The Burden of Being Smart and Sexy, with an Asterisk

To “advertise” yourself as both smart and sexy is not only narcissistic, it is also inefficient and tacky. It makes you look greedy; and foolish. Also, it is the easiest way to become misunderstood in your group. By playing both cards at once, you will not only lose both, but you will also live to see both “precious” qualities turned against you.

After all, most unwise women religiously believe in conventional wisdom, therefore they force themselves into the limelight by recommending themselves as smart and sexy. An overstatement, of course, but still worth a try, no?

Sadly, nobody told them that managing such (supposedly) dangerous attributes is solely a matter of self-control. And self-control is solely a matter of true wisdom.

A wise woman knows that being considered smart and sexy is irrelevant to the two vital questions: “Will I ever get laid?” and “Will I ever get a Nobel prize?”

A few years ago, I was at a dinner where the champagne was warm and the host had served lentils in a copper pan because apparently this made them French. Across from me there was a woman who spent most of the evening informing us, by various routes, that she was unusually intelligent and sexually formidable. Imagine my face…

She didn’t say it quite so plainly. She mentioned the married professor who had become obsessed with her after a conference in Vienna, then a few minutes later, she corrected someone’s use of the word “epistemological”. She had read Lacan in French, although her French accent suggested he had suffered enough (yes, I am judgy)! She kept touching the inside of her wrist while speaking, one of those gestures women acquire after discovering that it might be perceived as sensual by the male population.

By dessert, I obviously knew she was clever. I knew men desired her. I also knew that she needed us to KNOW, and this third piece of information devoured the others.

Vanity was present, certainly! Vanity is almost always present at this kind of dinners, wearing niche perfume (that everyone has today, the irony!) and pretending to listen. Yet something more exhausting was happening. The woman had become the public relations department of her own existence. She was inhabiting herself while simultaneously issuing press releases.

(this is an unruly, occasionally indecent essay about the social penalties attached to women who are intelligent, desirable, visibly aware of both, and therefore considered faintly suspect; it moves through dinner-table theatre, self-monitoring, group psychology, sexual strategy, the mythology of mystery, and the small humiliations involved in wanting to be seen without turning yourself into an ad, with no neat doctrine waiting at the end, but with some insight that might recalibrate your thinking).