Why Smart Women are Unattractive (battlepanda.blogspot.com)
I recently came across Paul Graham's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" essay and, together with a discussion I had with some of my geek-ette friends about the lack of normal-looking women on the screen, a light-bulb suddenly went off in my head. It was total internet kismet, where two seemingly disparate pieces of information traveled to me from all over the world as electrical impulses and locked like adjacent puzzle pieces in my brain.
Graham posits that "nerds are unpopular because they have other things to think about." They don't work hard enough at being popular because it simply takes up too much mental RAM. He also theorizes that American high schools are such cruel social ecosystems not because kids are inherently nasty or teenagers are inherently crazy but that the typical American high-school is basically a holding pen divorced from reality.
I copy and pasted the essay into Word and made essentially just three substitutions -- "smartgirls" for "nerds" (and "smart kids"), "unattractive" for "unpopular" (and "attractive" for "popular"), and "femininity" for "school". If you'd indulge me and think of femininity not as a state of being but an actual place, smooth over some of the bumps and generally carry the metaphor through in your mind, it is stunning how much of the essay still made sense.
Some totally unedited clips from the search-and-replaced version:
"Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity."
"So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.
If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.
But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things."
One particular aspect of the essay that really carried well in the search-and-replaced version is Graham's description of popularity as something that is cruel and twisted because it is a hierarchy that emerged out of a vacuum. It is form that emerged without function. It is devoid of connection to genuinely useful qualities that get stuff done in the real world, and as it is hierarchy that exists to be hierarchical, it is a zero-sum game. Just as not everybody could be popular, not everybody could be attractive. The way to claw your way up this kind of hierarchy is to be as conformist to the ideal as possible while pushing somebody else down. If a pill was invented tomorrow that will make all women instantly size zeros, the goalposts will shift to something else that is difficult to attain.
"Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that 'no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.' I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.
I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists."
Now that I'm older and I can look at things a bit more objectively, I c...
14 comments
[ 302 ms ] story [ 339 ms ] threadIt's a message that society sends...you are not attractive enough if you are not super-groomed, super-thin. As I get older, I am getting better at resisting this message.
Hollywood sucks for this sort of thing. There's a very small group of people who have way too much sway over what society thinks attractive girls, smart people, black people, liberals, conservatives, et al look like. It's pretty damaging.
I think there is a subtle semantic difference between "attractive" and "popular" that means they can't readily be substituted for each other in the text of Paul Graham's essay.
http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html
There's nothing subtle about my substitution :) The essay was just a way of helping me see my own experiences from another point of view.
ASSUMPTION A1: There are no smart women who are attractive
OBSERVATION O1: Tina Fey
Assumption A1 has been disproven by observation O1, and thus it follows that assumption A1 cannot hold, thus disproving your claim.
Or: Oh Please.
First, I disagree with the premise anecdotally: most girls I find attractive are smart.
Second, I don't agree that the relationship between nerds and popularity is isomorphic to the relationship between intelligent women and attractiveness. Nerds, practically by definition are not popular; the same is decidedly not true for smart women and being attractive. Additionally, popularity is typically an extrinsic measure, relative to your peers (i.e. it wouldn't make sense for everyone in your high school to be considered one of the popular kids) while attractiveness is an intrinsic measure (in theory, everyone in your high school could be considered attractive).
Moreover, I disagree with the conclusion in both directions. It's not clear that being smart is a cause/excuse for being unattractive nor is it clear that being attractive is some sort of excuse for being unintelligent.
Finally, I disagree with the idea on principle. I don't think adult men or women should get into the habit of blaming their intelligence for their supposed unpopularity or unattractiveness. A lot of smart people (understandably) used that as a coping mechanism for teen angst in high school, but by adulthood it's about time to let go of that sort of destructive, zero-sum approach to life.
I think it's abhorrent to tell smart kids being anti-social in general or smart girls rejecting their femininity in particular that their behavior is some sort of badge of honor. It's not. It's not good, it's not bad, it just is.
The older I get, the more I understand that intelligence is a multi-dimensional thing. There are many types of intelligence. If you're great at math but you can't write, are you smarter than your neighbor who's a brilliant essayist but can't calculate an eigenvector? And where does the person fit who can magnificently work a room but is only average at writing and math? Intelligence isn't an axis, it's a plane, er, multi-dimensional surface.
