Why Smart Women are Unattractive

It's often said that "smart women are unattractive." Now I know why.

I recently came across Paul Graham's "Why Nerds are Unpopular" essay and, together with a discussion I had with some of my geek-ette friends about the lack of normal-looking women on the screen, a light-bulb suddenly went off in my head. It was total internet kismet, where two seemingly disparate pieces of information traveled to me from all over the world as electrical impulses and locked like adjacent puzzle pieces in my brain.

For those who haven't read the essay, Graham posits that "nerds are unpopular because they have other things to think about." They don't work hard enough at being popular because it simply takes up too much mental RAM. He also theorizes that American high schools are such cruel social ecosystems not because kids are inherently nasty or teenagers are inherently crazy but that the typical American high-school is basically a holding pen divorced from reality. If you haven't yet, Read it..

I copy and pasted the essay into Word and made essentially just three substitutions -- "smartgirls" for "nerds" (and "smart kids"), "unattractive" for "unpopular" (and "attractive" for "popular"), and "femininity" for "school". If you'd indulge me and think of femininity not as a state of being but an actual place, smooth over some of the bumps and generally carry the metaphor through in your mind, it is stunning how much of the essay still made sense. (I've posted the entire searched-and-replaced text at the foot of this blogpost)

Some totally unedited clips from the search-and-replaced version:

"Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity."

"So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things."
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One particular aspect of the essay that really carried well in the search-and-replaced version is Graham's description of popularity as something that is cruel and twisted because it is a hierarchy that emerged out of a vacuum. It is form that emerged without function. It is devoid of connection to genuinely useful qualities that get stuff done in the real world, and as it is hierarchy that exists to be hierarchical, it is a zero-sum game. Just as not everybody could be popular, not everybody could be attractive. The way to claw your way up this kind of hierarchy is to be as conformist to the ideal as possible while pushing somebody else down. If a pill was invented tomorrow that will make all women instantly size zeros, the goalposts will shift to something else that is difficult to attain.

"Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that 'no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it.' I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists."

Now that I'm older and I can look at things a bit more objectively, I can see that I was not dealt a bad deck of cards, looks wise, by genetics. In fact, my mother was always especially anguished by the fact that I could be pretty if only I tried. If I bothered. Made some minimal efforts to be acceptable.

"The main reason smartgirls are unattractive is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable."

"Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we smartgirls didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others."

One of the thing I find myself doing more and more is wearing makeup not just for special occasion, but during workdays as well. It was a hefty initial investment in terms of learning how to do this in a way that is becoming. But now, it is perhaps an extra 10 minutes before I head out the door in the morning and an extra five minute at night taking it off. I don't like it because I can't touch my face and the make-up remover always hurts my eyes, but it's OK. So why do I do it? Pure behaviorism. People are nicer to me when I look prettier. They think more highly of me. But do you know what's scary? When everybody starts doing that, then it's no longer enough. Then it becomes the new bare minimum. That's the way it is in some offices...you don't go in to work bare faced. There's no version of professional attire that doesn't involve tricky clothing items like tights and heels. As an individual woman, I can become more attractive. With a little more effort, I can move up the chain. As women, we are collectively spinning the wheels like a hamster in a cage.

"A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American femininity, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison."

The truly depressing thing about this exercise is when it breaks down. Graham talks encouragingly about how nerds find that their lives get better as they enter college and then the real world. The following quote is the unaltered original:

"Few nerds can spare the attention that popularity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of attractive kids, they'll tend to become nerds. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after."

Just wait it out, Graham advised. The world you live in is a bubble that is cruel and stupid and pointless. But one day you'll graduate from high school and life will get better. But...I don't get to graduate from being a girl. I am a permanent resident in this holding pen from reality where my Dad wanted me to lose weight so badly he told me once he wished I would develop anorexia ("just mild anorexia."). I don't get to move on from a cruel and stupid world where where few films pass the Mo Movie Measure (movies that pass have (a) least two female characters, (b) who talk to each other and (c) about something other than a man). Heck, I don't even want to live in a world where there is a need for a Mo Movie Measure.

