Omar’s comment over at Videogamey last night reminded me of an old game we used to play, in real life and then on my now-largely-abandoned discussion forums:  Junk Food Girls.

Junk Food Girls is sort of like Death Is Not An Option, Team-Changer or Marry/Fuck/Kill, in that it’s a game that involves difficult confessions and brutal recrimination, and it gets more fun when everyone’s had a lot to drink.  The rules are very simple:

  1. One person throws out the name of a potential Junk Food Girl
  2. The group, in turn, agrees or disagrees with the nominee (thereby admitting their own attraction)
  3. If the Junk Food Girl gets the majority of votes, those in the minority drink; if the Junk Food Girl is voted down, the nominator and supporters must drink.

No game of Junk Food Girls ever goes past about three turns before it breaks down into lively debate and heavy drinking; however, the opening rounds are still recommended, as few things lubricate these kinds of admissions more than a few ounces of hearty booze.

At the heart of Junk Food Girls is a simple equation, but one that requires the player to weigh their heart carefully.  On the one side is raw attraction at a base level; on the other is sickening shame and compromised dignity.  When evaluating who your Junk Food Girls are, you must calculate along these lines:

Sexiness - Shame Factor = Want To Get It On Anyway

  • When the WTGIOA is greater than zero — that is, when sexiness still outweighs the drawbacks — then you’ve got yourself a Junk Food Girl.
  • When the WTGIOA is less than zero — that is, when you just can’t bring yourself to be attracted to someone — then the nominee is rejected.
  • Finally, where the Shame Factor is a negative — that is, when there is positive social value to a nominee (such as, say, Rachel Weisz) rather than crippling drawbacks (such as those emanating from, say, Paris Hilton) — then you have a Crush.

Junk Food Girl sounds pejorative, but it isn’t meant to imply the individual in question is trash; rather, they represent the same kind of guilty, unhealthy, furtive appeal that junk food does.  They are to sex what Kentucky Fried Chicken is to your waistline — unhealthy, penalizing, but irresistibly compelling.

When Omar admitted that he “might have a crush” on the catastrophically bone-headed Ann Curry, Today Show co-host and overall dipshit, I realized how hard a habit this was to break.  I immediately wanted to jump in and correct him: crushes are sex appeal plus other goodness!  Junk Food Girls are sex appeal despite badness like idiocy and shitty reporting! 

Consider:

Ann Curry

Pros: 

  • Dutch-Irish-French-Japanese ancestry, combined to good effect
  • News broadcaster smile
  • Sat pretty close to Angelina Jolie one time.
  • Can really wear the shit out of a low-cut business suit
  • Let’s just admit it:  Pretty hot.  You’d stare at her in a grocery store, c’mon.

Cons:

  • Vapid.
  • Seriously, inane even for a morning show reporter.
  • 300,000 results in Google for the query, “Ann Curry hate“
  • Oh my god she’s annoying.

Final verdict:

It could be that Ann Curry has some kind of Secret Hotness reserve that I haven’t seen.  But as it stands, she has that pleasant exterior that you might notice on someone who rides the same bus route you do, who is appealing right up until you have to listen to her on her phone for five minutes.  And then you want the bus to crash, just to … just to make her stop.

Rejected.

It’s just that easy!  Naturally, Junk Food Girls can as easily be applied to men, though it is less common — women find other things to discuss in graphic detail when they’re drinking, I’m scornfully told.  All the same, as we head into the holidays and with bountiful liquor soon to be flowing into the cups of the merry, there are few ways to better break the ice and really expose (and ridicule/join in on) the guilty pleasures of your friends and family.

So!  Whose turn is it next?