In my last post, Romantic Architecture, I discussed the fairly common “1-10 scale” that is used to rate a woman’s attractiveness. Lovelyleblanc7 left a comment in that thread, and I found this part particularly interesting:

But I realized this though, it is very hard for most women to figure out an honest answer of how attractive they are, especially if a lot of her peers are female or men who are afraid of being truthful. So, even though women can be picky, we think the men we desire are on our league, so to most women, it would be assortative mating.

As a man, I never gave serious thought to how women would rate themselves and each other. Part of me assumed that women could at least get a rough estimate. But after having read some comments and e-mails, and talking with some women I know, it seems that this isn’t the case at all. Apparently they are quite poor at rating their own attractiveness.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, really, but it did. And I don’t have a good excuse for it. How many posts and threads in the manosphere have discussed how women have completely unrealistic expectations these days? Hundreds at least. While the toxic hypergamy which infects the water supply in the West might be the cause of some of this, it can only work with what is already present. So it should have been obvious to me that women aren’t able, in most cases, to accurately place their own SMV value (which is what the 1-10 scale essentially represents).

One example of such a post is Sunshine Mary’s thread on assortive mating, which provided a set of possible reasons why women find men marriageable:

1. Due to their modern arrogance, they don’t find the men who are truly their assortive mating equivalents attractive now. 2. Many modern men are less attractive as husbands because, perceiving that they may not ever be able to marry a decent woman in our modern femininistic society, the men have lost the motivation to strive to do those things which make them attractive to women (improving their looks, athleticism, money, power, and status). 3. Feminism has given women a false sense of equality with men, making women believe that they don’t really need a husband; women don’t feel pressure to marry or stay married to less attractive men.

That first factor alone should have clued me in. While arrogance no doubt plays a part in it, there is probably something else as well- older women are no longer providing the kind of helpful advice that younger women desperately need. And part of that advice was probably telling those young women just what they were worth (as in, what kind of man they could ensnare… err, I mean marry). Maybe this didn’t translate into discerning a woman’s “number”, but it did give women an idea of what to shoot for. This advice is essentially gone now. So women are running wild, completely unaware of their SMV value (which is heavily determinative of their MMV).

All of this prompts me to ask this question:

Should a single woman looking to marry strive to find out her respective attractiveness on the 1-10 scale, in order to calibrate her relationship efforts towards men with whom she is roughly matched?

While I hope that my readers will provide their own answers, I have a few additional thoughts and answers related to this:

First off, a woman knowing her SMV value doesn’t necessarily help her direct her attention towards an equivalent male because, as I noted in the last post, discerning male SMV/MMV is rather difficult.

Second off, it isn’t necessarily easy for a woman to find out her “number.” It pretty much requires a brutally honest man whom she can trust to tell her the truth, and who is capable of analyzing her attractiveness in an objective manner. And even then she should get a number of opinions on this to average out the inevitable bias. If her view of her SMV is inaccurate, it could severely impair her efforts to find a mate. I know of at least one blogger who was the unfortunate recipient of a false report on her SMV, which caused her no small amount of distress for a long time.

My third and final thought is that assortive mating isn’t an exact science, either. There is a large subjective aspect to SMV and MMV, and that means a woman who thinks she is a 6 might erect an unnecessary ceiling of men she doesn’t consider for marriage, unaware that some men might rate her MMV higher than others.

And that wraps up this post. I encourage everyone to brutally rip apart my idea in the comments.