The Dushku Limit

This is Eliza Dushku:

You may recognize her from the underrated cinematic gem Bring It On (no, I'm not being sarcastic; that movie kicks ass) and the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. You might also recognize her from the list of women you're never going to bang. Why not? Because she's too hot for you. But that's okay; it's nothing to be ashamed of. She's too hot for me, and everyone I know, and probably everyone that you and I have ever met. Eliza Dushku is aspirational. She is past the point where working stiffs, degenerates, and even jet-setting strip club reviewers can expect to ever get with her. She has reached a critical mass of hotness. Which brings me to my next point.

This is Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar:

You're not gonna bang him either. Not because he's too hot for you. Because he's dead. Very dead. Chandrasekhar was a 20th century astrophysicist (1910-1995) who made a number of significant contributions to his field, the most famous of which was calculating a value later named the Chandrasekhar limit. The Chandrasekhar limit is the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf star. A white dwarf star with mass greater than the Chandrasekhar limit will eventually collapse and become a neutron star or black hole.

So the Chandrasekhar limit is the point of no return for white dwarfs; the boundary which, if crossed, means certain gravitational collapse. And it doesn't matter how much you exceed the limit by. One percent too big: gravitational collapse. Five times too big: gravitational collapse. There are only two buckets in which a dwarf can fall: those which are doomed and those which are not.

Right now, you're probably asking yourself: Peter, WTF can Eliza Dushku and Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar possibly have in common, besides their piercing stares and silly sounding last names? Allow me to explain.

A while back, I was at Devil's Point in Portland, and looking around at the women, I was having a hard time adequately quantifying their hotness for my review. They were hot, for sure. Ridiculously hot. Stupidly hot. Shockingly hot. But were they 9s, 9.5s, 10s? And what does it even mean to be a 10? Is it ever fair to give out that score? What if a more attractive group of dancers came along? Would that blow up the whole system?

While struggling with those questions, I had a revelation: It didn't matter that someone might be hotter than these women, because they had already passed the point where relative hotness is relevant. Essentially, they're so beautiful that you aren't allowed to ask for anything more.

(Because I spent much of high school obsessing over the cosmos,) I immediately realized that this was a strip club parallel to the Chandrasekhar limit. Like dwarf stars with a weight beyond the Chandrasekhar limit, these women had reached critical mass and thus, functionally, all belonged to the same class of beauty. And that critical mass, that line, will hereby be referred to as the Dushku Limit.

The Dushku Limit: the point at which a woman is so hot that it doesn't matter that women hotter than her exist.

Why the Dushku Limit?

Because Eliza sits right on that line. She is indisputably stunning, but you could totally hear one of your friends saying something absurd like "She's not really my type." Are you serious, bro?! It's Eliza fucking Dushku! She's absolutely your type. There is no room for debate about her attractiveness.

Also, Dushku Limit rolls off the tongue so beautifully. Dushku Limit. Dushku Limit. It's a wonderful sounding phrase. 

Please feel free to incorporate this term into your every day conversations. Hat tips appreciated, but not required.

You're welcome.