Love and Dating Essays

bellview--like to laugh?  stick around   

Home | Movie Reviews | Video Roundups | Essays | Game Reviews | Subscribe | Mailbag | About | Search

The Bell-Longer Hottie Scale

10/14/02

Every so often we here at Bellview like to reiterate that feedback IS a good thing, and once again, we’ve come up with another essay that should spark some responses!  Anand, this one’s for you.

---

I’ve written a sizable number of essays in the last couple of years that have referenced the Bell/Longer 9.9 Hottie Scale.  Well, I thought now would be a good time to explain just what the hell this thing is.

History

Charles “Chuck” Longer (the creator of the Random Bellview section appearing at the bottom of all essays) and I lived together for three years, 1998-2001.  Friends during our high school years over our common love of basketball, we lost touch during college and got reacquainted after going to a common friend’s wedding back in the fall of 1997.  Chuck and I are not your typical “dudes”—far from the frat type, Chuck and I regularly had deep conversations about things not only related to bad eating habits and sports and booze, but hip-hop, relationships, society, courteous driving, big closets and the like.

Chuck and I also regularly talked about women.  These conversations led to the formulation of a scale that took into account more than just looks.  Both Chuck and I felt that we had gone out with some very attractive women but sometimes it was those very women that were the most disappointing.  This was odd, especially in the view of our friends, because people get accustomed to thinking that because you are dating somebody ridiculously hot, things must be all good.  We thought that in our case, that hadn’t always been true and set out to design a scale that we could use to rate women while taking every single thing about them into account.

The Scale—Design

First and foremost, Chuck introduced elements to the scale that he had been using for years while back at Penn Shitty Unive...whoops, Penn STATE University.  So, the scale should go from 0.0 to 9.9.  Yes, there should be zeroes, which will be explained later.  Chuck strongly believes in the lack of perfection (I didn’t at first in the case of women, but I have changed), so the high end of the scale should be 9.9.  Attaining a 9.X was an incredible achievement, marked by only a few lucky souls; if you were dating a 9.9 and didn’t propose to this girl at some point in the next 15 minutes, you were playing with fate, cause that girl was “a keeper.”  Luckily, Chuck went ahead and married a 9.9’er, or else I would have had to shoot him myself.

It was important to have fractional points awarded for certain elements, so that is why the scale does not go from 1-10, because there are just too many shades of women to be boxed into ten groups; now, we have 100, and we feel that is enough to broadly generalize all women.  (hehehe)  Also, just looking at a woman in a bar or park or at a basketball game wasn’t enough; you have to at least talk to the person for a few minutes to get some feel for the kind of person she might be.  As much as I love going to Miami for the sights, I admit that most of my judgments there are based on how much clothing the ladies are not wearing; the Hottie Scale is used for dating purposes only, not for random hookups or honest-to-goodness ogling.

The design of the scale, then, was to award a certain number of points right away for looks, then to add or subtract fractional points for a number of elements (below) that can accurately describe the kind of person this girl might be as well.  This is where my part of the formulation was important; this allowed for computation of my college theory “The Trik Factor” (women so careless they forgot the ‘c’), which many of my UVA friends are familiar with since it is in Charlottesville where I fell in love with the word “trik.”  This Factor is essentially a way to track reliability and accountability in women; generally, women that utilize “The Purse Lean”, are bad about returning phone calls or regularly abuse a man’s sense of time are downgraded under the Trik Factor portion of the Scale.

The Scale—Elements

So, Chuck and I started to put this thing to work.  There were a sizable number of regular elements that helped this thing roll...and, like all good science, the genius is in the unpredictability:

Looks:  We always start here.  Generally, women fall somewhere between 3 and 9 (rare) in terms of “basic” looks—hair, skin, features, flab, build.  Chuck and I are both believers that in general, women wear too much makeup, so that negatively affected this number.  Rack size, in proportion to the rest of the body, was also a factor—simply, there is such a thing as too large!  Fashion sense also played into this—women that lay around the house with no makeup and mesh shorts can look just as good as the Ann Taylor types that populate every office building downtown; it’s just a question of time and place.  Also, odds and ends—things like a “girlstache” or that little bit of swinging fat on underdeveloped arms—took points away here.

Sense of humor:  Chuck and I are pretty funny guys.  We can also be pretty silly.  Sense of humor for us meant funny rather than witty.  Our thought was that if laughs don’t come easily for you—whether you are laughing or providing the laughs for us—then you lose points here.

