Chapter 5
Sex Rank
Pick a Number From 1-10…
Sex Rank is a somewhat harsh way of looking at the world, but ultimately it is an honest one. Based on how sexy they are, everyone can be loosely assessed as having a number from 1 to 10 and that number is called their Sex Rank. Just admit it, we’ve all done it, looked at a woman and had a number pop into our head. She’s a 7, a 9, a 4… whatever. When a man rates a woman, he’s focusing a good deal on physical beauty as a primary factor in her sexual attractiveness.
Women of course do exactly the same thing to men, but when they do it, while physical beauty is a factor, it is much less of a factor to women than men. Women find wealth, social status and more (the whole range of Alpha and Beta Male traits) appealing and sexy. So women can also mentally rank men on a 1to 10 scale of sexiness as well.
Sex Rank is best viewed as a metaphor; it's hard to nail down exactly what is a male 6 vs. a male 7 for example. We could possibly come up with a chart and point system for everything to map out what exactly makes up every level of Sex Rank, but then we'd all just get into a big fight about the chart, disagreeing over the fine points. Some people find different things sexier than others. What makes someone a 6 or a 7 is essentially instinctive knowledge built into your own Body Agenda.
Both men and women rank each other continually and for the most part without conscious thought. In this way men are engaged in a constant battle for their place in the pecking order with each other. There’s only so much room to be a 10, only so much space to be a 9… and so on down the ladder. Also women are in constant competition with other women to be the most appealing. Women may wear makeup to be attractive to men, but primarily to be more attractive to men than other women are. It’s about staking a claim higher up the Sex Rank ladder.
In a monogamous society, people of equal Sex Rank will tend to pair off with each other. 10s will couple with 10s, 9s with 9s, and 8s with 8s… all the way to 1s with 1s. Basically an 8 won’t settle for a 7, and a 7 won’t settle for a 6, so a male 7 and a female 7 will just meet each other and feel a surge of mutual interest and pair off.
Finding a female’s Sex Rank is fairly easy. You just hold up her photo and ask a bunch of guys how hot she looks. While women clearly have more value than just beauty, female Sex Rank is very heavily weighted towards physical beauty. The interest men have in the physical attractiveness of women is often chided as being “shallow”, but in reality this interest is of critical importance. The male Body Agenda is constantly looking for a healthy woman with good genes and the ability to successfully bear and nurture their child.
Women have to take more factors into consideration when assigning Sex Rank to a man, as men are more complex to rate with wealth, power, appearance, social status, physicality, aggression and language skills all being factors toward their final Sex Rank. Yet I'm sure as soon as you meet someone you can probably mentally peg them as a number, or at least "less hot than me", "as hot as me", "hotter than me", which is ultimately the point.
Divergent Sex Ranks Lead To Relationship Failure
For both genders, the sexual competition to be at the top of the pecking order never stops. A woman who was an 8 at age twenty-three when she married, but then packs on the pounds, smokes, drinks and generally ages very badly may turn into a worn out 3 by age forty. A women who was a 4 at age twenty-three may lose some weight, get her teeth fixed, dress better, exercise consistently and advance a career, and turn into a solid 5 by age forty. It’s all about your sexiness relative to the average sexiness of your gender regardless of your age. In terms of raw sex appeal, it takes a beautiful forty-year-old woman to match a quite plain twenty-year-old woman. If the Sex Rank within a couple starts to diverge, then stress is placed on the couple. Consider what would happen if two 6s marry and the woman becomes health focused and dresses to impress consistently, and blossoms into a 7. At the same time her husband starts as a 6 and then struggles to work and turns into a couch potato, hits 350 pounds and falls to a 2. What was a balanced male 6 to female 6 relationship is now a badly imbalanced male 2 to female 7 relationship. No one is going to be surprised when the woman falls for another man that is a 7 and leaves her husband without much fanfare.
As a critical point - the more divergent the Sex Rank, the greater the relationship stress. A male 5 with a female 6 relationship may be an "imperfect marriage” but can survive if the couple has a strong moral basis. A male 4 with a female 6 marriage is likely to just fold, or be only tolerable to the wife if she has affairs on the side. A male 3 with a female 6 relationship is doomed, as other men will brazenly approach the wife for a relationship knowing they are far more attractive than the husband.
One of the classic examples of divergent Sex Rank leading to relationship failure is when a wife suddenly starts aggressively working out and makes serious progress towards weight loss. As the weight loss is progressing the husband is usually excited...
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