Grandmother’s advice? Not necessarily, Maureen Dowd tells us today. Ray Fisher, a Columbia economics prof, conducted a two-year study which led him to conclude:
It isn’t exactly that smarts were a complete turnoff for men: They preferred women whom they rated as smarter — but only up to a point … It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves. The same held true for measures of career ambition — a woman could be ambitious, just not more ambitious than the man considering her for a date.
… So, yes, the stereotypes appear to be true: We males are a gender of fragile egos in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.
Dowd goes on to recount the recent bad news for successful, intelligent women that the NY Times has been recording, some of it covered on this blog. And the news about having a zaftig figure (big hips = smarter kids) comes as no surprise after this post.
One has to wonder how one’s very bright friends ever ‘find a man.’ Hmmmmm.
Feminist Philosophers 
Maureen is constantly saying that she is too smart to attract a man. Methinks the lady doth protest to much. That column is a huge list of dating excuses.
Change “to” to “too.” I’m not really that illiterate. Just too quick on the submit button.
Of the guys I know, brightness would be strongly correlated with “not dating”. Maybe bright people just make for more demanding partners.
Heh. I had a post related to this back in January, about what sorts of conclusions we can draw from anecdotal evidence that (as Pelle Carlberg puts it) “clever boys like clever girls more than clever girls like clever boys.”
The claim that there’s an imbalance in how heterosexual men and women value intelligence in dating relationships doesn’t strike me as nearly as ridiculous as some of the other claims that Dowd makes here — zaftig figures, etc. It’s at least interesting to see what looks like empirical evidence supporting the anecdotal evidence I talk about in my post back in January.