Lessons Learned Rather Late

Caveat: I will be linking to the Daily Mail, which is essentially a tabloid, which is to say that it specialises in attention-grabbing, emotion-yanking stories. One of the stories it likes to tell is "Unattractive Smart Woman Moans that She is Treated Unfairly by Life."

The unattractive smart woman sometimes complains that women hate her because she is too beautiful, but more often she complains that men reject her because she is too smart. There are egregiously unflattering photos, and I can only assume the writer is paid a hefty fee. (Pause while I ponder how big a fee would tempt me to humiliate myself in the Daily Mail.)

Here is the latest addition* to the ghastly tradition.

My first thoughts were as usual: what gets you ahead at work and school is not what makes you the belle of the ball, and there is nothing shameful in putting aside one set of intellectual tools to take up another. I know of a brain surgeon (not B.A.'s) who speaks to her much-less-well-paid husband in baby talk, much to the chagrin of the surgeon's single sister.

I thought also that it is indeed rude to go on holiday with a chap and then have a rip-snorting laugh-a-minute conversation in a language he doesn't understand right in front of him. B.A. is very goodnatured and tolerant, but he doesn't like that sort of thing either.

Finally I had a new thought, which is that the author should have dialled down and dated younger chaps, not older. This is the United Kingdom, so this is entirely possible. Any young man who is attractive to older, successful women is not going to mind if she dominates dinner conversations. He is going to expect it. He might also expect her to pick up the table at fancy restaurants, which is only fair if he is still on the bottom rungs of his chosen career.

But in general I think complaining because men like to be flattered by a woman instead of being argued into submission by her is as silly as railing against nature because chocolate is poisonous to dogs. Acknowledging this fact and adjusting one's social behaviour accordingly is what separates the Smart Smart girls from the Dumb Smart girls.

For those permanently  (but involuntarily) Single women who are utterly convinced that being fun instead of intellectual at parties is a form of dumbing down, may I suggest they take up studying a foreign language and attempt to converse with native speakers (minus, of course, the presence of a disgruntled monolingual beau)? This way you will be doing something intensely brainy while at the same time sounding charmingly hapless. You also have the added bonus of sounding romantically exotic.

That said, just sounding American or Canadian in Scotland makes you sound romantically exotic, one reason why Mrs Smartypants is now married. That and the fact that soon after I met B.A. I caught a cold so terrible, I could barely speak, let alone crush all comers with my fearsome intellect.

Update: It just occurs to me that the very fact that the Daily Mail delights in such clickbait as this article is evidence of how much people dislike well-paid older women complaining "It's 'cause I so smaaaaart!"

*Polish Pretend Son has just written in to point out that this story is actually from 2013.

We Can Discover What They Think, But We Won't Always Like It

Facebook offers such interesting conversations. Here's one that I had yesterday that is of interest to my old Single gal readership:

Complete stranger in USA: I gotta say, X, I'm not impressed by "classical liberal" girls. They're still going through their "equity feminist" phase, which just means that they're not nut job "gender feminists", but still take umbrage when you tell them that, if women didn't vote at ALL, the Democratic party, and whatever your version of that is in [Canada], would die. 

X, a pal of mine back home: Well, that would be the Liberal Party up here. And as an old man long out of the dating cycle, I have the luxury of not having to deal with many "young women" any more, so your take is probably more valid than mine.

Now this caught my eye because I occasionally hear "women shouldn't vote because" arguments, which annoy me because they're lazy. If it is true that women almost always vote for the better looking candidate, then it may also be true that men almost always vote for the taller candidate, for which there is evidence. So what are we going to do, remove men's franchise? One solution is to train children up in rational thought from the age of 4, when they can first grasp the concepts of "Handsome is as handsome does" and "Charm is deceptive, and beauty is fleeting: but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised (Proverbs 30:31)."  I hate to admit it, but English Canadian society was a lot more rational when it was Presbyterian.

But back to the Complete Stranger in the USA.

CSiUSA: The irony with me is that, where before I'd be excited at all these semi-red pilled girls into David Rubin and Jordan Peterson, who are "questioning" their PC indoctrination, nowadays I'd rather just date an apolitical gum chewing airhead, that works at a hair salon. 

