By Judy Mcguire

Like Sex done right, the best crushes always make you feel a little tainted; a little bit wrong in a very right way. Unrequited love for the usual suspects—bartenders, rock stars and nuns—don’t count; those are no-brainers. The kind I’m talking about makes the owner feel like there might be something very wrong with them. Friends would argue that most of my fixations are depraved or sick in some manner (nobody—but nobody—understands my yen for Richard Belzer), but what I’m talking about goes way beyond a predilection for big noses and acne scars.

When my friend Julie emailed me a photo of captured Chief Warrant Officer Ron Young a few weeks back, we were both all a-quiver, salivating over his likeness, all roughed-up and frightened. We dug up every fact we could—he’s a Mormon! He has a baby but, scandalously, no wife!

As we both quickly found out, perving on a prisoner of war doesn’t exactly endear one to friends and neighbors.

Now that he’s been freed from his Iraqi imprisonment, I feel heaps less guilty about my prurience. Watching him saunter out of confinement in those fetching blue stripey prisoner pajamas, all scruffy and gaunt… I still want to touch him with my tongue, but it’s not the same. Because he’s safe and sound, suddenly it’s okay to admit I want to play Prison Bitch with him. And, not coincidentally, suddenly the idea isn’t quite as exciting,

Julie comes from a long line of women who love inappropriate men, so this was nothing new for her.

"My mom used to have a huge crush on Libyan dictator Moammar Qadaffi," she revealed matter of factly. "She was going through menopause at the time, and when the news would come on she’d have a hot flash and start talking excitedly about Moammar’s virility. It was very, very disturbing—and not just for geopolitical reasons."

Proving herself every bit her mother’s daughter, among the men Julie has found attractive: puffy, looks-challenged actor Oliver Platt; executed Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh; and Osama bin Laden ("the thought of his rough treatment in a cave while his seven wives looked on disdainfully gave me shower-nozzle masturbation material for weeks"). Along those same lines, Marcy, an L.A.-based television producer, recalls a universal "bad" crush: the Ralph Fiennes character, Amon Goeth, in Schindler’s List. She writes (embarrassment evident even via email): "There was something so sexy about the way he held that rifle and picked people off from his roof."

Twisted yes, but undeniably, it’s been Ralphie Boy’s only heat-producing role. Before and since he’s played nothing but pantywaists (exception being The End of the Affair, but barely). Marcy went on to berate herself: "What’s wrong with me? I’ve always been horrified that I could find such a despicable character a hottie."

Nothing like white-girl guilt to moisten the panties.

Childhood memories loom large in the world of the naughty crush. Mark, a Seattle tattooist, confessed, "I’ve always had a thing for Barney Rubble. His submissiveness, along with his ‘little person’ stature, excited the hell out of me. It’s left me with a very dirty attraction to blond dwarves and bodybuilders. If they seem a bit slow-witted, that’s all the better."

Meghan, a 29-year-old editor with a face as sweet as a Keane painting admitted, "I was totally obsessed with Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock. I didn’t know what a turn-on was, but I knew Mr. Spock made me feel funny down there."

My second-most-perverted friend, Emil, mined the depths of 80s new wave for his big secret crush. Being a straight boy, Emil felt it necessary to add the disclaimer, "if I were in prison." Okay, then, if you were in prison, you’d do what? "I’d do Boy George. He’s like a big sofabed." A sofabed with a wiener.

Chris, a normally sane reporter type, has a more "normal" yet somehow even more horrifying musical crush: Jewel. "She’s plump in all the right places, bursting out of her too-tight jeans," he rhapsodized. "And the earthy, windswept, I’m-a-poet-and-I-know-it approach to music is far sexier than a Britney Spears jiggy-fest."

Whereas men have been unapologetically slobbering over teenage girls since time began, the Pam Smarts of the world are still aberrations. Siobhan and her roommate (both in their 30s), heard about a friend’s cute teenage brother who was being abused at home. The two "rescued" him and promptly lost their minds. "We wanted his young flesh," she shrugged. I’d never met her young charge. Why was she holding out, I wondered. "The whole situation quickly got out of control and ended up with broken friendships, and the boy and I getting hit by a truck."

Teenagers are best in theory anyway. Or on the tv. I thought I’d found a suitably scandalous replacement for Officer Young on the WB’s latest crappy teen drama Everwood. Young Ephram is everything I was looking for—tortured, mopey, broody, moody—and best of all, only 15. He’s the dreamiest tv teen since My So Called Life’s Jordan Catalano. Each week I willed Ephram to quit following that dull Amy around and realize that the woman for him is much older and lives by herself in Brooklyn. Note the use of past tense. While reading a feature on the show in the New Yorker [!], all my dreams came a-crashing down. Gregory Smith—the actor who plays Ephram—is nineteen! Where’s the filth in that?

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