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For the last six days, I've been on holiday at my family's beach house. Fortunately, the weather has been excellent so I've been able to spend the time outside, hopefully soaking in some vitamin D and generally enjoying the holiday period. This has been a huge relief, because I am by nature a city dweller, and I start to go a bit nuts when I find myself in remote (i.e. 1 hour north of AKL) places like Omaha. This is particularly the case when the weather is bad, because fine weather is pretty much a condition precedent to a beach holiday. However, many times have my parents driven me up to Omaha to stay there for weeks in the rain, with nothing to do. Accordingly, we now have quite a large collection of magazines to get us through rain at the beach. I always thought it would be easier just to drive home. My parents disagreed.

A few days ago, as I was lazily eating my breakfast, I started to flick through an old Hello! magazine, from when Prince William first started dating Kate Middleton (I am not quite sure why I am so keen on all these royal family stories; perhaps it is as they say that girls secretly want to be princesses). The article basically detailed all her background, as told by a 'close friend'. It painted one of those classic and almost cliche stories of the girl who was ignored all through school then went on to befriend a prince at university. Charming. The bit that interested me was that apparently when she was in high school, there was a practice in place whereby the boys of the school would rank the attractiveness of the girls from one to ten, and tell them. Kate was a seven.

This then brought back a high school memory of my own. At Dio, at the end of fifth form, it was quite common for quite a lot of girls (typically the very bright ones, or the ones whose parents wanted them to marry into a rich family) to leave the school and go to King's, another of the country's top schools. King's College is a private boys' school from years 9-11, and then there are boys and girls for years 12 and 13. As it happened, a lot of my Advanced Maths class was leaving to go to King's, and those who were leaving talked incessantly about King's from as soon as they found out that they had been accepted, until the end of the year. Anyway, someone had heard that King's College too had the practice where the boys rated the girls according to their appearance. Immediately, many of the prospective King's girls laughed it off, and one began a lengthly speech essentially about how women shouldn't see themselves as objects to men, and somehow linked this in with the ranking system. I wasn't fooled. I could feel it. Panic was in the air.

I never did find out whether my friends were rated. In fact, I never really thought about it again for a while. However, last year I was in the car with two of my male friends, who were rating seemingly all the girls in our year of Law. I probed them for more information on the rating system. Apparently, the 'marks' that the girls receive go from one (ugly) to ten (beautiful), and obey a skewed bell curve distribution. The mean is seven (because apparently at our age most females are in the prime of their lives) and you can't give out fractions.

I went home and pondered the information I had just been given. The conclusion that I came to, however, is that despite how seriously my two friends were taking their rating system, it simply fails to provide any useful information. If the distribution of female attractiveness is really bell shaped, meaning that a perfect ten is extremely rare. However, most men are married, and to women who I'd say are objectively less than tens. So, giving a girl a rating out of ten is useless, because the ratings are not given relative to the score at which that the man would 'settle'. For example, saying 'that girl is a seven' is unhelpful unless you add 'but I'd be happy with an eight'. The whole dilemma is further confounded by the (scandalous!) fact that some women's personalities add to or detract from their overall attractiveness. The interpretation of the figure is just too uncertain.

It's also unnecessary. Attraction is binary. Yes or no. 0 or 1.