In 1826, the Welsh Utopian social reformer Robert Owen devised what’s often credited as the first numbered human rating scale. As part of his crusade to abolish child labour and spread education, he sought a way to determine what fields children would best succeed in. Kids at the various schools he founded and funded were asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 in 10 categories like courage, excitability, and imagination.
This idea of a numbered rating took off decades later with the advent of the field of psychometrics. Francis Galton, the father of psychometrics, developed his own rating scale some time in the 1870s and it was off to the races with rating human beings on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s unclear how long humans were using the 1 to 10 scale to rate people based on their hotness—if I had to guess, probably since the concept was initially devised—but what is known is that the system broke into the wider public consciousness in 1979 with the release of the film 10.
"It’s sad that 10 is the film that opened Pandora’s Box of hot-or-not-ness."
It’s sad that 10 is the film that opened Pandora’s Box of hot-or-not-ness. Watching it recently I admired the wry, melancholic dramedy (even if it had the leadened pacing I associate with the films of Blake Edwards) which has much more in common with The Heartbreak Kid than Girls Gone Wild. It’s an acute send-up of male psychosexual obsession, middle-aged self-loathing, and the tribulations of monogamy. However, the reason we still talk about it today is for a moment that happens a half hour into the film, where the psychiatrist of Dudley Moore’s disaffected songwriter asks him what he would rate the girl he’s obsessing over on a scale of 1 to 10. “Eleven!” Moore replies, which is kind of confusing considering the movie is called 10. But that’s how hot she was, breaking a rating scale that was being codified before our eyes.
If the film has a “moral,” it could be that there is no such thing as a ten. Many, maybe most, audience members did not learn that lesson. In part because the titular ten (or eleven, I guess) was Bo Derek, who became an instant star upon the film’s release. The image of her running along the beach kickstarted her career, inspired countless white women to get ill-advised cornrows, and launched litigation over her perceived perfection. Was Bo really a ten?
One person who said no was her then-husband: actor turned producer-director-promoter John Derek. In a 1980 newspaper piece not-so-subtly titled “Bo Derek’s Husband Thinks She’s Too Fat to Be a Beauty,” John said he sent Bo to the auditions for 10 with the intent of proving she wasn’t a ten, as if he needed proof that his hot young wife was damaged goods in some way. John, it should be noted, was 30 years Bo’s senior and started an affair with her when she was 16. He eventually left his wife for Bo and the two moved to Germany for two years so he wouldn’t be arrested for statutory rape, and then moved back to California where they married. The articles at this time make note that he’s not just her husband but her Svengalii, controlling what she eats, when she’s photographed, and training her to “strip at will.” If there’s anything you need to take away from this piece it’s that John Derek should have been fired into the fucking sun. But I digress.
Obviously, 10 director Blake Edwards and producer Tony Adams disagreed with John Derek’s middling assessment of his wife. But this was in part because Bo was the only woman who auditioned to openly admit that she wasn’t a ten, bemoaning that her ears stuck out and that she had too many scars. This exchange encoded one of the cardinal rules that makes a woman a true ten: Modesty.
Now, the sex symbol is a concept as old as Hollywood—quite literally, it was coined to describe early film stars of the 1910s—as is the practice of mercilessly judging sex symbols. But the introduction of the ten rating scale brought with it an air of scientific legitimacy to the objectification of women, with Derek being patient zero for study. And Bo wasn’t merely having her appearance adjudicated, she had to put up with the label of being actually perfect—a designation that was catnip for women-hating men who were ready and willing to poke holes in it. An excuse for self-styled intellectuals and hack newspapermen to espouse the most insanely hateful shit about women.
A Windsor Star piece from 1983 entitled “Bo Derek: IS She a Ten?” dips its toes in biological pseudoscience with multiple judges bringing up Bo’s imperfect thigh gap. Other demerits mentioned include claims she was “a little wobbly in the knees,” “top-heavy,” “too tall,” and “too squeaky, like a doll you have to inflate… she doesn’t exude any musk.” A yes-or-no poll in the Lakeland Ledger saw 73% of respondents say “yes” to Bo being a ten, though one man made the now oft-seen claim of seeing “women walking down the street every day who look better than her.” Sure pal.
