Smarts

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From Bryan White

From time to time, I come across these women online complaining that “Men are intimidated by smart women”, and I can only presume that they’re talking primarily about themselves, prompted by some personal experience that they found exasperating. The thing is, I’m not sure if this is something that’s actually happening, or this is just something these women are telling themselves. There are a couple of pretty bold assumptions behind a statement like that.

First of all, you’re assuming that you’re smart. Already I’m pretty deep into side eye territory. Good lord, if only everyone who claimed to be smart was actually smart, what a world it would be! We’d be at least 10 months away from completing our second Dyson’s Sphere by now.

Second of all, I gotta figure you’re making some bold assumptions about what these men you’re interacting with are actually thinking. I highly doubt that any of them are telling you outright, “How come you gotta be so smart with all you’re book learnins and sech? I likes em dumb. Rill dumb,” as they bare their rotting teeth. So, clearly, you’re doing some heavy reading between the lines. Is it possible that maybe they just disagree with your opinions, or they find your attitude and demeanor to be off-putting? No? That’s just … No? It’s gotta be the intimidation thing? Oh, okay.

I mean, I’m not necessarily saying that it ISN’T happening. What do I know? It’s fairly common knowledge that there are a lot of men out there who have issues with women in general, and they take these issues out on women in creepy and bizarre ways. I’ve seen plenty of strange, unwarranted hostility directed at women just out of the blue. So, obviously I understand that it’s a thing.

But there’s another side that doesn’t always get acknowledged where women can kind of throw a party for themselves by making a statement like this, and a bunch of people will just show up with cake and presents, nobody questioning any of it. They’ll just meet her at the door, telling her, “Oh girl, he just can’t handle you!”

Whichever the case may be, I want to put my own two cents into the pot here. I can’t speak for other men; I can only speak for myself when I say, of all the myriad complaints I’ve lodged against people over the years, be they man, woman, puppy dog, whatever, being too smart is never, ever, ever, ever something I’ve had a problem with. Please, pleeeaaase, be smart. Please be way way wayyyyyy smarter than me. I won’t mind at all. I promise I won’t. I’ll even bow my head, fold my hands, and send a plea out to humanity at large:

“Dear Human Race, on Earth as you are … umm … on Earth. Yes, please be smarter. We can do this. Really. I know you like your phones, but you can put them away when you’re driving. Right? And the whole flat Earth thing, that can just be our little joke. Okay? I’m laughing about it already. HA! See? So, okay. Good. Good. We just need to focus. Whew! Deep breath.

Amen.”

12 thoughts on “Smarts”

  1. Bless you for this piece so dyed-in-the-wool in-your-face unapologetically & quintessentially American, from its title onwards.

    Over here in Britland I have never heard or seen written “smarts” as a plural noun, not nohow since landing aged 4 in 1946. I would have remembered, I’m weird that way. Karleen’s the same, she knows when she first heard any word, having first obtained book-larnin’ from reading the Bible to her great-grandmother who had “dark eyes”.

    It’s a foreign word I have to translate, invariably coming up with “cleverness” but looked it up in the OED to make sure.

    colloq. orig. and chiefly N. Amer.
    Intelligence, esp. natural intelligence; cleverness, acumen, nous; wits. see also book smarts n. at book n. Compounds street smarts n. at street n. and adj. Compounds 4).
    1940 Pegler..is also sure ‘we are suffering from a very bad case of the Smarts’, which means in his language that there is too much education loose in the world today.
    1964 N. Amer. Rev. Autumn 67/1 He is pretty high in the smarts dept., since he is a bonafide doctor with a degree and all that.
    1968 Ebony Mar. 16 (advt.) If you’re good, we’ll take you on. In management. Where you can use all the smarts you picked up in college.
    1972 H. Kemelman Monday Rabbi took Off xlv. 263 The whole story is a little weak… I mean, this kid of yours has the normal amount of smarts.
    1981 Guardian Weekly 26 July 15/4 They complain..that the soldiers have neither the smarts nor the education to work the complicated weapons of modern warfare.
    1990 Vogue Sept. 96/2 British dance acts..display the dance-floor smarts of the UK’s new style scientists.
    2008 S. Toltz Fraction of Whole v. 556 I think I’ll leave this manuscript here..and maybe one day it’ll be found and someone will have the smarts to publish it posthumously.

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  2. Having said that, would concur heartily with what you say, except for the negative connotations we Brits apply to “clever” & “cleverness”. A “clever-clogs” is that annoying person who knows better than I do, corrects my little mistakes and laughs at me for being “dumb”—which amateur philologists like myself would recognize as also an American word, but one successfully imported, not like “smarts”.

    Over here, self-deprecation is a must. The first word a visitor needs to learn is “sorry”, to be used immediately when you are jostled by someone and you know it is their fault.

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    1. We used call someone like that a “know-it-all”, the implication being that they don’t half of a quarter of what they think they do. Lately that’s evolved online into the accusation of someone being “Dunning-Kruger”, which has ironically itself fallen prey to the Dunning-Kruger effect through constant overuse by people don’t really understand what it means but think that they do.

      Gotta love the internet.

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  3. Thing is, I can’t see smarts (trying to get used to the word) as one-dimensional as implied by one’s IQ score. I think Brits like me would use the word “bright”. Am I attracted to a woman who seems to be brighter than I am, say in my fantasy life as a James Bond-like figure? Yes, I am, for she knows how to entice me, and it may end up like making love to one of those spiders that bites off your head at the summit of coital ecstasy to nourish her hundreds of unborn spiderlets.

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        1. Dead, I believe. I’ve thought about restarting it here on WordPress, but I think if I do start a new blog I would need to do it under a new name to get a fresh start. I like that title, I always will, but when I tried to reboot it before it failed almost immediately because I couldn’t get my head around the fact that I was trying to do something new under the same name. It just didn’t fit and it didn’t work.

          That was the last time I did any kind of “regular” blogging. Since then, it’s been mostly the sheep blog and some poetry stuff.

          This blog has given me the chance to do some “regular” blogging again, which I appreciate. I also like that it’s very low obligation, since I’m not running the show here.

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  4. One thing to discuss about this site is the restricted membership. I’ve invited people on a basis of having known them for some years & trusting their discretion. Nobody else has even been told about it so there is no way someone could apply to join. But an existing member could discuss inviting someone.

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  5. On the topic of Jordan Peterson (which hasn’t been mentioned till now re this post, but you brought him up in another) .

    I don’t admire him for being a smart-ass, or being so intense, dogged, brave & honest. It’s over the top & wearying. I don’t necessarily agree with all that he says.

    I do admire his skill in being constantly super-smart, especially under pressure. I’d give him an award for pressing his opponents to raise their game and stop being dumber than they can’t help being.

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