Then I sat up because it was a guy frankly talking about what kind of girl he thinks he prefers. Men aren't always right about this. What they think, what they feel, and what they actually do are often disconnected; they're not as holistic as women. They compartmentalise like crazy. It is useful to know this if you are a woman who has, or  ultimately wants to have, a man in your life.  So I asked some questions.

Me, Journalist-Novelist-Blogger: I write a lot for never-married conservative women, so if you are serious, please explain why. The social science is that women want to date "up" and men don't care what women do for a living, as long as they are agreeable and attractive. Possibly the word "airhead" indicates that you are not serious, however (and every woman I've ever met working at a hair salon was very smart about life and money) .

To my surprise, CSiUSA became defensive and, instead of typing "What do you mean?" or real insults, like Polish Pretend Son would have, he whimpered:

CSiUSA: 100% serious. When you say my use of the word "airhead" indicates I'm not "serious", and then you're saying, "every woman I've ever met working at a hair salon was very smart about life and money..." indicates to me that, in spite who you pull the lever for, you are trying to change my mind via shaming tactics, and I do not like it.

Oh dear. It took me a while to understand what he meant by pulling a lever, but then I remembered Americans vote by pulling a lever, not by marking boxes with an X with a pencil. However, I didn't give up hope of getting his opinion. When trying to get men to produce research results, you must be super-gentle, like you would be with guinea pigs or white mice.

Me, JNB: No, no. I am not shaming you. Nor am I interested in changing your mind on anything. I am just contemplating the women I have known in hairdressing salons and wondering why you characterise them as airheads when you find them attractive. Questions for clarification, as it were. My readers are often very interested in what men think about dating (and related activities) although they are not always happy when they find out. Nevertheless truth is what is, in the words of a forerunner to the great Jordan Peterson.

Okay, that was St. Thomas Aquinas, so I was sort of joking. But sort of not. You should hear me at meetings trying to convince people that JP is like TA in that Thomas used Aristotelianism, the fashionable science of his day, to elucidate Truth to the best educated, JP is using psychology, the fashionable science of the day, to elucidate Truth to the best educated. Also, I suspect JP would be even more interested in Catholicism if he read Trad stuff, especially Thomas Aquinas's masterful and amazing Prayer After Communion, because Trads are alllll about facing up to wickedness, our own and other people's.

Anyway, good news. CSiUSA decided I was legit. Which I was. The stakes on what men really want in women are very high. I'm happy to be married to B.A., but I'm not happy I got married too late to have kids. Married trads having and educating kids is the best chance we have for reversing the civilisational decline.

CSiUSA: "The social science is that women want to date "up" and men don't care what women do for a living, as long as they are agreeable and attractive." I was dating a chick, cute as a button, obsessed with her music, her tattoos, how she looked, and not much else, and was completely ignorant, and it was perfect. We were driving, and she was complaining about how our air is dirty, and how it doesn't matter if you smoke, and then I told her that we have some of the cleanest air in the world, and that India and China are the filthy polluters, and she goes, "really?! I didn't know that! You know a lot of stuff! I need to come to you when I want to know about something!" Yep, that's what I like. None of this, "I'm a conservative women! I want to be a doctor and a lawyer!"

That was so freaking brilliant: painful truth about what men think they want. Now it may occur to you that CSiUSA is probably not himself a doctor or a lawyer. Very few men are. I don't actually know what the average guy does for a living. Whatever he can, I imagine. Something boring and often unpleasant.  No wonder they think they just want women to be attractive and agreeable.

Me, JBN: Okay, I got it. She didn't set herself [up] as competition instead of as a partner, and she made it clear that you were attractive for your brains and added something to her life. Sounds like good girl-friend material! What did she do for a living, if I may ask?

Wrong question. The right question was "What do you do for a living, CSiUSA?" Too late, though.

CSiUSA:  I actually think she was a hair stylist.

And thus my point was proved: women who work in beauty salons are very smart about life. I didn't ask CSiUSA why he didn't marry Miss Completely Ignorant Perfect--probably because unbeknownst to him he hasn't sorted out his own feelings about class, or that she picked up that she can do better than a guy who thinks she's an "airhead." Like I said: beauticians I've met are very smart about life.

