Dime pieces

I Skyped with my son yesterday. He had read the post from Saturday morning about how women with blonde hair and big boobs are consistently overrated, so we got onto the subject of rating women.

He said that nothing made him sicker than hearing guys describe girls as "tens" when in fact they're only eights or nines. To prove his point, he asked me how many tens I had known; I was only able to list five or six. I was hesitant to tell him that I had thought his mother had been among them, knowing how he would react, but then went ahead and said it anyway, just to annoy him.

He rewarded me with the expected groan of disgust (no son ever sees his mother in those terms).

I asked him how many tens he'd known. He said he'd only known one, and had maybe seen two or three others. He repeated that it sickened him to hear guys throw that ranking around so freely. I told him he seemed to be taking this awfully seriously, as if these guys had somehow committed a horrible sacrilege. I added that he reminded me of nothing so much as a Muslim who'd just heard Mohammed insulted.

He replied that from now on he was going to declare a fatwa against guys who threw the term "dime piece" (meaning, a ten) around too freely.

I mentioned a woman I had once dated when I was single whom I thought might have been a ten (he had seen her photo). He said, no, she was a hard nine, but not a ten. I pointed out that this woman had driven me absolutely crazy when I had first met her.

My son said that you could want to go to bed with a nine just as much as you might with a ten, or possibly even more, since there was something so breathtaking about a ten that the feeling you got was more one of awe than of lust.

I thought of the woman in the photo and asked, "Can a girl be a ten if she's not that smart?"

My son replied, "No, because if she was really a ten, you'd have no idea whether she was dumb or not."

I thought about that for a moment and admitted that he was right, since everything that comes out of a ten's mouth, no matter how stupid, sounds like magic.

I recounted a conversation I'd had with his uncle about forty years ago. I'd been talking about a girl I'd had an insane (unrequited) crush on in high school, and his uncle had asked me, "How long did it take, from the moment you first saw her, before you were completely smitten?" I had never been asked this question before, so had to think about it. I then replied, "Honestly? Around ten or fifteen seconds." (Never let it be said I'm not superficial.)

His uncle had cackled with delight (in obvious agreement about the timing).

My son said, "That sounds about right. It's not one or two seconds, and it's not like it takes a whole minute, either. You look at her once, then look back, and then look back again, sort of in disbelief. And by that point you're like, 'I can't believe a face can look that good'."

To shift gears, I asked my son how he would rate himself. He shrugged and replied, "Around an eight and a half."

I said, "That sounds about right, because I'm an 8.6 or an 8.7."

He laughed, "Dad, if I'm an eight and a half, you're about a four and a quarter."

The thing is, I actually agree with him. (Not about my rating, but about the concept of a ten.) A ten represents perfection, or a type of beauty so extraordinary that it's even better than (bland) perfection. By definition, none of us can have known any more than five or six of them in our lives.

I suppose you could argue that with a ten point ranking system, each number should represent roughly ten percent of the population. But that would take all the romance out of the concept of a ten.

The distribution of looks is probably better represented by a fairly steep bell curve, with the vast majority of the population falling into the three to seven range.

When I told my son that this discussion proved that he was in fact a romantic at heart, he reminded me that he was the one who had gone to the local bookstore and taken the Marquis de Sade books out of the adult section and put them in the "Teen Paranormal Romance" section (where they keep the Twilight books). 

He chortled, "Can you imagine a teenage girl picking up Justine and saying, 'I like that name, this sounds like a nice book, I think I'll get it'."

I suggested to my son that he was struggling to come to grips with who he really is: a romantic, or a cynical practical joker. 

He replied brusquely that the two don't conflict, and there was no reason he couldn't be both. 

He's probably right.