If there's something you'd like to change about yourself, change it. If you're happy with yourself as you are, even better. People should accept themselves, flaws and strengths alike, but I'd hate to see people going around muttering under their breaths that more popular, better dressed, or better made-up peers are only that way because they lack intelligence. That's a pretty juvenile conceit, to be honest. And I'd like to think we're all too smart to fall for that sort of self-deception for very long.
This is the typical nerd male response. It's all about you :P In reality social pressure comes from so many sources.
<i>popularity is typically an extrinsic measure, relative to your peers (i.e. it wouldn't make sense for everyone in your high school to be considered one of the popular kids) while attractiveness is an intrinsic measure </i> The whole point of my piece was that we are told attractiveness is an intrinsic measure whereas, in many ways for women, it is much more arbitrary and akin to popularity. Women in the states above all want to be thin. But if we can invent a pill tomorrow that will make everybody thin, is everyone suddenly going to be hot? For a while maybe, but soon a new arbitrary standard that excludes the majority of the population will emerge.
<i> clear that being smart is a cause/excuse for being unattractive </i> My other main point is that being a conventionally attractive woman is hard work! Think about it this way...Katherine Heigl had to lose 10 pounds to play opposite Seth Rogan in Knocked Up.
<i>I think it's abhorrent to tell smart kids being anti-social in general or smart girls rejecting their femininity in particular that their behavior is some sort of badge of honor.</i> I'm a girly-girl. There's nothing I love more than to put on some makeup and look hot at a party. There's a difference between enjoying something when it's fun for you and having it be an obligation.
<i>If there's something you'd like to change about yourself, change it. If you're happy with yourself as you are, even better. People should accept themselves, flaws and strengths alike, </i>
That is exactly as I would like the world to be. But right now, if you are a woman and you don't diet and you don't wear makeup and you don't spend a lot of money on grooming products and cloths and frankly a lot of other bullshit guys don't even know...you are at a distinct disadvantage. I'm just a regular girl who is tired of the bullshit. I haven't cut back on personal hygiene or anything. But I will not go on a diet or obsess about my weight unless it is for health reasons. I haven't read a fashion magazine for year, and while I do have nice cloths for special occasions, my wardrobe and spending on beauty is a fraction that of my peers.
(1) [name redacted] (1:25pm): Good heavens. This is like reading my own thoughts on someone else's plan. :)
My father never said anything about anorexia, but there were some comments in that vein.
I still don't care enough. Frankly, I hope I never have to.
(2) [name redacted] (6:01pm): I love that Paul Graham essay. It's the first essay of his that I read, and still his best work, I think.
Your substituted version makes me think of "Adam's Curse," by W. B. Yeats:
"To be born woman is to know -- Although they do not talk of it at school -- That we must labour to be beautiful."
I think some girls decide that labor isn't worth the hassle.
(3) [name redacted] (4:05pm): I was really heavy in high school- now I'm about the same size as you said you are. I'm so done feeling bad about my figure, because I'm perfectly normal and I happen to like food. [me] (4:29pm): Yay!
(4) [name redacted] (1:23pm): Go post that on news.ycombinator.com. It's surprisingly insightful, and I bet everyone there (including Paul Graham) would get a big kick out of it. [me] (2:28pm): :) I just might
(5) [redacted a]: the most fascinating thing, to me, is using the words of Paul Graham to talk about feminism. [redacted a]: (from that plan) [redacted b]: I don't know anythign about him except the nerds essay [redacted a]: He's someone that a lot of nerd guys look up to for things like the nerds essay. A lot of nerd guys having no patience for feminism.
It takes work to be beautiful. I could straighten my hair every time I get out of the shower, dye and pluck my eyebrows every other week, keep my roots dyed monthly, devote 20 minutes to make-up daily, keep my nails in shape, take better care of my skin, tan, shave often, and tone my abs. Frankly, I don't have the time or motivation. Why bother when I could read, code, or do a million other interesting things?
There are a few women who don't have to do as much to be beautiful - I was always envious of people with dark complexions and straight hair for this reason. But for most people, it does take time. It's not something that just is. Nearly anyone can look wonderful with the right lighting, clothing and make-up, and vice-versa.
Also, I've never met anyone who admitted to being attracted to morons, yet many are. People think highly of attractive people whether or not it's warranted.
I note that most of the replies so far fail the test of doing the swap in the opposite direction i.e. "I'm attracted to smart women" is the same as "nerds are popular with me" which is different from "nerds are popular", and even more so from "nerds were popular in high school".