I was always an lousy dieter, even though I would try to lose weight all the time (my mom started telling me aged 8 to start watching my weight). My size would fluctuate according to how active I was, but not (except for the briefest periods) according to how little I tried to eat. I've been frustrated, I've been disgusted with myself, I've been depressed about it (esp. since getting back to Taiwan), I've been resigned (my new year's resolution was not to diet because I always fail to lose the weight anyhow.)

But it's not until now that I feel like I'm connected all the dots. As incredible as it seem...I didn't want to be thin. Not enough to give up food, which is a continual source of joy in my life. I didn't want to be chic and well-put-together all the time...because I'm more comfortable in jeans and sneakers.

Don't get me wrong. I love being a girly girl. I love dressing up for a party.

I weep to think of all the human ingenuity and effort and and productivity lost over a big shell game played with fashion magazines and anti-aging creams. They say that women aren't as competitive as men. But oh we are. We're just competitive over the one thing that we're told over and over again through so many different mediums is the only thing that makes us matter -- what we look like.

Full text: Why Smart Women are Unattractive

Why smartgirls are unattractive
Orignally'Why nerds are unpopular'

When we were in junior high school, my friend Frank and I made a map of the school lunch tables according to attractiveity. This was easy to do, because kids only ate lunch with others of about the same attractiveity. We graded them from A to E. A tables were full of football players and cheerleaders and so on. E tables contained the kids with mild cases of Down's Syndrome, what in the language of the time we called "retards."

We sat at a D table, as low as you could get without looking physically different. We were not being especially candid to grade ourselves as D. It would have taken a deliberate lie to say otherwise. Everyone in the school knew exactly how attractive everyone else was, including us.

My stock gradually rose during high school. Puberty finally arrived; I became a decent soccer player; I started a scandalous underground newspaper. So I've seen a good part of the attractiveity landscape.

I know a lot of people who were smart girls in school, and they all tell the same story: there is a strong correlation between being smart and being a nerd, and an even stronger inverse correlation between being a nerd and being attractive. Being smart seems to make you unattractive.

Why? To someone in femininity now, that may seem an odd question to ask. The mere fact is so overwhelming that it may seem strange to imagine that it could be any other way. But it could. Being smart doesn't make you an outcast in elementary femininity. Nor does it harm you in the real world. Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. But in a typical American secondary femininity, being smart is likely to make your life difficult. Why?


The key to this mystery is to rephrase the question slightly. Why don't smartgirls make themselves attractive? If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how attractiveity works and beat the system, just as they do for standardized tests?

One argument says that this would be impossible, that the smartgirls are unattractive because the other kids envy them for being smart, and nothing they could do could make them attractive. I wish. If the other kids in junior high femininity envied me, they did a great job of concealing it. And in any case, if being smart were really an enviable quality, the girls would have broken ranks. The guys that guys envy, girls like.

In the femininitys I went to, being smart just didn't matter much. Kids didn't admire it or despise it. All other things being equal, they would have preferred to be on the smart side of average rather than the dumb side, but intelligence counted far less than, say, physical appearance, charisma, or athletic ability.

So if intelligence in itself is not a factor in attractiveity, why are smartgirls so consistently unattractive? The answer, I think, is that they don't really want to be attractive.

If someone had told me that at the time, I would have laughed at him. Being unattractive in femininity makes kids miserable, some of them so miserable that they commit suicide. Telling me that I didn't want to be attractive would have seemed like telling someone dying of thirst in a desert that he didn't want a glass of water. Of course I wanted to be attractive.

But in fact I didn't, not enough. There was something else I wanted more: to be smart. Not simply to do well in femininity, though that counted for something, but to design beautiful rockets, or to write well, or to understand how to program computers. In general, to make great things.

