Most of us use a scale of 0-10 to describe a person's desirability in the sexual marketplace. But what does the number actually mean? What makes someone a "perfect 10"?
We're going to make a few assumptions and formulate a reasonable model:
To keep things simple, a person's "raw" market value is determined by looks and culture. "Looks" refers to one's physical appearance, while "Culture" describes things like wealth, education, intelligence, mental health, etc. These are both important factors, but it's a safe bet that looks are slightly more important than culture, so we can assign the following weights to these core variables: Physical Appearance=55%, Culture=45%.
Within the Physical Appearance category, there are two sub-components: "Natural" Physical Attractiveness (what we were born with) and Presentation (how we choose to present ourselves). Presentation refers to clothing, grooming, style, and hygiene. Perhaps the more important of these two is Natural Physical Attractiveness, because there's not a lot we can do if someone was born unattractive, so once again we can assign the following weights within the Looks category: Natural=55%, Presentation=45%.
Subjective approximations (0-10) are fine for all of these individual sub-values:
- Natural Attractiveness: For men, height, followed by angular/"chiseled" facial features linked to high testosterone; for women, a cute feminine face, followed by a good body
- Presentation: For both genders: good clothes, hair style, and teeth. Additionally, for men: muscles; for women: make-up, manicure, etc.
- Culture: Job, education, family, stability, mental health
The above is sufficient to arrive at a person's
raw market value. However, this value almost always has to be tweaked further based on age and gender.
For demographic reasons, as explained in this article, a surplus of singles occurs among
younger men and
older women. Demographers have found that a
very young woman's "inflated" market value can be as high as 120% of her "real" value, since there are a lot of men of all ages competing for her; and the same is roughly true for a
much older man, who also has a large pool of women of all ages available to him. While these two demographics experience a boost, the other two (young men and older women) are penalized as a result of this distribution.
Therefore, we make the following assumption:
- A 20-year-old woman's and 50-year-old man's value is
120% of their raw value;
- A 20-year-old man's and 50-year-old woman's value is
80% of their raw value;
- At 35
, both men and women are at exactly
100% of their raw value.
Everyone else is scaled proportionally.
The slope for this age-percent function is (+/-) (4/3)(x-35)) + 100. Once the age factor is accounted for, we can then arrive at the final value for how a person is treated by society in the dating marketplace. Enjoy!