But of course, Bo Derek was Bo Derek. If she could be victim to the slings and arrows of the ten rating scale, then what hope did the average human being have? In an op-ed in the Gates County Index from 1981, one writer comes to defend Bo’s ten-ness, but only at the expense of her perceived lack of smarts. Entitled “10 Reasons Why Brains Are Not Important,” the author admits that while she “doesn’t seem like a total zero upstairs,” ultimately she was “made for the eyes not the ears” and that if she were a genius it would “only distract from the essential message she brings to the world.” Which, to put it in harsher words than the author does, is that she is only meant for ogling and, if you’re lucky, fucking.
But the worst is saved for the poor unfortunate souls who are on the bottom half of the rating scale. The author works his way down what the “intellectual requirements” of each number on the ten scale is. When he gets to the “lowly ones,” he says they: “Should be able to mount convincing arguments as to why the dog catcher should not incarcerate them.” This vitriol, delivered with a noxious mix of collegiate joviality and faux-scientific determinism reminds me of nothing more than the way manosphere influencers discuss women today. Now feels as good a time as any to bring up that our aforementioned buddy Francis Galton wasn’t just the father of the modern human rating scale but also the father of modern eugenics—a torch that right-wing creeps have kept bright and burning all these years.
These days, the ten scale is back in vogue, revived in 2022 thanks to TikTok. For a few weeks the app and others were flooded with the “s/he’s a ten, but…” memes. Lighthearted japes metastasized into something far more insidious. Men’s rights cretins and retvrn freaks have glommed onto the ten rating system as if it were an actual scientific metric, docking and adding decimal points with pinpoint precision. Mounds of flesh circled, facial features painstakingly pored over, the size of bust somehow equated to someone’s proficiency as a mother. It is in these instances of online perniciousness that we can see the eugenic roots of the ten rating system most acutely. The idea that something as absurd as a 10/10 nose could exist, the same way that skull shape determines intelligence levels.
No actress, and the ten-ness radiating from said actress, has driven people online more collectively insane than Sydney Sweeney. A bombshell that feels like such a throwback that certain segments of the right have tried to claim a stake in her for the mere fact that she’s blonde and has big boobs. The discourse around her and the adjudication of her perfection mirrors that of Derek, but torqued for the age of Twitter accounts with Greek statue and anime avatars. Take this (since deleted) viral tweet claiming Sweeney would be a “3/10 not even noticeable on the metro in Russia.” Or the debate over her breasts which, depending on who you ask, are either “not that big” (per Slate) or “harbingers of the death of woke” (per the National Post). Sweeney, admirably, seems both aware and above this. But like Bo Derek, she’s not the one at real risk from this type of thinking.
"I am not chastising anyone who has ever rated someone out of 10. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
I am not chastising anyone who has ever rated someone out of 10. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I have had conversations back in high school and university where my friends and I would crudely rate the girls in our class despite the fact I could hardly look my own body in the mirror over fear of perceiving it. Nor am I saying we should not objectify celebrities in any capacity. It’s instinct for human beings to recognize hot people as hot, and to want to comment on that. The thirst tweet is corny, but it is natural. I just want to consider and reckon with the ten rating scale. The Icarian pursuit of perfection reaching impossible new highs/lows. A potent mix of endless scrolling and heretofore unknown horizons in anatomical reconstruction leading women to get synthetic threads strung through their cheeks and men to looksmaxx until their face is polygonal and their legs are nothing but bone shards and metal.
Watch or read any interview at the time of 10’s release and Bo’s distaste for Hollywood is clear and her uncomfortability with her 10 label is palpable. Clips of old talk shows where she walks out to the couch under a shower of catcalls are numerous. Time and time again she says she doesn’t like Hollywood, doesn’t even like films that much, didn’t like being asked to do nude scenes, and that acting was “never her passion.” She was just thrust into it all as a teenager and stumbled into being the standard-bearer of female perfection. I can’t imagine a more unenviable enviable position. The young Bo would often say all she wanted was to own a ranch and hang out with animals. In a 2020 interview with Variety, here’s how she describes her typical day:
“I am so into a rut and a routine, but normally I’m lucky enough to mix it up with travel. But right now, if I’m home, I wake up, make coffee, feed the horses, feed the dogs, feed myself, go to my computer, work in the garden, swim in the pool for exercise and then feed horses, feed dogs, feed ourselves. John [Corbett, my current husband] and I watch “Jeopardy!” while we eat and then we watch movies all night.”
Sounds like perfection.