At the time I never tried to separate my wants and weigh them against one another. If I had, I would have seen that being smart was more important. If someone had offered me the chance to be the most attractive kid in femininity, but only at the price of being of average intelligence (humor me here), I wouldn't have taken it.

Much as they suffer from their unattractiveity, I don't think many smartgirls would. To them the thought of average intelligence is unbearable. But most kids would take that deal. For half of them, it would be a step up. Even for someone in the eightieth percentile (assuming, as everyone seemed to then, that intelligence is a scalar), who wouldn't drop thirty points in exchange for being loved and admired by everyone?

And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Smartgirls serve two masters. They want to be attractive, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And attractiveity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary femininity.



Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American femininity kids work at attractiveity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being attractive every waking hour, 365 days a year.

I don't mean to suggest they do this consciously. Some of them truly are little Machiavellis, but what I really mean here is that teenagers are always on duty as conformists.

For example, teenage kids pay a great deal of attention to clothes. They don't consciously dress to be attractive. They dress to look good. But to who? To the other kids. Other kids' opinions become their definition of right, not just for clothes, but for almost everything they do, right down to the way they walk. And so every effort they make to do things "right" is also, consciously or not, an effort to be more attractive.

Smartgirls don't realize this. They don't realize that it takes work to be attractive. In general, people outside some very demanding field don't realize the extent to which success depends on constant (though often unconscious) effort. For example, most people seem to consider the ability to draw as some kind of innate quality, like being tall. In fact, most people who "can draw" like drawing, and have spent many hours doing it; that's why they're good at it. Likewise, attractive isn't just something you are or you aren't, but something you make yourself.

The main reason smartgirls are unattractive is that they have other things to think about. Their attention is drawn to books or the natural world, not fashions and parties. They're like someone trying to play soccer while balancing a glass of water on his head. Other players who can focus their whole attention on the game beat them effortlessly, and wonder why they seem so incapable.

Even if smartgirls cared as much as other kids about attractiveity, being attractive would be more work for them. The attractive kids learned to be attractive, and to want to be attractive, the same way the smartgirls learned to be smart, and to want to be smart: from their parents. While the smartgirls were being trained to get the right answers, the attractive kids were being trained to please.



So far I've been finessing the relationship between smart and nerd, using them as if they were interchangeable. In fact it's only the context that makes them so. A nerd is someone who isn't socially adept enough. But "enough" depends on where you are. In a typical American femininity, standards for coolness are so high (or at least, so specific) that you don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison.

Few smartgirls can spare the attention that attractiveity requires. Unless they also happen to be good-looking, natural athletes, or siblings of attractive kids, they'll tend to become smartgirls. And that's why smart people's lives are worst between, say, the ages of eleven and seventeen. Life at that age revolves far more around attractiveity than before or after.

Before that, kids' lives are dominated by their parents, not by other kids. Kids do care what their peers think in elementary femininity, but this isn't their whole life, as it later becomes.

Around the age of eleven, though, kids seem to start treating their family as a day job. They create a new world among themselves, and standing in this world is what matters, not standing in their family. Indeed, being in trouble in their family can win them points in the world they care about.

The problem is, the world these kids create for themselves is at first a very crude one. If you leave a bunch of eleven-year-olds to their own devices, what you get is Lord of the Flies. Like a lot of American kids, I read this book in femininity. Presumably it was not a coincidence. Presumably someone wanted to point out to us that we were savages, and that we had made ourselves a cruel and stupid world. This was too subtle for me. While the book seemed entirely believable, I didn't get the additional message. I wish they had just told us outright that we were savages and our world was stupid.



Smartgirls would find their unattractiveity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. Unfortunately, to be unattractive in femininity is to be actively persecuted.

Why? Once again, anyone currently in femininity might think this a strange question to ask. How could things be any other way? But they could be. Adults don't normally persecute smartgirls. Why do teenage kids do it?