University-educated women can also be very smart about life if we stop thinking courting men works the same way as getting a job. I had a bad Pretend Mother moment when Polish Pretend Son wrote about some attractive Nordic atheist he had met who had umpteen scholarships but told him that he was the first man she had ever met who was smarter than her. Every pretend-maternal siren went off.

That Nordic woman was an evil genius, with real smarts as well as scholarships. I respected her the way you respect a worthwhile enemy, as does the hero of a Chesterton novel for his enemy, you know?  But virtue must triumph over evil, so I pointed out to PPS that he was being snowed, and now he's marrying a Nice Polish Catholic Girl*, so my job there is done.

One thing the rom-coms get right: if you want a boy to like you, and he already kind of likes women like you, impress upon him that he is smart and can add to your life. The one caveat is that you should pick a nice boy. I'm not sure CSiUSA is actually a nice boy.

*Incidentally, the NPCG is a doctor. But she got PPS's attention, which she didn't necessarily want that badly, by singing him a song about some nefarious fictional character of whom he reminded her. Song girls are such sirens, especially when they don't know it... Jordan Peterson would have a field day.

Update: One thing I think we would have problems getting men to admit is that men also always have been interested in marrying in such a way as to improve their financial circumstances. Anyone who  has read a Georgette Heyer novel--do men read Georgette Heyer novels?--should know this. It is quite obvious that one contemporary reason for men's rejection of marriage is that they believe (wrongly) that marriage is a bad financial risk. What is bad for finances is divorce, not marriage. Divorce-prevention is indeed very important but not impossible.

I once broke up with a guy who worried a little too obviously about my ability to earn money. That wasn't the only reason I broke up with him, but it certainly added to the Negative side of the ledger. I'm a bit more sympathetic to such concerns now, but then I was still of baby-having age.

Why Should the Man Propose

I woke up at four and turned in desperation to the computer. The Daily Mail featured some remarks by long-term girlfriends on Whisper about their longing for their boyfriends to propose. Several commentators wondered why the women wait for the men to propose instead of proposing themselves.

The answer to this is that a man proposing is the ultimate proof to his girlfriend that he really loves her and really wants to spend the rest of his life with her.

Duh.

When I was 15 I thought advice about not calling boys up and not asking them on dates and not asking them to dance was total fuddy-duddyism. Those were modern times, and my mother was totally out of touch with the modern world, etc. I was stung, but not convinced, by being called a brazen hussy. Calling girls brazen hussies is no way to pass on wisdom that completely contradicts everything we read in magazines and hear on TV.

The truth of the matter is that you don't call up boys, or ask them on one-on-one dates, or ask them to dance because if you do, you will never know if he really likes you or is just being polite or is just going along with it all because you are a girl--any girl. You may have begun a journey towards the humiliation that is attempting to assuage the tortures of doubt by asking the man you love if he loves you.

I hated, absolutely hated, my mother's assurances that "the woman doesn't get to ask, the woman gets to say 'Yes' or 'No'"--which, incidentally, is a brutally stripped down version of the call-response philosophy of Saint Edith Stein.  I hated the idea that instead of riding out into the world and winning the man I thought best-looking (etc.), I had to choose from whichever suitors rode up to my door. I was very pessimistic about my own attractions, which may have been humility but may also have been a kind of premature despair. Given a 15 year old daughter of my own, I would counsel her to commit herself to her schoolwork, to sports, to camping, to artistic pursuits and to put dating and dancing right out of her mind until university.

It may be salutary to explain how I won the heart of dear B.A., which was to sit very straight-backed on a couch in an Edinburgh New Town flat wearing a blue silk shift dress and pearls and listen very politely to an elderly Oxford graduate chat about Maurice Bowra, et alia. Also (for the millionth time), I had the very good fortune to resemble B.A.'s favourite singer, the pin-up idol of his university days. If you had told me at 15 that the way to a man's (or, anyway, the right man's) heart was to dress like Jackie Kennedy and not talk, I simply would not have believed you.