In 1826, the Welsh Utopian social reformer Robert Owen devised what’s often credited as the first numbered human rating scale. As part of his crusade to abolish child labour and spread education, he sought a way to determine what fields children would best succeed in. Kids at the various schools he founded and funded were asked to rate themselves on a scale of 1 to 10 in 10 categories like courage, excitability, and imagination.
This idea of a numbered rating took off decades later with the advent of the field of psychometrics. Francis Galton, the father of psychometrics, developed his own rating scale some time in the 1870s and it was off to the races with rating human beings on a scale of 1 to 10. It’s unclear how long humans were using the 1 to 10 scale to rate people based on their hotness—if I had to guess, probably since the concept was initially devised—but what is known is that the system broke into the wider public consciousness in 1979 with the release of the film 10.
"It’s sad that 10 is the film that opened Pandora’s Box of hot-or-not-ness."
It’s sad that 10 is the film that opened Pandora’s Box of hot-or-not-ness. Watching it recently I admired the wry, melancholic dramedy (even if it had the leadened pacing I associate with the films of Blake Edwards) which has much more in common with The Heartbreak Kid than Girls Gone Wild. It’s an acute send-up of male psychosexual obsession, middle-aged self-loathing, and the tribulations of monogamy. However, the reason we still talk about it today is for a moment that happens a half hour into the film, where the psychiatrist of Dudley Moore’s disaffected songwriter asks him what he would rate the girl he’s obsessing over on a scale of 1 to 10. “Eleven!” Moore replies, which is kind of confusing considering the movie is called 10. But that’s how hot she was, breaking a rating scale that was being codified before our eyes.
If the film has a “moral,” it could be that there is no such thing as a ten. Many, maybe most, audience members did not learn that lesson. In part because the titular ten (or eleven, I guess) was Bo Derek, who became an instant star upon the film’s release. The image of her running along the beach kickstarted her career, inspired countless white women to get ill-advised cornrows, and launched litigation over her perceived perfection. Was Bo really a ten?
One person who said no was her then-husband: actor turned producer-director-promoter John Derek. In a 1980 newspaper piece not-so-subtly titled “Bo Derek’s Husband Thinks She’s Too Fat to Be a Beauty,” John said he sent Bo to the auditions for 10 with the intent of proving she wasn’t a ten, as if he needed proof that his hot young wife was damaged goods in some way. John, it should be noted, was 30 years Bo’s senior and started an affair with her when she was 16. He eventually left his wife for Bo and the two moved to Germany for two years so he wouldn’t be arrested for statutory rape, and then moved back to California where they married. The articles at this time make note that he’s not just her husband but her Svengalii, controlling what she eats, when she’s photographed, and training her to “strip at will.” If there’s anything you need to take away from this piece it’s that John Derek should have been fired into the fucking sun. But I digress.
Obviously, 10 director Blake Edwards and producer Tony Adams disagreed with John Derek’s middling assessment of his wife. But this was in part because Bo was the only woman who auditioned to openly admit that she wasn’t a ten, bemoaning that her ears stuck out and that she had too many scars. This exchange encoded one of the cardinal rules that makes a woman a true ten: Modesty.
Now, the sex symbol is a concept as old as Hollywood—quite literally, it was coined to describe early film stars of the 1910s—as is the practice of mercilessly judging sex symbols. But the introduction of the ten rating scale brought with it an air of scientific legitimacy to the objectification of women, with Derek being patient zero for study. And Bo wasn’t merely having her appearance adjudicated, she had to put up with the label of being actually perfect—a designation that was catnip for women-hating men who were ready and willing to poke holes in it. An excuse for self-styled intellectuals and hack newspapermen to espouse the most insanely hateful shit about women.
A Windsor Star piece from 1983 entitled “Bo Derek: IS She a Ten?” dips its toes in biological pseudoscience with multiple judges bringing up Bo’s imperfect thigh gap. Other demerits mentioned include claims she was “a little wobbly in the knees,” “top-heavy,” “too tall,” and “too squeaky, like a doll you have to inflate… she doesn’t exude any musk.” A yes-or-no poll in the Lakeland Ledger saw 73% of respondents say “yes” to Bo being a ten, though one man made the now oft-seen claim of seeing “women walking down the street every day who look better than her.” Sure pal.