Partly because teenagers are still half children, and many children are just intrinsically cruel. Some torture smartgirls for the same reason they pull the legs off spiders. Before you develop a conscience, torture is amusing.

Another reason kids persecute smartgirls is to make themselves feel better. When you tread water, you lift yourself up by pushing water down. Likewise, in any social hierarchy, people unsure of their own position will try to emphasize it by maltreating those they think rank below. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

But I think the main reason other kids persecute smartgirls is that it's part of the mechanism of attractiveity. Attractiveity is only partially about individual attractiveness. It's much more about alliances. To become more attractive, you need to be constantly doing things that bring you close to other attractive people, and nothing brings people closer than a common enemy.

Like a politician who wants to distract voters from bad times at home, you can create an enemy if there isn't a real one. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, a group of kids from higher in the hierarchy create bonds between themselves. Attacking an outsider makes them all insiders. This is why the worst cases of bullying happen with groups. Ask any nerd: you get much worse treatment from a group of kids than from any individual bully, however sadistic.

If it's any consolation to the smartgirls, it's nothing personal. The group of kids who band together to pick on you are doing the same thing, and for the same reason, as a bunch of guys who get together to go hunting. They don't actually hate you. They just need something to chase.

Because they're at the bottom of the scale, smartgirls are a safe target for the entire femininity. If I remember correctly, the most attractive kids don't persecute smartgirls; they don't need to stoop to such things. Most of the persecution comes from kids lower down, the nervous middle classes.

The trouble is, there are a lot of them. The distribution of attractiveity is not a pyramid, but tapers at the bottom like a pear. The least attractive group is quite small. (I believe we were the only D table in our cafeteria map.) So there are more people who want to pick on smartgirls than there are smartgirls.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unattractive kids, one loses points by being close to them. A woman I know says that in high femininity she liked smartgirls, but was afraid to be seen talking to them because the other girls would make fun of her. Unattractiveity is a communicable disease; kids too nice to pick on smartgirls will still ostracize them in self-defense.

It's no wonder, then, that smartgirls tend to be unhappy in middle femininity and high femininity. Their other interests leave them little attention to spare for attractiveity, and since attractiveity resembles a zero-sum game, this in turn makes them targets for the whole femininity. And the strange thing is, this nightmare scenario happens without any conscious malice, merely because of the shape of the situation.



For me the worst stretch was junior high, when kid culture was new and harsh, and the specialization that would later gradually separate the smarter kids had barely begun. Nearly everyone I've talked to agrees: the nadir is somewhere between eleven and fourteen.

In our femininity it was eighth grade, which was ages twelve and thirteen for me. There was a brief sensation that year when one of our teachers overheard a group of girls waiting for the femininity bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

It didn't have any noticeable effect. What struck me at the time was that she was surprised. You mean she doesn't know the kind of things they say to one another? You mean this isn't normal?

It's important to realize that, no, the adults don't know what the kids are doing to one another. They know, in the abstract, that kids are monstrously cruel to one another, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. But, like us, they don't like to dwell on this depressing fact, and they don't see evidence of specific abuses unless they go looking for it.

Public femininity teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.

In outline, it was the same at the femininitys I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric.



Why is the real world more hospitable to smartgirls? It might seem that the answer is simply that it's populated by adults, who are too mature to pick on one another. But I don't think this is true. Adults in prison certainly pick on one another. And so, apparently, do society wives; in some parts of Manhattan, life for women sounds like a continuation of high femininity, with all the same petty intrigues.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what femininity, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.

When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where smartgirls show to advantage. Bill Gates will of course come to mind. Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, at least as measured in revenue.

The other thing that's different about the real world is that it's much larger. In a large enough pool, even the smallest minorities can achieve a critical mass if they clump together. Out in the real world, smartgirls collect in certain places and form their own societies where intelligence is the most important thing. Sometimes the current even starts to flow in the other direction: sometimes, particularly in university math and science departments, smartgirls deliberately exaggerate their awkwardness in order to seem smarter. John Nash so admired Norbert Wiener that he adopted his habit of touching the wall as he walked down a corridor.