Intelligence:  This one is easy.  This, like sense of humor, tends to take points away more often than not.  However, this is purely smarts, not current-events knowledge...although, if you were to say to me something like “Sniper shootings?  No, I didn’t hear about that”, then...

“That ‘je ne sais quoi’”:  For whatever reason, you have probably dated someone that YOU thought was damned cool...but, NOBODY ELSE YOU KNOW liked at all.  In fact, it is possible that a couple of your closer friends have told you “Hey, man, listen...I really don’t think that girl is for you.”  You don’t see it, but EVERYONE ELSE YOU KNOW does.  But, how about if it is flipped around and EVERYONE YOU KNOW likes this girl?  This is the kind of girl that your parents ask about upon meeting her; in fact, they might be more concerned with her well-being than yours.  This category tends to add a lot of fractional points, because “everyone likes that girl” and therefore, you seem cooler by having her around.  Not to sound cocky, but I know that I have this quality, as does Chuck.  If you have this quality, you probably make friends very easily, get set up on blind dates often and have friends who buy you plane tickets.  People like having you around, probably because you are a pretty good, decent human being.  No one can explain this personality trait, but almost everyone can tell if you have it.

Open-minded:  It was our humble opinion that the coolest girls are willing to try new things of any kind at any time.  This category could go either way; women that liked to stick to their friends in already-established circles while keeping the same routine all the time (i.e., the girls from “Sex and the City”) lost points, but those who had routines but room for flexibility gained points.  (For example, negative points were awarded here for girls that “don’t like surprises”; so if you say “Hey Jane, do you want to go out to get Mediterranean?” and she says “Ugh, I so don’t do Mediterranean” and you say “Have you ever HAD Mediterranean?” and she says “No, but I just know I wouldn’t like it!” then you need to dump that hag like a day-old newspaper!)

“Direct conflicts”:  All of us have passions.  Mine are movies, writing, bacon, dancing and video games.  If I meet women and they say some shade of “The thing that I hate about movies—kind of like your shitty ‘Bellview’ essays—is that they all feature dance scenes with video-game characters eating pork.  Ugh!”, then I know to walk away.  Major deductions can take place here because direct conflicts mean long-term problems in a relationship; this category has strong ties to the previous category.  (Why people stay with partners with whom they share more than one direct conflict is beyond me.  Maybe that’s why I am single.)

Bad habits:  Chuck and I don’t smoke, so women that smoke (and that try to kiss us with *that* breath) lost points.  Women that, at the age of 27, are still coming home to an hour of prayer over the Porcelain Altar every weekend also lost points—I guess everybody gets blasted every so often, but I stopped hangin’ out with drunks back in college.  This can basically be categorized as “Bourbon Street Babes”—girls so destructive that you don’t want to be around when they REALLY go over the edge.

The Trik Factor:  explained above.  Like the previous two categories, always deducts points.

The Scale in Action Today

Now that I have been using the Scale for a couple of years now, I make assessments quickly and quietly, rarely sharing the Actual Retail Value of a subject’s hottie profile with anyone besides Chuck or my friend Brian “Schmoove” Prenoveau.  As I said before, I have met some zeroes—women that were average-looking but total bitches—and, I have met a few 9.8’s.  It is our opinion that you can only have one 9.9 girl per lifetime, since, well, YOU know.

9.X, though, is rarefied air.  You gotta be pretty good at something, and usually, it is a pretty attractive female that has got all her shit together—great personality, funny, you feel good taking her to your office holiday party, family gatherings or a house party, since everyone is gonna like her.  Her days of laid-out-in-the-alley boozing and twice-a-month crack smoking are over, and she is pretty flexible with learning new things and making new compromises in her life and career. 

And, she ain’t no trik!!

 

Random Bellview Ratings, courtesy of Bell & Longer Community Trust:

• Watching the 49ers beat the worst team in the NFL, the Washington Redskins:  Opening Weekend (protest registered by C. Longer)

• Not sweating out the rent check:  $9.00 Show

• Starting up your own business...renting out cages for dance parties:  Matinee

• That new voice mail voice on Sprint’s cell phone system:  Rental

• The Emmy winner for Best Comedy—“Friends”???:  Hard Vice

 

justin@bellviewmovies.com