The Binary Amendment

Fifth Year Senior12 years ago

As fraternity gentlemen, we meet a lot of women. Lots and lots and lots of women, actually. While we can rarely remember their names, and often never cared to ask in the first place, it’s still of paramount importance to rate their physical appearance. Sure, they’ve supposedly got personalities too, but last time I checked, I can’t motorboat a personality.

Feminists can claim that numeric systems for ranking female attractiveness are offensive, but feminists are offensive to America, so I guess we can agree to disagree. It’s not like we let wooly-legged granola heads into our parties anyways. Besides, I’m pretty sure they all live with Nancy Pelosi in California’s organic lesbian communes, or something.

The most common scale is a 1-10 scale. While a 1-100 system would probably be more accurate, it would also be way more complicated. What exactly distinguishes an 83 from an 86? I don’t even know, and I’m pretty damn hopped up on Adderall right now. If my brain on full turbo can’t figure out the rubric for a 100-point system, the average drunk doesn’t have a chance. 1-10 is just simpler. If you really need added distinction, you can always use qualifiers like “hard” and “soft,” as in, “She’s a hard 9, but her sister is only a soft 8.”

“Watching that girl’s arm fat jiggle makes me softer than the Snuggle bear…she’s maybe a 3 at best,” while probably accurate, is not exactly the qualifier I’m talking about here.

The biggest problem with this system is that nobody has the same scoring rules, which makes comparison more useless than a third nipple. To some, all women have at least one flaw, which means a 10 will never exist. To others, a 10 means “I’d hit it harder than John Henry trying to beat the steam-hammer.” Others are absolute 10-sluts and will give one out to any girl willing to give them an OTPHJ, never mind the hook nose and clown makeup.

Also, what do you do with 5’s? Have you ever seen a girl who is neither attractive nor unattractive in any way? Even the girls you would consider plain are usually either 4’s or 6’s. Thirdly, do 0’s even exist? After all, shouldn’t a girl at least get credit for having functional lady parts, even if you wouldn’t touch her with somebody else’s thirty-nine-and-one-half foot pole?

In response to the confusing and arbitrary nature of the 1-10 scale, many gentlemen have migrated to a much simpler system: the binary system. For those of you too busy elephant walking for the last couple years to figure it out, if you would hit it, she gets a 1. If you would not hit it, she gets a 0. As you can see, there are a lot of advantages to the new system, namely efficiency. On the 10-point scale, you’re not going to waste your time with a 4 or a 2, so why bother making a distinction? All that really matters is if she’s pretty enough, right?

The thing is, you and I both know that “pretty enough” varies widely depending on how late it is and how high your BAC is. Anyone who insists that his standards don’t drop after a fifth of Woodford is a lying liar who’s probably from Canada. What we need is a system that is slightly more nuanced than the binary system but without the arbitrary nature of a 10-point system.

A 3-point, 0-2 scale does exactly that. 0 still means you wouldn’t hit it, but a 2 is now the designation given to a sorostitute that sober you finds attractive enough. 1’s are reserved for the girls you’d nail while drunk, but wouldn’t brag to your brothers about. To put it another way, it’s the “Quit it, Hit it, or Hit it and Admit it” system.

That’s right. It even rhymes. Suck on that.