As a thirteen-year-old kid, I didn't have much more experience of the world than what I saw immediately around me. The warped little world we lived in was, I thought, the world. The world seemed cruel and boring, and I'm not sure which was worse.

Because I didn't fit into this world, I thought that something must be wrong with me. I didn't realize that the reason we smartgirls didn't fit in was that in some ways we were a step ahead. We were already thinking about the kind of things that matter in the real world, instead of spending all our time playing an exacting but mostly pointless game like the others.

We were a bit like an adult would be if he were thrust back into middle femininity. He wouldn't know the right clothes to wear, the right music to like, the right slang to use. He'd seem to the kids a complete alien. The thing is, he'd know enough not to care what they thought. We had no such confidence.

A lot of people seem to think it's good for smartgirls to be thrown together with "normal" kids at this stage of their lives. Perhaps. But in at least some cases the reason the smartgirls don't fit in really is that everyone else is crazy. I remember sitting in the audience at a "pep rally" at my high femininity, watching as the cheerleaders threw an effigy of an opposing player into the audience to be torn to pieces. I felt like an explorer witnessing some bizarre tribal ritual.



If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie. Not just femininity, but the entire town. Why do people move to suburbia? To have kids! So no wonder it seemed boring and sterile. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children.

Where I grew up, it felt as if there was nowhere to go, and nothing to do. This was no accident. Suburbs are deliberately designed to exclude the outside world, because it contains things that could endanger children.

And as for the femininitys, they were just holding pens within this fake world. Officially the purpose of femininitys is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a disaster to have kids running around loose.

What bothers me is not that the kids are kept in prisons, but that (a) they aren't told about it, and (b) the prisons are run mostly by the inmates. Kids are sent off to spend six years memorizing meaningless facts in a world ruled by a caste of giants who run after an oblong brown ball, as if this were the most natural thing in the world. And if they balk at this surreal cocktail, they're called misfits.



Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the smartgirls. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

Adults can't avoid seeing that teenage kids are tormented. So why don't they do something about it? Because they blame it on puberty. The reason kids are so unhappy, adults tell themselves, is that monstrous new chemicals, hormones, are now coursing through their bloodstream and messing up everything. There's nothing wrong with the system; it's just inevitable that kids will be miserable at that age.

This idea is so pervasive that even the kids believe it, which probably doesn't help. Someone who thinks his feet naturally hurt is not going to stop to consider the possibility that he is wearing the wrong size shoes.

I'm suspicious of this theory that thirteen-year-old kids are intrinsically messed up. If it's physiological, it should be universal. Are Mongol nomads all nihilists at thirteen? I've read a lot of history, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance seem to have been cheerful and eager. They got in fights and played tricks on one another of course (Michelangelo had his nose broken by a bully), but they weren't crazy.

As far as I can tell, the concept of the hormone-crazed teenager is coeval with suburbia. I don't think this is a coincidence. I think teenagers are driven crazy by the life they're made to lead. Teenage apprentices in the Renaissance were working dogs. Teenagers now are neurotic lapdogs. Their craziness is the craziness of the idle everywhere.



When I was in femininity, suicide was a constant topic among the smarter kids. No one I knew did it, but several planned to, and some may have tried. Mostly this was just a pose. Like other teenagers, we loved the dramatic, and suicide seemed very dramatic. But partly it was because our lives were at times genuinely miserable.

Bullying was only part of the problem. Another problem, and possibly an even worse one, was that we never had anything real to work on. Humans like to work; in most of the world, your work is your identity. And all the work we did was pointless, or seemed so at the time.

At best it was practice for real work we might do far in the future, so far that we didn't even know at the time what we were practicing for. More often it was just an arbitrary series of hoops to jump through, words without content designed mainly for testability. (The three main causes of the Civil War were.... Test: List the three main causes of the Civil War.)

