And She's Hot Also

I was watching an episode of Bones the other day and marvelling at how Bones manages to have a perfect bod and porcelain complexion while being insanely smart and kicking butt with as much testosterone-fuelled ardour as Booth. Then there's Liz Lemon from 30 Rock who is a woman so cool and so hot at the same time that it's a wonder her appeal hasn't turned tepid since the show's debut. There's even Dr. Juliet Burke from Lost who is such a genius that she had a male rat give birth (yes, you read right) but has a waist that Dr. Jack 'Hottie' Shepherd can span with his hand and hair so luxuriously blonde you wonder whether there's an ad campaign for L'Oreal being shot secretly somewhere.

I mean what. the phug.

Is it a case of life imitating art or vice versa? Are all women really that attractive and cerebral? I mean I like the idea of a beautiful nerd as much as the next person but is it a bit disconcerting to be bombarded with media portrayals of ladies who look like supermodels and think like Nobel laureates? There is a sort of inverse sexism at work here: we often bemoan the fact that airbrushed pictures on magazine covers send out the wrong message to girls that they can only be valued if they look like that. But I have a bone to pick with this perverse sub-strand of chauvinism permeating our popular culture which communicates to girls an even more harrowing message: it's not enough to be smart. You have to look like that anyway.

Why I say this is more damning is because in the first instance, the entire value of a woman is being placed in her physique but in the second, value is actually being wrested away from her intellect and bestowed upon her physical appeal. It reminds me a bit of the Beauty Pageant and the imagery it evokes of a swimsuit-clad siren answering presumably thought-requiring questions. She could answer a (arguably more intelligent) question on the road, in a boardroom, at a university debate...but she does so flaunting her figure on a stage. I never really understood that. I firmly believe that a beauty pageant should be just that: a BEAUTY pageant; stop trying to endow it with some misguided notion of political correctness.

Coming back to my earlier contention about media portrayals of women, I read this article a year or so ago, in The New Yorker (here it is: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/07/23/070723fa_fact_denby) which mentioned the invasion of the slacker-striver pairing in romantic comedies of the past decade. You have a useless, dim-seeming, nice enough , non-fugly bloke coupling with a career-driven, successful, very pretty woman and this has been passed off as a rather staple archetype in not just romantic comedies but also TV shows since the mid '90s/early '00s. The idea is that the woman cannot be anything but bright and upwardly-mobile, efficient and alpha, professionally powerful and of course, she must be gifted with long legs and perky breasts to boot (the 18-35 male demographic being the prime consumer of romantic comedies???). As the article asks, where are the women who aren't that awesome? Are they languishing in development hell as the protagonists of Oscar bait 'women's movies' or as sidekicks and dispensable love interests of the hero in another male-oriented 'dick flick'?

My truck with this rests on aforementioned social and aesthetic grounds. But there is one last angle to consider: what about the men? If you google 'good looking nerd' you'll only get a bunch of pages about the hottest female celebs who also have a brain. But why is it that men aren't put under the same microscope? It can hardly be because women don't mind ugly, stupid partners...although that's what Hollywood (and Bollywood, though its problems are way more complex) is conditioning females to believe. And I don't think women are less shallow than men and don't mind a so-so face as long as he can string a sentence together. Why wouldn't girls want to be in the company of great looking guys who are also very smart?It's also a little dangerous to be repeatedly hinting to women that they should just 'settle' under the specious marquee a seemingly feminist 'self-fulfilment' agenda.

There'll be whole bunch of evolutionary theories and sociological responses entailing 'social capital' rationalising this trend, I'm sure, but to be fair to the real world, I have seen far more evenly matched couples (in both the IQ and the GQ departments) than scruffy, semi-literate schmos hanging with overachieving Ms 10s. I speculate that this problem is more restricted to the nebulous universe of the media but worry about the kind of pressure this is exerting on young women to not only work hard towards academic success but whip themselves into an hourglass while they're at it. Will women never be taken seriously just on the basis of just their intellect, a privilege men have been enjoying forever? Must they always have an also attached to their worth?

I like that a geek can be lovely, but if she isn't, nobody should give a damn.