As anyone who has ever met me knows very well, I love getting into arguments with people. Although by nature I seek compromise as opposed to confrontation, there a few social and political issues I feel sufficiently passionate about to pro-actively talk about. Feminism is of course one of them, but even that is such a huge area, and I don’t always agree with some feminists. One specific issue I often get into with feminists is the whole “ranking girls” deal. You know, that whole “she is a total 8” and “gross! she is so a 4”. It tends to piss women off quite a lot (mainly the ones below a 6) and many feminists love to rage about how sexist and objectifiying it is as a practice. I contend that on the contrary it should be embraced as a practice by all genders.

The ranking system is a way for people (notice I didn’t just say guys because, you know, girls totally do the same thing albeit with different parameters) to express to each other just how attractive they find someone else to be. Typically relying on a 1 to 10 scale, one number can hardly be considered precisely indicative of attractiveness, but it still does the trick for the most part.

Before going forward, it’s important to note that attractiveness and beauty, although similar in many ways, are NOT the same thing. Beauty is the result of a sensory experience that deeply satisfies our mind. Attractiveness is the result of stimulating experience that generates a force that pulls us towards something. Art is beautiful, and humans can generally agree on most beautiful things this guy says it’s because of evolution yet no one wants to have sex with The Mona Lisa despite the fact that we can all agree it’s a beautiful painting. Attractiveness has more to do with sex, which is why it’s subjective. That’s kind of the point actually. Because the ranking system is entirely subjective it really means very little beyond a personal opinion. After all, as they saying goes, “opinions are just like assholes: everybody’s got one of their own”. Just like other people’s assholes, how you fall on the scale according to some random person is nothing to obsess over. Yet, this often brings women of all ages quite a lot of pain: that’s the real issue!!!

I don’t know about you, but I don’t think physical attractiveness is all there is to a woman or a man, which is why it’s perfectly fine to assess that on a scale. If you are an 8, you should not start being rude to others because attractiveness is just one of many, many aspects to the human experience. If you are a 4, it’s not the end of the world either because there are many other and more important things you got going for you. The numbers we will start putting on the attractiveness of women and men are thus entirely subjective, and someone’s 4 is probably someone else’s 8 (Ex. I find Kim Kardashian to be a 5 at best, most people disagree with me). On the contrary, it not only be untrue to utter phrases such as “everyone is beautiful” and “attractiveness doesn’t matter”, but it’s flat out unfair to truly beautiful people as well as oppressive to every single person that has ever found anyone else attractive by limiting their freedom of expression.

I know; what I just said just made so much sense, especially under a feminist perspective. Yet very few people approach this entire issue this way because in an effort to fight back against objectification and rhetorical aggression we have somehow forgotten that attractiveness is a real thing, and expressing opinions of any kind in no way carries normative force, since, you know, no individual has the authority to assess one’s attractiveness and declare its objective value to all of us. Thus, instead of trying to silence everyone’s opinion on attractiveness (since silencing discussion rarely works) we should teach everyone to never feel as if attractiveness is the only characteristic that matters to them, and empower ourselves to just not give a flying fuck about the opinions of haters we don’t really care about the end of the day.