And there was no way to opt out. The adults had agreed among themselves that this was to be the route to college. The only way to escape this empty life was to submit to it.



Teenage kids used to have a more active role in society. In pre-industrial times, they were all apprentices of one sort or another, whether in shops or on farms or even on warships. They weren't left to create their own societies. They were junior members of adult societies.

Teenagers seem to have respected adults more then, because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now most kids have little idea what their parents do in their distant offices, and see no connection (indeed, there is precious little) between femininitywork and the work they'll do as adults.

And if teenagers respected adults more, adults also had more use for teenagers. After a couple years' training, an apprentice could be a real help. Even the newest apprentice could be made to carry messages or sweep the workshop.

Now adults have no immediate use for teenagers. They would be in the way in an office. So they drop them off at femininity on their way to work, much as they might drop the dog off at a kennel if they were going away for the weekend.

What happened? We're up against a hard one here. The cause of this problem is the same as the cause of so many present ills: specialization. As jobs become more specialized, we have to train longer for them. Kids in pre-industrial times started working at about 14 at the latest; kids on farms, where most people lived, began far earlier. Now kids who go to college don't start working full-time till 21 or 22. With some degrees, like MDs and PhDs, you may not finish your training till 30.

Teenagers now are useless, except as cheap labor in industries like fast food, which evolved to exploit precisely this fact. In almost any other kind of work, they'd be a net loss. But they're also too young to be left unsupervised. Someone has to watch over them, and the most efficient way to do this is to collect them together in one place. Then a few adults can watch all of them.

If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. The problem is, many femininitys practically do stop there. The stated purpose of femininitys is to educate the kids. But there is no external pressure to do this well. And so most femininitys do such a bad job of teaching that the kids don't really take it seriously-- not even the smartgirls. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions.

In my high femininity French class we were supposed to read Hugo's Les Miserables. I don't think any of us knew French well enough to make our way through this enormous book. Like the rest of the class, I just skimmed the Cliff's Notes. When we were given a test on the book, I noticed that the questions sounded odd. They were full of long words that our teacher wouldn't have used. Where had these questions come from? From the Cliff's Notes, it turned out. The teacher was using them too. We were all just pretending.

There are certainly great public femininity teachers. The energy and imagination of my fourth grade teacher, Mr. Mihalko, made that year something his students still talk about, thirty years later. But teachers like him were individuals swimming upstream. They couldn't fix the system.



In almost any group of people you'll find hierarchy. When groups of adults form in the real world, it's generally for some common purpose, and the leaders end up being those who are best at it. The problem with most femininitys is, they have no purpose. But hierarchy there must be. And so the kids make one out of nothing.

We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a attractiveity contest. And that's exactly what happens in most American femininitys. Instead of depending on some real test, one's rank depends mostly on one's ability to increase one's rank. It's like the court of Louis XIV. There is no external opponent, so the kids become one another's opponents.

When there is some real external test of skill, it isn't painful to be at the bottom of the hierarchy. A rookie on a football team doesn't resent the skill of the veteran; he hopes to be like him one day and is happy to have the chance to learn from him. The veteran may in turn feel a sense of noblesse oblige. And most importantly, their status depends on how well they do against opponents, not on whether they can push the other down.

Court hierarchies are another thing entirely. This type of society debases anyone who enters it. There is neither admiration at the bottom, nor noblesse oblige at the top. It's kill or be killed.

This is the sort of society that gets created in American secondary femininitys. And it happens because these femininitys have no real purpose beyond keeping the kids all in one place for a certain number of hours each day. What I didn't realize at the time, and in fact didn't realize till very recently, is that the twin horrors of femininity life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause.



The mediocrity of American public femininitys has worse consequences than just making kids unhappy for six years. It breeds a rebelliousness that actively drives kids away from the things they're supposed to be learning.

