COLUMN: When It's Hip to Be Hippy

By Tobin Barnes
It’s the age-old conundrum for men. What’s more important in a woman? Looks or intelligence?

Makes their heads spin.

Believe it or not, men don’t necessarily want both.

That’s if you believe a study on speed dating.

You heard me, a study on speed dating, conducted by two psychologists and two economists. That’s a lot of brain power for a thimble-sized subject. At first glance, whole thing seems like hunting rabbits with a rocket launcher. Must have gotten a government grant.

The lead researcher is Ray Fishman who, according to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, met his future wife, a doctor, on a blind date. The doctor, Ellie Grossman, was later discussing her prospective catch with her grandmother, who told her, “Never let a man think you’re smarter. Men don’t like that.”

The couple married after she proposed. Apparently, she wasn’t going to hide her brains under a bushel with the coy lassie approach. (Boy, is that ever a mixed metaphor.)

But according to Fishman’s study, Grandma’s perception of men is generally correct.
Fishman and his colleagues conducted their two-year study at a local bar near Columbia University in New York. The gist of his research recently appeared in Slate:

“We found that men did put significantly more weight on their assessment of a partner’s beauty, when choosing, than women did. We also found that women got more dates when they won high marks for looks.”

Now it’s not like men are complete glamour hogs. They prize intelligence, too, according to the study, but only to a certain extent.

“It turns out that men avoided women whom they perceived to be smarter than themselves,” reports Fishman. “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.

“We males are a gender of fragile egos,” Fishman concludes, “in search of a pretty face and are threatened by brains or success that exceeds our own.”

Okay, nothing new there. Any guy could have told you that without a two-year study. We’re admittedly a less-than-profound gender.

But what are we male troglodytes going to do if we add the above to the following information:

According to another recent study, women with a lot of curves are not only more intelligent than less curvaceous women but also bear more intelligent children.

This research was undertaken by Steven Gaulin of UC at Santa Barbara and William Lassek of the U of Pittsburgh. A couple more big guns.

Here’s the reason, they say, for this apparent paradox: Curvy women store more omega-3 fatty acids in their hips, and it’s omega-3 that help builds babies’ brains. Evidently, there’s a prime ratio of small waist to expansive hips that works best, and they’ve even quantified it. But, obviously such calculations are too erudite for a column of this stature.

But here’s what I’ve gathered. Curvy mothers have curvy daughters and so on, and that’s where the smarts come from.

What’s important is that this flies in the face Marilyn Monroe, Anna Nicole Smith, and other such bombshells. Their curves dictate that they were smarter than they put on. And thus, the curvy dumb blond becomes an urban legend, if scientific research is to be believed.

Even more to the point, what about the poor, testosterone-muddled schlub searching for Miss Right? According to the first study mentioned, all this time he’s been trying to find a woman who’s less intelligent and less ambitious than he.

And cripes!

He’s been looking in all the wrong places.