DaveChung.com – A Guy’s Blog From Girl World

Like Bravo, Style Network, and of course, Lifetime, E! is one of those channels that isn’t really made for the guys.

With shows like The Girls Next Door (which I’m guessing a lot of guys watch for the boobage), Keeping Up with the Kardashians (Season 2 premieres tonight!), and the celebrity-filled Daily 10, the network is pretty much filled with shows filled with estrogen, other than maybe Snoop Dogg’s Fatherhood, which is pretty awesome.

However, for the guys, E! is incredible at making hottie lists, which are pretty much two hours of pictures of hotties with some commentary and interviews with more hotties. This weekend, E! aired “Byte Me” – 20 Hottest Women of the Web. Though I don’t think there are too many guys adding E! to their favorite channel lists, there’s more than enough eye candy on lists like this to make us slow down while we’re rapidly flipping through channels in the few minutes that we’re not watching things on DVR.

Generally, guys watch one of the few DVR-proof things on TV, professional sports. So it makes it very possible that we’d be channel surfing or just flipping through the guide to see what’s on TV that night or on a Sunday afternoon like today when the “Byte Me” special aired. So just in case some guys are doing this, E! puts together these glorious features filled with pictures that would make any guy slow down for a bit before going to the next channel.

For me, I watch CNN’s Election Center and E! News Weekend

every weekend, just so that I can get a dose of both sides of the news world before rolling into the next week. This weekend, E! cleverly put their newest hottie list on right after their news program, making me stay on the channel for a whole extra hour (I didn’t watch the whole thing) after I was done spending time with Ryan, Maria, and the gang.

It’s pretty brilliant and while I don’t think these lists are ever completely right, they’re entertaining! The fact is that you can’t really talk about hotties, sports, or movies in a comprehensive fashion to the extent that it’s going to satisfy everyone. While it was very wrong of E! and Maxim to declare Lindsay Lohan their hottest girl of 2007 in one of these very features, it was very right for them to have Megan Fox hosting the show.

But again, I don’t think these lists are every really supposed to be taken as “fact” when they’re in such subjective categories. They’re kind of just there for fun, to turn pages online, and keep people watching and reading IRL. For those purposes, I think they work and I think E! does a great job with all the lists they put together (breakups, marriages, teen icons, etc. etc.) to help expand their male reach.

While this list was somehow missing Jessica Chobot, it did have a ton of really well known faces of the Internetz that I thought were really intriguing picks, like CNNSI writer and former FSU “Cowgirl” hottie Jenn Sterger.

I thought that was one of their “cool” picks because while Jenn became a Maxim hottie after being pointed out in the crowd during a Florida State football game in the crowd, she made something of herself on the Internetz. Not only does Sterger continue to model, with her Playboy shoot undoubtedly getting the most buzz, but she’s taken her education, good looks, and publicity to make a career out of what was just a few seconds of television fame, though there are a lot of Sterger haters out there who feel cheated by her “luck.” She might not be a household name, but she was truly an Internet sensation.

She wrote for CNNSI for a year, a job that many Internet sports geeks would kill for, along with other sports websites, and gets to speak at different events all around the country as a result of her Internet fame. I think she’s got to be one of the more popular people on Facebook as it said she was getting about 3,000 requests a day, but Sterger made a career that went beyond just being hot, which I think is admirable and impressive.

While I haven’t thought too much about Jenn Sterger for a while, because I hadn’t seen her stuff on CNNSI and it’d been a while since her Maxium photoshoot, I thought it was definitely very “hip” of E! to include her on the list, despite the fact that she doesn’t have as much buzz as she did before.

Another great choice on this list was Lara Croft, not the Angelina Jolie version, but the actual video game version.

When Tomb Raider came out, fanboys all over the Internet became enamored with the athletic, smart, disproportionate brunette with the big’uns (what up, Al Bundy).

People would look for “cracks” for Tomb Raider that would somehow allow them to play “Nude Raider.” I’ve actually never played Tomb Raider, but I remember when all the big gaming sites would have articles talking about Lara’s hotness and people would send in questions about this “Nude Raider” code for their games.

While Lara Croft is not a real person, E! paid tribute to the gaming community big time by including someone other than just some hottie who made it big on Facebook (Sterger), MySpace (ForBiddeN Girl), or YouTube (Obama Girl), or basic HTML way back when the Internet was invented (Cindy Margolis).

There was a lot of diversity on this hottie list and so it actually made it a ton of fun to watch for someone who regularly engages in some nerdage like me. I guess the key to these E! lists is to ask “How this list is going to be different than others?” For “Byte Me,” E! chose a lot of people for the list that wouldn’t necessarily make their other hottie lists that might not have been household names, but they were often faces or things that were familiar to male viewers.

My only disappointment with the special is that due to the name of the feature and the content, I’m kind of surprised that E! Online hasn’t turned this into a huge online feature with a widget that we could take with us, much like AskMen did with the Top 99 Women feature. It seems like a missed opportunity?

But overall, to me, as a male viewer “Byte Me” was a success!

The list included

Cindy Margolis

Jenn Sterger

Girls of the Lingerie Bowl

Lara Croft

Jennifer Nicole Lee

Layla Kayleigh

The Olly Girls

Candice Michelle

Somaya Reece

Trashy Lingerie Girls

Melyssa Ford

Olivia Munn

Dita Von Teese

ForBiddeN Girl (Christine Dolce)

Maxim Hometown Hotties

Vida Guerra

Playboy Cyber Girls

Obama Girl

Tila Tequila

Suicide Girls

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