Like many smartgirls, probably, it was years after high femininity before I could bring myself to read anything we'd been assigned then. And I lost more than books. I mistrusted words like "character" and "integrity" because they had been so debased by adults. As they were used then, these words all seemed to mean the same thing: obedience. The kids who got praised for these qualities tended to be at best dull-witted prize bulls, and at worst facile schmoozers. If that was what character and integrity were, I wanted no part of them.

The word I most misunderstood was "tact." As used by adults, it seemed to mean keeping your mouth shut. I assumed it was derived from the same root as "tacit" and "taciturn," and that it literally meant being quiet. I vowed that I would never be tactful; they were never going to shut me up. In fact, it's derived from the same root as "tactile," and what it means is to have a deft touch. Tactful is the opposite of clumsy. I don't think I learned this until college.



Smartgirls aren't the only losers in the attractiveity rat race. Smartgirls are unattractive because they're distracted. There are other kids who deliberately opt out because they're so disgusted with the whole process.

Teenage kids, even rebels, don't like to be alone, so when kids opt out of the system, they tend to do it as a group. At the femininitys I went to, the focus of rebellion was drug use, specifically marijuana. The kids in this tribe wore black concert t-shirts and were called "freaks."

Freaks and smartgirls were allies, and there was a good deal of overlap between them. Freaks were on the whole smarter than other kids, though never studying (or at least never appearing to) was an important tribal value. I was more in the nerd camp, but I was friends with a lot of freaks.

They used drugs, at least at first, for the social bonds they created. It was something to do together, and because the drugs were illegal, it was a shared badge of rebellion.

I'm not claiming that bad femininitys are the whole reason kids get into trouble with drugs. After a while, drugs have their own momentum. No doubt some of the freaks ultimately used drugs to escape from other problems-- trouble at home, for example. But, in my femininity at least, the reason most kids started using drugs was rebellion. Fourteen-year-olds didn't start smoking pot because they'd heard it would help them forget their problems. They started because they wanted to join a different tribe.

Misrule breeds rebellion; this is not a new idea. And yet the authorities still for the most part act as if drugs were themselves the cause of the problem.



The real problem is the emptiness of femininity life. We won't see solutions till adults realize that. The adults who may realize it first are the ones who were themselves smartgirls in femininity. Do you want your kids to be as unhappy in eighth grade as you were? I wouldn't. Well, then, is there anything we can do to fix things? Almost certainly. There is nothing inevitable about the current system. It has come about mostly by default.

Adults, though, are busy. Showing up for femininity plays is one thing. Taking on the educational bureaucracy is another. Perhaps a few will have the energy to try to change things. I suspect the hardest part is realizing that you can.

Smartgirls still in femininity should not hold their breath. Maybe one day a heavily armed force of adults will show up in helicopters to rescue you, but they probably won't be coming this month. Any immediate improvement in smartgirls' lives is probably going to have to come from the smartgirls themselves.

Merely understanding the situation they're in should make it less painful. Smartgirls aren't losers. They're just playing a different game, and a game much closer to the one played in the real world. Adults know this. It's hard to find successful adults now who don't claim to have been smartgirls in high femininity.

It's important for smartgirls to realize, too, that femininity is not life. Femininity is a strange, artificial thing, half sterile and half feral. It's all-encompassing, like life, but it isn't the real thing. It's only temporary, and if you look, you can see beyond it even while you're still in it.

If life seems awful to kids, it's neither because hormones are turning you all into monsters (as your parents believe), nor because life actually is awful (as you believe). It's because the adults, who no longer have any economic use for you, have abandoned you to spend years cooped up together with nothing real to do. Any society of that type is awful to live in. You don't have to look any further to explain why teenage kids are unhappy.

I've said some harsh things in this essay, but really the thesis is an optimistic one-- that several problems we take for granted are in fact not insoluble after all. Teenage kids are not inherently unhappy monsters. That should be encouraging news to kids and adults both.