The Veiled Flame

And why intelligent men find it hard to distinguish between smart and stupid women

One male commenter quite clearly failed to grasp what I meant when I stressed four points about the male perspective on female intelligence, including this one.

A highly intelligent man can barely tell the difference between a smart woman and a stupid woman.

I suspect, though, that my disagreement with point 3 of Mr. Day’s stressed points is somewhat related to my suspicion that, as a self-identified ‘highly-intelligent man,’ he exempts himself from his belief that such men are incapable of discerning between smart and stupid women.

His suspicion is incorrect.

First, I am not merely “a self-identified ‘highly-intelligent man’”. At various times, I have been identified by a Harvard University study, Mensa, and the National Merit organization, just to name three, as being highly intelligent.

Second, not only do I not exempt myself from this belief, I first noticed it due to the fact that while there was an IQ difference of more than 60 points between two girls I was dating my second year of college, the experience was essentially identical despite the fact that one young woman was more than four standard deviations below me and the other was more intelligent than me.

Notice that I did not say highly intelligent men are incapable of discerning the difference between very smart and stupid women, I said that we “can barely tell the difference”. Or, to put it another way, we can see the difference, but in terms of their observed behavior and interests, the difference is minimal. And therefore, we find it very difficult to care about it.

You can tell the difference. But do you really care?

Was the brilliant girl capable of insight and analysis? Absolutely. In fact, one thing she said has not only stuck with me for decades, but became a core aspect of my intellectual philosophy after she corrected one of our female friends about “the great ideas” she had floating around in her head that she couldn’t quite seem to express.

An idea does not actually exist until it is articulated. Unless and until you can write it down, all you have is a feeling. There isn’t actually anything there.

That was a tremendously valuable insight for me and it is probably one reason why I am a writer despite lacking any literary talent whatsoever. It’s an intelligent and important insight. But it was pretty much the only insight she ever had that I found worth noting, and indeed, one of the few times she ever expressed any interest in anything outside of the usual social concerns that most women have. Her normal conversations were, on average, of no more intrinsic interest to me than those of the girl with the sub-100 IQ.

Let me put it in terms that intelligent women might find easy to understand. If a man with an IQ of 150 and a man with an IQ of 90 are discussing European football and arguing over whether Lionel Messi or Cristiano Ronaldo are the greatest of all time, it’s probably going to be fairly easy for you to determine which of the two men is more intelligent. His knowledge of the statistics and appeal to average goals+assists-penalties is probably going to strike you as a more convincing argument than the other guy’s appeal to club and country trophies if you actually pay attention to the cases presented.

But you’re not going to pay attention to the discussion at all.

You’re not, because you don’t know much about the careers of either man and you don’t care in the slightest about the subject.

(The answer, by the way, is Lionel Messi, who much to my chagrin, I was forced to admit was better than Pele after I ran through all the career numbers. It’s not even close!)

From the male perspective, no matter how intelligently a woman navigates the sea of female nonsense with her arsenal of brilliant bon mots, no matter how effortlessly she manages to compete successfully in the never-ending female sport of competitive status, all of her efforts in this regard are going to be generally invisible to us. Because while women care a great deal about male status, men don’t care at all about female status.

Remember, opposites attract. Never forget that. Observe, don’t project.

Also recall that the female tendency to be instinctively contrarian is going to make even the smartest woman look blitheringly stupid on an alarmingly regular basis. And while the intelligent woman’s ability to disguise her incorrect reactions behind pedantry and rhetorical posturing with other women and with male midwits, it’s just going to make her look dishonest as well as stupid to the highly intelligent man who doesn’t care about her rhetoric and sees through her pedantry.

For example, I once manipulated a very intelligent woman into publicly declaring “it isn’t dark at midnight” in front of a group of people by doing nothing more than systematically feeding her assertions that appealed to her instinct to be contrary. Ironically, intellectually sub-par women aren’t smart enough to say anything that obviously stupid in front of a crowd.