Let’s face it – women love, love, love famous men. Primarily rock stars and movie actors, but no one famous is entirely off the hormonal radar. Sports stars, obviously, but also the occasional news anchor, sexy author (think Hemingway, not Dan Brown), painter, politician, or prince.

Why?

This is an easy one – because first of all, most of them are also hot, hot, hot – but secondly, we don’t know them and we probably never will. They are, in the end, safe repositories of all our hopes and dreams about men. The men we meet are invariably not rock-star good-looking or worldly. They leave their towels on the bathroom floor and check out other women at dinner. We know that 75% of them will probably cheat on us at least once in our lifetimes, and with modern society coupled with internet access, that number probably goes up in both directions.

The real trouble is that we modern, relatively youngish, women were all raised in a cyclone of media hype. There were the Brat Pack – I still drool over Rob Lowe, admittedly, skanky video tape aside, a myriad of teen stars – my friend still has fantasies about Michael J. Fox a mere 20 years later, a plethora of hot pop/rock stars to choose from – my preference was, of course, for John Taylor of Duran Duran. (I still maintain that he was one of the hottest men to walk the planet, again, 20 years on.)

The point is, however, that no one was immune to this kind of media influx. It inevitably colored how we saw the world, including ourselves. Along with our obsession about the perfect man we’ll never know is our own, long history with body image problems. I don’t know a single women who doesn’t hate a part of her own damn body. For me, it’s my colossally sized ass, but for other women it’s the thighs, the tummy, the floppy arms, the weird-looking feet. And let’s not get started on how we feel about our faces, compared to other faces. I grew up thinking I simply had to look as good as people like Cindy Crawford and Christie Brinkley. If that’s not an impossibility, then I don’t know what is. Still, I buy the makeup and the new shirt, that I just KNOW will make me look cute. Just in case I run into Orlando Bloom on the street, I need to look my best.

I also have never met a woman that didn’t secretly wish her husband was someone else. Brad Pitt, Clive Owen, said John Taylor, Johnny Depp, Sean Connery (the younger version), etc., etc., etc. This, coupled with the stupid “happily ever after” tales, have infected our consciousness and mixed into an indefinable and relentless sense of slight dissatisfaction with real life.

Which is why famous men are so great. You don’t know them so you don’t have to deal with their problems. For instance, John Taylor, for many of the years I obsessed over him, was a cocaine addict and completely out of control. Now, would I have really felt he was not only beautiful and intelligent, funny and witty, great in bed and a perfect mate if I had really ever been with him? Probably not. I would have quickly discovered that this man, like all other human beings, had issues that made it prickly to impossible to be with him in a long-term romantic relationship. But I still like waxing on about the dream of him from time to time.

So let us drool over our respective idols, men, and try to understand that it doesn’t mean we love you any less. It just means that we, too, like to get our hearts and nether regions racing about other partners from time to time. And unlike you, we choose people that it’s practically impossible to find ourselves in bed with, so go figure.