Can smart be sexy? Of course it can. Indeed, it is – there’s no “can” about it. Nothing more attractive than a woman with brains as well as looks.
Maybe that’s why Amal Alamuddin was the one to finally land the biggest fish in the bachelor pond: George Clooney hisself. She’s beautiful, obviously, but she’s also very clever, accomplished and professionally impressive. She makes the likes of me look like a baboon bashing the keyboard with two fingers. (Which, as it happens, is close enough to the truth.)
I’ve never understood men who don’t fancy smart women, or who find intelligence a turn-off, or somehow intimidating or unattractive. I literally don’t understand this. (Told you I was a dumb chimp.)
Like, what’s the problem here, fellas? Nobody’s suggesting you must choose between intelligence and, say, good looks or sexiness or a pleasant personality or whatever. These things are, believe it or not, all compatible. One doesn’t sort of push the other out of the “package” that is a woman; they can all get along just fine together.
More than that, braininess complements those other qualities, adding to them. I’m not gonna lie, I like a nice ass and legs as much as the next man; but when that ass and legs are accompanied by a clever mind, so much the better.
Why wouldn’t you want your girl to be smart? For starters, most people are kind of boring – sorry, but it’s true. They are.
Sure, glance around you: you’re probably sitting next to a boring person right now. Look at them, sitting there, being boring. Oh crap, they saw you looking – pretend to be waving to someone behind them.
Anyway, being boring, in my opinion, is generally caused by a lack of intelligence. A lack of smarts, quick wit, mental sharpness. Whereas clever people aren’t as boring as everyone else.
Oh, some of them may seem so, but that’s only because the rest of us aren’t bright enough to understand what the hell they’re on about. Einstein might have been a total babe, but the post-coital chat about the different flavours of quarks and the cosmological constant no doubt felt somewhat tedious. But that wasn’t his fault: it was yours, for not being smart enough to follow it.
Also, clever people are wittier than the average bear – in other words, funnier. And who doesn’t enjoy a laugh every now and again? I know I do. In fact I had one just there now, thinking about Einstein’s cosmological constant. Hilarious on so many levels!
There are many more benefits to going with a brainiac. She can sort out all the head-wreckingly complex stuff of life like tax returns. She can help out with that Sudoku or crossword puzzle.
She can work out why the car isn’t running, why the cable TV won’t record that Bachelorette marathon you’ve been jonesing for but can’t watch for some obscure reason, and why your computer is currently making a sort of mewling noise and whispering “Please…release me from this living hell…pleeeease” over and over, ever since you “accidentally” stumbled on that Thai lady-boy live-chat website and rather foolishly agreed to download several apps AKA viruses to your hard-drive.
This is all good, as far as I’m concerned. Above all, though, I still can’t comprehend how any man feels intimidated by an intelligent woman.
So your wife is smarter than the proverbial brain-pie? Well, so what? How does that negatively affect your life in any way? Would it make you more clever if she was a bit of a ditz? Would you be happier if the both of you, and not just you, were staring at the TV programme-link service like confused chimps who’ve just seen Man make fire for the first time?
Why should it matter? Why compare yourself? By that rationale, you’d also feel lousy for being uglier than her, smellier, with a more annoying laugh, more crooked teeth and so on.
Chill out, for God’s sake. Brains aren’t just compatible with beauty – they are beautiful.
Darragh McManus, author and journalist 