A warm summer’s night, a leafy suburban street in Zagreb, from somewhere overhead from an open window of one of the crumbling Soviet era apartments, if you listen carefully enough, you’ll hear the tuneful musing of the Stone Roses drifting down to the street below. Wait. Zagreb? The Stone Roses? What unstoppable force of nature brings those two together? That’s right. Jimmy is in town. And that tapping you hear to the music is not his gleeful drumming along of his fingers on the coffee table. It’s the tippity tap tap of him writing yet another blog post. That his worldwide readership of 23 will read. At some point. If they can be bothered.
‘Well you ‘aint too young and pretty and you sure as hell can’t sing’. Obvious parallels to me there, but ‘aint too young and pretty ‘aint something these Zagrebnik fuckers know much about. Zagreb is a town full of cheeky, friendly, beautiful women. Just like Manchester…
As most of us have probably experienced, men and women often rate each other in terms of their attractiveness on a scale of 1-10. There is no widely accepted measure to which we conform or adhere in order that our appraisals hold any kind of universal standard. This can result in widely divergent ratings.
I remember a friend of mine at work who used to surprise me with his standards. I had been into pickup a year or so and the Sarge School website was live and I was teaching most weekends. It didn’t take long for the guys at work to take a lot of interest in this and look to playfully ridicule me at ever opportunity. It was a great place to work, banter abounded, we played football. It was like working with friends. I miss those days.
This friend of mine would from time to time see some photo of some skirt I’d ‘dated’ and he’d rate her. I quickly noticed his standards were impressively high. What I considered an 8 he’d sneer at as a 5 maybe a 6. He’d type ‘Victorias Secret Model’ into Google images and quickly explain to me how he thought they were a range of 7s and 8s.
‘Wow!’, I thought. ‘This guy has seriously high standards. He must date only the cream of the crop if he’s dismissing these girls as 7s’.
Indeed, he always talked about the ‘7s and 8s’ he dated in the past, which lead me to believe he dated a succession of women who looked like Victoria’s Secret models. I always wondered where he found them, this endless supply of top drawer women. I was trawling the bars and streets of London with absolute dedication and not managing to find the golden well of beauty this guy was onto. The funny thing was, whenever I asked him what he did at the weekend, he tended to not go out much. He must have just had an amazing magnetism that drew women to him.
A year later I met his wife. I was duly shocked. The guy with the standards of a king, who sneered my girlfriends away as ‘6s’, was married to what appeared to be well in the minus numbers by his standards of physical beauty. I was very impressed with his focus on personality over beauty. To be able to deny himself the golden spring of beauty and choose a warthog demonstrated virtue on an Herculean scale in my eyes.
Nowadays, a quick and easy way for me to pull a figure out of the air is to think ‘If this girl was in a room of 100 randomly selected women, how many women would be hotter than her’. If 100% of the women would be hotter, then she’s a 0. If 0% of the women would be hotter, she’d be a 10.
So for my girl, I’d say she’d be easily in the top 5. That makes her a 9.5.
We had an objective system at RSG that was a bit more long winded, but we loved to pontificate over it and it provided opportunity for banter and because it was based on what other people might reasonably think, it escaped the subjective ‘well she’s a 10 to me’ bullshit. It went thus:
Got Game
10 – Nobody believes you’re actually dating her.
9 – Your reputation precedes you based on the girl you’re dating. ‘My mate Jimmy is coming out later. Do you know him? Man, you should see his girlfriend, she is phenomenal’.
8 – If she were you girlfriend, people would regularly comment on how well you’d done.
Not Game
7 – No fame, no shame. You could marry a 7 with personality.
6 – If she were your girlfriend, people would say you could do better, rather him than me. That type of thing.
5 – You sneak her out of the flat in the morning so your flatmates don’t see.
Lower than 5 and we started to have fun. Stupid things like, she is blackmailing you, you would require drugs to be able to fuck her, you’d happily volunteer to fuck a donkey instead, etc.
I always said that game starts at an 8. If you’re pulling 7s, it isn’t game. Sure you get the odd 7, I’ve dated quite a few really sweet girls who I’d consider a 7. But game begins, for me, at an 8.
So just for a little fun, I recently I found below composite from Hot or Not which seemingly collates many people’s opinions into a reference point of objective rating. It’s interesting to look at. I don’t think it’s 100% accurate, nothing is. I think the ‘average’ girl at the end is what I would rate as a 5… so possibly accurate. The 9 to 9.4 actually looks like my girlfriend.
(I promise I’ll have some infield footage at some point. I do have some, I’m just being picky. These little cams aren’t reliable. All the best sets seem to film badly, muffled sound, or not catching the girls enough. I’ve got a couple of decent clips to put out at some point though)