But of course, Bo Derek was Bo Derek. If she could be victim to the slings and arrows of the ten rating scale, then what hope did the average human being have? In an op-ed in the Gates County Index from 1981, one writer comes to defend Bo’s ten-ness, but only at the expense of her perceived lack of smarts. Entitled “10 Reasons Why Brains Are Not Important,” the author admits that while she “doesn’t seem like a total zero upstairs,” ultimately she was “made for the eyes not the ears” and that if she were a genius it would “only distract from the essential message she brings to the world.” Which, to put it in harsher words than the author does, is that she is only meant for ogling and, if you’re lucky, fucking.
But the worst is saved for the poor unfortunate souls who are on the bottom half of the rating scale. The author works his way down what the “intellectual requirements” of each number on the ten scale is. When he gets to the “lowly ones,” he says they: “Should be able to mount convincing arguments as to why the dog catcher should not incarcerate them.” This vitriol, delivered with a noxious mix of collegiate joviality and faux-scientific determinism reminds me of nothing more than the way manosphere influencers discuss women today. Now feels as good a time as any to bring up that our aforementioned buddy Francis Galton wasn’t just the father of the modern human rating scale but also the father of modern eugenics—a torch that right-wing creeps have kept bright and burning all these years.
These days, the ten scale is back in vogue, revived in 2022 thanks to TikTok. For a few weeks the app and others were flooded with the “s/he’s a ten, but…” memes. Lighthearted japes metastasized into something far more insidious. Men’s rights cretins and retvrn freaks have glommed onto the ten rating system as if it were an actual scientific metric, docking and adding decimal points with pinpoint precision. Mounds of flesh circled, facial features painstakingly pored over, the size of bust somehow equated to someone’s proficiency as a mother. It is in these instances of online perniciousness that we can see the eugenic roots of the ten rating system most acutely. The idea that something as absurd as a 10/10 nose could exist, the same way that skull shape determines intelligence levels.
No actress, and the ten-ness radiating from said actress, has driven people online more collectively insane than Sydney Sweeney. A bombshell that feels like such a throwback that certain segments of the right have tried to claim a stake in her for the mere fact that she’s blonde and has big boobs. The discourse around her and the adjudication of her perfection mirrors that of Derek, but torqued for the age of Twitter accounts with Greek statue and anime avatars. Take this (since deleted) viral tweet claiming Sweeney would be a “3/10 not even noticeable on the metro in Russia.” Or the debate over her breasts which, depending on who you ask, are either “not that big” (per Slate) or “harbingers of the death of woke” (per the National Post). Sweeney, admirably, seems both aware and above this. But like Bo Derek, she’s not the one at real risk from this type of thinking.
"I am not chastising anyone who has ever rated someone out of 10. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone."
I am not chastising anyone who has ever rated someone out of 10. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. I have had conversations back in high school and university where my friends and I would crudely rate the girls in our class despite the fact I could hardly look my own body in the mirror over fear of perceiving it. Nor am I saying we should not objectify celebrities in any capacity. It’s instinct for human beings to recognize hot people as hot, and to want to comment on that. The thirst tweet is corny, but it is natural. I just want to consider and reckon with the ten rating scale. The Icarian pursuit of perfection reaching impossible new highs/lows. A potent mix of endless scrolling and heretofore unknown horizons in anatomical reconstruction leading women to get synthetic threads strung through their cheeks and men to looksmaxx until their face is polygonal and their legs are nothing but bone shards and metal.
Watch or read any interview at the time of 10’s release and Bo’s distaste for Hollywood is clear and her uncomfortability with her 10 label is palpable. Clips of old talk shows where she walks out to the couch under a shower of catcalls are numerous. Time and time again she says she doesn’t like Hollywood, doesn’t even like films that much, didn’t like being asked to do nude scenes, and that acting was “never her passion.” She was just thrust into it all as a teenager and stumbled into being the standard-bearer of female perfection. I can’t imagine a more unenviable enviable position. The young Bo would often say all she wanted was to own a ranch and hang out with animals. In a 2020 interview with Variety, here’s how she describes her typical day:
“I am so into a rut and a routine, but normally I’m lucky enough to mix it up with travel. But right now, if I’m home, I wake up, make coffee, feed the horses, feed the dogs, feed myself, go to my computer, work in the garden, swim in the pool for exercise and then feed horses, feed dogs, feed ourselves. John [Corbett, my current husband] and I watch “Jeopardy!” while we eat and then we watch movies all night.”
Sounds like perfection.