On Dating News from Huff Po

I read this article knowing at once how it would end because the article was about a study showing that men don't like hanging out with women who beat them at IQ tests. Instead of advising women not to engage in IQ tests with men, which is relatively easy to do, it suggests men need to change.

Of course, these findings don't mean that all or even most men are threatened by smart women. This study just adds to decades of literature on gender dynamics which suggests that, as a whole, there are a lot of icky complications around confidence and power wrapped up in heterosexual attraction. 

More research needs to be done until there are any practical implications.In the meantime, it's probably not a bad idea for threatened men to do a little soul-searching and think about why they might be intimidated by smart women.

So much for "born this way", eh?

When I was 25, I would have taken all this extremely seriously, especially the passive aggressive nagging at men to change. As a matter of fact, I dated guys probably not as smart as I was for years, and it was only when I was over 30 that I returned to the "Am I Too Smart?" worries.

Since then, I have come to the conclusion that there is a big difference between being an intelligent conversationalist  and embarrassing men by beating them in competitions, however informal those competitions may be. Guys have to compete with guys all the time. (In Poland male Polish wedding guests march up to male foreign wedding guests and wordlessly invite them to drink vodka shots with them. I saw incidents of this myself this month: it was very funny although, of course, not so funny for the foreign men.)  In general, guys like girls because/when the girls don't compete with them. Having an intelligent conversation is not the same thing as competing. Trying to win an argument is, however, competing. Fine for work. Not so fine for social life.

At best, girls are a lot of fun to be around. They make you feel good about yourself. They don't try to cut you down to size or to get you to drink more than you can stand or to become obstacles in your career path. Except when they do --which to many men feels like the woman are cheating. Sometimes they are particularly annoyed when the  aggressive woman is attractive because they feel this gives her power over them. Men hate it when they feel women-not-on-their-side have power over them, and fair enough. I would feel scared if men-not-on-my-side had power over me. Come to think of it, I suffered unde women managers I really couldn't stand, and they were always way harder to deal with than any male employer I ever had.

If it is a FACT that men are turned off by women they KNOW--in some agreed upon, quantifiable way--are smarter than they are, then the really smart women will not stress to the men we meet that we might be smarter than they are. We don't have to "play dumb". We just don't get drawn into "who is the smartest?" competitions outside of work. (Work is a different story although even there I am sure one can be gracious. Not everyone you meet needs to know that you went to a "Top 15" college, gag, barf.) We don't exaggerate how smart we are, and we don't nuke men with our intelligence unless we are trying to turn them off.

I once nuked a drunken chap who was making ridiculous claims about Saint Thomas Aquinas. It felt very satisfying, but then he wasn't very attractive, and he was patronizing me, and I wanted him to go away. I try to keep this sort of thing to a minimum, however, as becoming addicted to crushing men's egos would be detrimental to my social life. I prefer to be fun to be around and make men feel good about themselves. I don't want to cut them down to size or get them to drink more than they can stand or to become an obstacle in their career paths. I have my jobs, and if I were competing for the ones they want, I sure wouldn't tell them.

Occasionally I feel sad that the men around don't seem to perceive how brilliant I am, or even that I had a really good education, but in saner moments I realize that this really doesn't matter as they are not newspaper editors and are not paying me. Besides, I learn a lot of interesting things by asking men questions. Men famously love to explain things to women, which I think is a weakness that can be used for good, especially if they know what they are talking about and I can learn from them. (If they don't know what they are talking about, I can at least practice being a kindly, restful woman.)

I showed my house guest the Polish Astrophysicist my essay about Wyspiański, and the first (and only) thing he said about it was "It's Szołayskich, not Sołayskich", which was very embarrassing and therefore GREAT because I will certainly never make that mistake again. Incidentally, even if you yourself are an astrophysicist, you can always improve yourself and make yourself sound dumb/funny/child-like at the same time by learning to speak another language. You could have a brain the size of a planet and still charm some manly man foreigner senseless by saying their equivalent of "Is not dwarf star, is comet. I show maths. Where is challllk? Look, look. I am writing on boardblack."