Isn't this a bit counter-productive?

You say it's terrible to rank women in this manner, because it holds up an impossible standard against which they have to measure themselves. Well fair enough; but your response is just to shift the standard from looks to being sufficiently talented to engaging in successful progressive acivism.

All your doing is trying to shift the goal posts so that instead of ugly people feeling crap about themselves people without your smattering of Masters degrees and motivation feel crap about themselves. I'm not sure that solves the core problem.

Congratulations on your article Jessica.

I was going to make a submission to the Real Hot 100, but the time has ended. Instead I'll just post the name of the person here.

Brooke Broderick aka Brookers, is a 20 year old director of videos and video logs which she puts together on her home computer herself. Her most popular video, a spoof of the 2005 fad Numa Numa, was seen by more than 1,000,000 people, making her the top subscribed female director on the popular website YouTube. 2 days ago she announced a contract with Carson Daly on MTV2 and will be leaving the site.

YouTube is a popular hit among todays generation of young people. It is the next MySpace and the biggest beneficiary of the Internet's move to broadband and visual media. This will allow millions of people to become video producers and directors and amateur comedians and performers... and put themselves out there.

As a frequent visitor to the site, I can say that many of the popular women on the site simply use a hot body to market themselves and turn their videos into almost a softcore porn. The surest way for a woman to gain popularity on there is to put on skimpy clothes, layers of makeup and dance around. Brooke is popular, not because she makes a whore out of herself, but because her videos are funny, entertaining, and extremely clever. They have entertained me and made me laugh a lot.

She has also inspired many others to pursue video directing or video blogging, as can be seen by the massive amount of feedback she has received. Now that she is going on to bigger things, she will no longer be doing her own work and will be working with a TV production company. Still, I think her success sets an example of a young woman taking the initiative to so something wonderful and inspire others to follow.

I'm not affiliated with her in any way. But you can watch her videos here(be warned though, her videos are extremely silly)

http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=Brookers

Nik, you can't get rid of the concept of role models. People will reinvent them. If you're going to have role models, you might as well have ones that encourage women to actually acquire those skills or contribute to helping the world, rather than just looking like a showpiece.

I think this is, in fact, a definite improvement. The list itself isn't comprised of academics, either. You don't need a master's degree to do something useful for your community.

So, err. Before this completely falls off the front page.

Bob Hayes, a righty has some questions for you ladies which are actually coherent and pertinent.

Firstly, the list seems to be restricted to women doing the kind of work that lefties would approve of-- not just women doing any kind of socially relevant work which is having an impact. So it's not, say, the equivalent of what TIME's Person of the Year used to be ("for better or worse")-- the kind of thing where an Ayatollah Khomenei might make the list just because they had an impact, even though their politics were detested. This list is purely "for better". (Of course, the Time list was never totally objective either). Do you think that this imposes any sort of limitation in the range of appeal of the RH100, and what are the advantages to this sacrifice?

Secondly, Bob suspects that physical appearance did play a role in selecting the nominees for the RH100; were you looking for women that were attractive in both senses? And why restrict the list to young women? Why aren't there more older or foreign women on the list?

These are his questions.

Hello,

just thought you'd like to know that you guardian article must have made a difference. Here is a story (not too interesting) which is followed by comments where the RH100 is mentioned as a really positive contribution...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/gender/story/0,,1792626,00.html