Smart Women Don't Get Laid

Kameron Hurley of Brutal Women, guestblogging

"As long as there are entrenched social and political distinctions between sexes, races or classes, there will be forms of science whose main function is to rationalize and legitimize these distinctions."

- Elizabeth Fee

Bear with me here, I'm a little hung over. Ce la vie.

It appears that we finally have proof! White, middle-class men of Science administering tests made to test the intelligence of white, middle class men have finally solved the mystery of inequality that has troubled feminists for generations.

Men are just smarter.

This is a great article because it assumes 1) everybody knows that IQ tests are the best measures of intelligence out there! In fact, that's why dark-skinned people always score so low! Because they're "naturally" dumb, just like women! 2) That people who have high IQ scores are smart and destined to get high-powered jobs and make lots of money and win Nobel prizes, though all the guys I know who tested at genius level are either in the Marines or managing hardware stores. 3) Men's brains are bigger than women's, which make them smarter! As we all know, size matters. Einstein's head was as big as a truck! 4) There was an expectation that white middle and upper class men, administering tests to young white men written by white middle and upper class men would then find that white, upper and middle class men didn't do well on the tests.

Gee. Somebody needs to start asking better questions.

I'm reminded of reading about a couple of women biologists who were standing around the lab one day shooting the shit with a handful of their colleagues, who happened to be men. One of the men said he wanted to look into doing a study about whether or not women's sex drives increased around the time of ovulation.

The two women biologists exchanged looks and burst out laughing. "We wouldn't have asked `if,'" one of the women said, "We would have asked `why?' Our starting points were different. You base your questions on your experiences. We wouldn't have wasted time asking `if.'"

I don't know at what point I internalized the idea that being a smart girl was a bad thing.

Now, I certainly concede that dorky guys aren't exactly idealized in the sexual arena either, at least not until they're 30 and successful and making tons of money while the former high school football jock pumps gas at the local BP. But about the time the dorky guys get to be hot, the dorky girls are getting "old," and unless you were really beautiful to begin with, I thought, you were pretty much screwed. Or not, as the case may be, in the attractiveness department.

And sex is a really great motivator.

As a pre-teen I'd already long known I was a dork. I knew this from the first day of kindergarten, when I tried to talk to a very pretty girl in a very pretty dress who did, in fact, turn out to be very popular in gradeschool (How do we know these things so early? Do we just all naturally gravitate toward these people? Is that what makes them popular? Her name was Laura Peterson - wow, I can't believe I still remember that), and was rebuffed for... I don't know what. My hair? My lack of social skills? I was doomed to dorkdom early on.

In the third grade I found the smartest, dorkiest guy in class and he became my best friend and we hung out a lot and read books. By the first grade I realized I was chubby and not-blond and not terribly socially desirable as a hang-out buddy for other girls because their games tended to be all about how to get a boyfriend, and they had to worry about their skirts all the time (my grandmother looked after me and my siblings during the day, and dressed me in skirts as well, but I didn't much care about them), and if I wasn't reading books, I was having My Little Pony & G.I. Joe wars or racing matchbox cars who all had names like "Fireball" and "Racer." I liked to talk about why and how things worked and why the world was the way it was, and all the girls seemed to be talking about were shoes and how to get boyfriends, because let me tell you, the "measuring your worth by whether or not you have a boyfriend" thing starts really, really early. And if you don't have a boyfriend, it means you're defective.

I suppose it was internalizing the boyfriend-getting activities that convinced me I shouldn't be smart. Or, if I was smart, to just not tell anybody. Because it was common knowledge at sleepovers that boys didn't like dorky girls who read books and used big words.

You start to learn appropriate conversations for girl-sleepovers, 90% of which revolved around who liked what boy and how to get him from somebody else and how you'd have to starve yourself tomorrow because you'd been eating so much (oh yea, boy, the "you gotta be thin!" stuff starts right out of the gate). I learned from these conversations, and from watching the girls who "got" boyfriends (whatever that means when you're 10 years old), that I needed to be thinner, blonder, and more sociable. Sociable meaning I needed to laugh and smile a lot and really be interested in clothes and lip gloss.

