Degrees of Difficulty

I was talking with a group of friends at a high school graduation party over the weekend, and the conversation turned to a problem that guest of honor, Jim, was dealing with. It seems that a very pretty female classmate had approached him earlier in the day with overt romantic intent (she was hitting on him), and Jim had responded with a suitably nuanced response (he stopped short of inviting her to move in - a cold shower may have been involved).

This young woman was wearing a shirt that was cut out to show her entire back - including a string traversing all that flesh and tied in a bow, presumably (and just barely) securing some sort of bra. The problem was that she also had a steady boyfriend. This boyfriend was not present at the party because he happened to be out of town; as I understand it, at some sort of summer camp for future CIA assassins.

Young Jim, being a certified high school graduate, had the wisdom to detect the potential awkwardness, and even possible danger lurking in this situation. Jim's best friend, having apparently cut most of the senior-level classes on self-preservation, did not. So for the rest of the party we watched our little enchantress strutting from the chocolate fountain to the swimming pool and back again with Jim's best friend shambling along in her wake, looking remarkably as if that tantalizing string was looped through his nose.

Now the obvious lesson here is that anyone who might attempt to have anything whatsoever to do with that particular young woman is going to be in for a whole lot of hard work.

Then it struck me that, from a man's point of view, all women can be pretty hard work. Some of them are just a little more adept than others at making guys scrunch up our foreheads and say, "Wait... What?"

That's why I propose that every female be assigned a Degree Of Difficulty rating.

Let me explain. If you've ever watched an Olympic diving competition, you will have noticed a lot of good-looking people in real skimpy bathing suits. If you happened to lose the picture on your television, you may also have noticed the scoring system they use.

Since some tricks are harder to perform than others, each dive has a Degree Of Difficulty number assigned to it. A panel of judges watch the athlete perform a dive, then come up with a number based on how good they think it looked (the dive - not the bathing suit). That number is then multiplied by the Degree Of Difficulty number to produce the final score - which is then transferred to Line 25 of form 1067 and used to calculate the athlete's tax refund.

I believe that most long-term married men have already learned to apply this principle to the women in their lives. We understand that if you have a wife with a Degree Of Difficulty rating of about three, executing a gambit like the venerable "Scheduling A Golf Game On An Anniversary" would be fairly simple, while if you have a wife who rates in the nine's, this same trick would be virtually suicidal.

Unfortunately, it has taken most of us many years and countless abject apologies to learn these things.

And so, for the benefit of the less experienced men out there, I propose that every female be reviewed by a panel of her fellow females, and assigned a number from one to ten reflecting her particular Degree Of Difficulty. The "peer review" idea here is important, since the girls would be a lot less likely to be distracted by something like a provocative string tied in a bow.

Each woman would then be required by law to prominently display her Degree Of Difficulty rating at all times, possibly on a pendant or even a tattoo. That way, if a young guy walks up to a "five" in a bar, he knows up front that he has a fifty-fifty chance of finding out that she has an over-protective brother who is a professional kick boxer.

I don't believe that this system would work particularly well for men. For one thing, most of us guys have trouble counting from one to ten (just ask us how many beers we've had), so it might be hard to get any sort of competent review panel together. Plus, I've never known a woman who could not pretty much figure out any guy within about three seconds of catching a whiff of his cologne.

So anyway, there it is. It's something to think about. If nothing else, it would kind of give new meaning to the phrase, "Perfect Ten."

Copyright © 2007, Michael Ball