Study Finds Majority of Men Who Rate Themselves 7s Are Actually 5s (At Most)

According to a recent study, most men who rate themselves 7s are actually 5s or lower on a 1-10 scale. This is startling news for the vast majority of men who publicly proclaim that they’re 7s.

The test group for this study was made up of 300 men across the US. We included any man who had ever said out loud or on social media that he was a 7. For the sake of the study, we excluded data from men who only believed that they were a 7 in certain locations (a New York City 7 but a San Francisco 8, for example, or an Arkansas 7 but an LA 1). To obtain the results, we asked a diverse group of judges to rate the self-proclaimed 7s, and the conclusions were shocking. Only 4% of these men were actually 7s, and 22% were 6s. This means a whopping 72% were 5s or lower. Actually, there was one man who said he was a 7 but was actually an 8, although we had to exclude him from the study because he was an outlier statistic. We did also ask if he was single, and sadly, he was not.

This study has startling ramifications for men. Going forward, any man who gets up at a stand up comedy open mic and tells the audience that he’s a 7 must face the reality that he’s probably only a 5, at best. He might need to look inward and ask himself if he should really be talking about his appearance on stage, or even doing stand up comedy at all. Any man on a dating app who describes himself as a 7 needs to be aware that the women looking at his pictures will probably disagree and also be put off by the phrase “I’m a 7, so I’m only seeking 8s or higher.” Men worldwide who think of themselves as 7s need to be careful.

Further results of the study conclude that the majority of men who rate themselves 7s internally believe that they’re 9s. This result was obtained by prodding the subjects one-on-one until they admitted that “yeah, whatever, I just take way better care of myself than most guys”, and “yeah, so what, just because society says it’s ‘too much’ hair gel doesn’t mean I don’t look awesome.”

The authors of the study tried to generalize their results to women, but they were unable to for obvious reasons.

Ginny Hogan is a NYC-based stand up comic and writer. She's a contributor at McSweeney's, The Hairpin, and Points in Case. Find her on Twitter and Instagram @ginny2357