The trouble with spending so much mental energy on grooming, clothes shopping, make-up, and worrying about everything you eat means you don't have a lot of mental energy left for other things. And you're often hungry or depressed, as you get caught in a binge-and-purge loop as you get older.

For years, I was convinced that if I was thinner and stupider, more boys would like me. Which, of course, was the main goal of life. I could do any number of Grand things. I could win a fucking Spelling Bee, or win the yearly academic achievement awards in all six categories, and it wouldn't get me more friends. It wouldn't get me boyfriend approval. It would just get me a bunch of awards, and unless you're already a Hot Chick, what's the point?

I was very lucky in that I've got amazing parents who were very clear that I needed to be smart and independent, and my worth was not measured by how many guys looked at my flat ass. They would have been very happy with a daughter who was a doctor or a lawyer, but I gave up on the idea of being an astronaut when I realized that I was consistently getting my lowest scores in math, and astronauts had to be good at math.

It didn't help that I had a sixth grade teacher who once looked at my math assignment - I'd gotten all but 3 of the 40 problems wrong - and said, "Well, you know, girls aren't usually so good at math."

Yea, that's really inspiring, thanks.

There's a lot more that goes into test scores than raw brain power.

Tell somebody "you can't" long enough, and they just might believe it. Tell somebody being smart is unattractive and being attractive is desirable and watch their test scores drop.

It's another reason to write books. Give people some other fucking options. Make us a world where intelligence is valued in everybody, and not measured in how well you can mark boxes on an answer sheet. Give me a place where I can fly.

For awhile, when I first started community college classes, I tried to dress more fem and talk less. I did this because my boyfriend at the time cheated on me with a thin fem girl and was running after a plain, ditzy blond with the IQ of toilet paper, and I was terrified that if I couldn't even keep this mediocre guy, how would I ever be able to "keep" a relationship together with anybody better? I'd only ever had one boyfriend, and who else would ever be interested? Men really did only want to be with stupid women, I decided. It's what was on TV. It's what I was experiencing. It was all around me. If I was going to be attractive, I had to be stupid. And being attractive, when you're 17 and have raging hormones, is all you're really concerned about.

So I strove to be quieter and dress in more skirts, and made myself utterly miserable. This was about the same time I stopped writing for about six months, where nothing at all could work its way through. I convinced myself that if I lost this boyfriend, I would never have another one. I worked so hard to be a suitable woman that I lost sight of everything else in my life, and started trying to teach myself to cook, and spent my days cleaning up after the boyfriend and waitressing while he skipped out on classes and lay around in bed reading.

I was giving up myself and watching it be subsumed by something else. I wasn't going anywhere. I wasn't thinking much of anything. I wasn't challenging myself at all. I didn't have the leisure time to go out and create anything worthwhile at all. I could barely cook instant potatos.

At some point, I realized I had a boyfriend like everyone said I should, and I hated it. I was miserable. I felt like I was doing everything right. But I was broken. I didn't want what other people wanted. I wasn't a real girl. Real girls didn't feel this way.

So I ditched the guy, went back to wearing boots and khaki pants, and after my Alaska Boys phase, I threw out pretending to be dumb all together. I even started researching new stuff, and teaching myself how to figure out the logic games on the LSAT.

But by that time, of course, my test score data had already been tabulated. I did not have the IQ of a genius. Too bad, really. I've always wanted to manage a hardware store...

In any case, I sure am glad that boys are smarter than me, just like everyone always said. I'll keep that in mind the next time some guy tells me that polar bears don't live in Alaska and women can't pee standing up.

After all, men are naturally smarter than women. Women are just born dumb. We arrive that way, full-fledged and drooling, from the womb. Obviously. As you can see.

I sure do feel better knowing that.