fat. I actually like working out, just not around other people. But I’d love for Charly to give me a workout!
But I don’t want to eat nothing but boneless skinless chicken strips and broccoli for the rest of my life. But who knows, maybe Charly finally wants to find out what ice cream tastes like. Maybe she is tired of spending half her life working out and wants to get fat. I wouldn’t mind that. I’m sure she’d still be smoking hot, and if things started out with her looking the way she does now, the memory of that will last forever and she can get as fat as she wants!
Maybe Charly’s not like every other muscular girl I’ve met. After all, she is Latina (I think), and I almost always get along well with Latina girls. Maybe she’s been looking for a Spanish-speaking green-eyed Black nerd with girlish tendencies who loves to have fun and thinks she’s the hottest girl on earth.
Indeed, in the few seconds I heard her talking on TV, she didn’t sound like any of the negative stereotypes that I’ve associated with girls like her. She sounded nice. Maybe I’m doing a disservice to myself by assuming she’d never like me, and maybe I’m doing a disservice to her by making all these prejudiced judgments about her based on the shape of her body. That’s wrong. We’re not supposed to do that, right?
I have a theory on attraction that I’m going to write in detail one day. I believe that there is more to attraction than we think. They say “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, and that is true to a degree, but I think it goes deeper than that. I believe that when we see someone we’re attracted to, we are making a subconscious, intuitive evaluation of them, and we are seeing much more than we realize...
Take my Scarlett Johansson encounter as an example. I see this girl, and I don’t know who she is, but I’m enchanted by her. I find out who she is and I find that she works in an industry that I’m also interested in working in and that years ago she played a movie role that made me fall in love with her as a professional, and that I even have a screenplay sitting on my computer that she would be perfect for. I find out that she was married to a man who dated my favorite musician. I find out she is a girl I should have recognized, that I’ve liked for a long time, but she doesn’t look nearly so cute on TV as she does in the lobby of the Aria. I learn a laundry list of things that suggest that she is exactly the girl I’ve always been looking for. So my initial attraction to her was anything but superficial. I saw all of this. I just didn’t know that I was seeing it.
So perhaps when I see Charly, and I feel like she is the perfect prototype of attractiveness to me, maybe there is more to that than I think. Should I see the most physically attractive woman I’ve EVER seen and not say something about it? That would be stupid!
Maybe Charly is different. Maybe that is part of what I’m seeing that makes her so attractive to me. She was a professional wrestler, so that makes her kind of an actress, right? Maybe she is the girl I’ve been looking for and maybe I’m the man she’s been looking for. Who knows, maybe the Scarlett Johansson door closed and another one opened. Or maybe not...
But one of the articles I saw said “Charly Caruso jokes about why she’s still single...”. So I don’t know what’s going on with her name thing, but maybe she’s single and I’m single and she might look up my picture and think I’m attractive, too. Maybe she would like the idea of having a fling with a guy who actually literally thinks she’s the hottest girl on earth. Maybe she would enjoy popping the cherry of a born-again virgin who has eight years of unexpressed sexual desire to let out. It’s the 21st century. There’s nothing wrong with that. Maybe all my life I’ve sabotaged myself by keeping silent about what I want.
So, hey Charly, if you happen to hear about this, and I’m wrong in my presumption that a girl like you would never be interested in a guy like me, get at me on Instagram...I’m sure you’re on there. My ID is michaeldavidmodern. It’s easier for you to write me because I’m sure your DM box fills up like every half-hour and you can’t possibly read them all. But if Scarlett Johansson calls first, you’re out of luck. Unless Scarlett still doesn’t believe in monogamy, in which case maybe she’d let me...
Whatever the case, I will use a cliche from Charly’s work to express where the Linear Championship of Beauty stands as of now. Here is my Mount Rushmore of smoking hot girls: The most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, Scarlett Johansson. The cutest girl I’ve ever seen, Amanda Seyfried. The...I don’t know...the Taylor Swiftiest girl I’ve ever seen, Taylor Swift. And the sexiest girl I’ve ever seen, Charly. But Scarlett Johansson is still THE champion.
As a final note, since it seems an appropriate place to say it, farewell to my favorite boxer of all time, Marvelous Marvin Hagler, who won the middleweight title in 1980, defeated every great middleweight of his era and and was NEVER BEATEN after that. Sugar Ray Leonard, will your ego let you admit you lost NOW?
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