If you wanna be happy
For the rest of your life
Never make a clever woman you wife
So from my personal point of view
Get a ditzy girl to marry you
As others have pointed out, SDMB males are self-selected and non-representative of the general population. Personally, I have difficulty wanting any non-trivial physical contact with people I don’t at least like and I have difficulty liking someone who’s dumb.
YWTF,
I picture a Steve Harvey type, how far off am I? Was he religious?
You mean a dumb ass with a ridiculous moustache?
Exactly. It comes as no surprise to me that a guy would want a cute girlfriend that doesn’t bitch all day. What guy wouldnt want that? It’s when a guy presses the point as if he’s saying something profound that it becomes disturbing.
I’m not angry at the guy. Just amazed and perplexed that he would express his preference and then be surprised at my negative reaction. He looked at me like a confused dog when I concluded aloud that he’s not interested in me as a person.
Doper men may be minorities, I don’t know and I don’t care. Its still somewhat comforting that most men who have posted in thread see the obnoxiousness in what he said.
No, he is not Steve Harvey-ish and he’s not religious. He doesn’t act like a know it all when it comes to women. In fact, his over-reliance on generalizations and rudimentary stereotypes makes me think he hasn’t had a ton of relationship experience. He doesn’t have female friends.
Hoo boy.
Indeed.
There you go!
I can’t imagine why. 
We’ve had threads with the question “Have you ever stopped dating someone because they weren’t smart enough for you?”, right? I know I’m attracted to guys smarter than me, for whatever reason, and have definitely been NOT attracted to a few guys that would have been great, except I just…wanted them to be smarter than they were. Kinda like guys who might really like a girl except they’re just not attracted physically. If I’m not attracted mentally, nothing else really matters, unfortunately. The flip side of that means that I’m likely dating someone who’s dating someone not-as-smart as they are…I’m married now, so it’s moot. 
And we have different interests, different emotional levels, different everything, but I’d put intelligence about even. He’s smart when it matters. 
But for pure sexual attraction…yeah. Give me the smart, geeky Jewish boy every time. <don’t tell MrTao!> 
I for one have never thought that unintelligent men valued intelligence. I’m not sure why you made that the big thing, and not the fact that he wanted no interaction at all, apparently just wanting someone who was pretty. That’s the moral problem. The other is probably just because he doesn’t value intelligence himself.
I personally don’t value intelligence, per se. I value the ability to converse in abstractions. It doesn’t matter if you have a lot of knowledge as long as you are capable of thinking. I don’t need someone I can discuss the most complicated things with. One of my previous girlfriends was a D student, but we got along so well because she thought about what she did know. (in fairness, her ADHD was part of why she was a bad student.)
It’s about us getting along, being compatible. It makes sense to me that someone not of an intellectual bent wouldn’t value intelligence, as it would just create distance between you. But wanting “females” to sit in a corner and be pretty? That’s a misogynist.
I didn’t make it the big thing, at least intentionally. Let me reiterate again that this isn’t just about him not valuing intelligence. It’s everything other than being physically attractive and “nice”. Intelligence is just one of many traits he specified as being irrelevant to him, which is why I used the word. If I had to post this thread over again, I’d drop “intelligence” since it seems to be a distraction.
The guy isn’t dumb either (except when it comes to wooing me into bed, apparently). He prides himself on how smart he is and he is fairly accomplished. It’s a mistake to assume only an anti intellectual dummy would say something like this.
I’m sorry, but what exactly does smarts get me?
I see what niceness gets me. It gets me someone pleasant to be around and someone that will occasionally do nice things for me. Which is not the same as being a doormat or a dog. I want someone that sees I am having a bad day and does something to cheer me up. Or randomly does something to show she cares. If I find someone that does that, am I supposed to cry myself to sleep because she doesn’t know what the Heisenburg Uncertainty Principle is?
Well, that depends. Can you say *Planck’s constant *with a mouthful of broccoli?
I’m sorry, but this is not a smart question.
At a minimum, having a smart partner makes it more likely that you will have smart children. Most people want their kids to have what it takes to get ahead in this world, and success in our society generally requires having the ability to learn quickly and apply knowledge skillfully. It also means being able to delay gratification and exercise sound judgement with minimum assistance from others. If you want your children to be smart, then you shouldn’t be indifferent about intelligence in your mate, as she will not only be contributing to them half of their genes but will more likely be their primary caregiver.
Having a smart wife means she can take responsibility for managing household finances without sending yall into bankruptcy for failing to understand how compound interests works. This is the kind of blunder than unintelligent people make all the time. They focus on the principal and completely ignore the implications that a high interest rate has on the bottom line. They also fall for pyramid schemes and the like because they lack the ability to think critically. Why wouldn’t you want someone who is good at putting two and two together? Why wouldnt you want someone is able to solve complex problems?
Beyond that, having a smart partner is important if you value having someone can talk about abstract concepts in insightful ways. Unintelligent people often can’t converse on anything other than people, places, and things. Ask them to talk about their opinion on healthcare reform and you might embarrass them because they won’t be able to say much except platitudes.
Everything from a person’s sense of humor to their vocabulary are in large part shaped by their intelligence. Someone who isn’t smart or is intellectually incurious will have a harder time understanding the fun in posting on a message board than someone who is smart and intellectually curious. They might actually view you with contempt for this activity, as much contempt as you’d view someone who passes the time looking at reality TV all day.
What i dont get is why none of this universally obvious. Intelligence isn’t like an inconsequential trait like eye color. It is something that serves a purpose and is highly valued in our society. I can think of plenty more costs to being with someone who is unintelligent than being with someone who is smart. In fact, I can’t think of any tradeoffs to being with someone who is smart. Maybe you can educate me on what these trade offs might be.
What does being with someone unintelligent get you, in other words?
If I am above average in intelligence and my parter is somewhat below average, that means we are going to end up with average to above average children, not knuckle-dragging morons. Besides, if happiness is the goal in life, being nice is a lot more beneficial. There are a lot of smart people who are alone and miserable. On the other hand, very few genuinely nice people are unhappy.
We aren’t talking about someone with the intellect of a 12 year old. The vast majority of adults are intelligent enough to manage their personal finance. As for the rest of it, people get into bankruptcy and fall for pyramid schemes because of greed and an inability to live within their means. Neither of which are directly related to intelligence. A lot of very smart people lost a lot of money investing with Madoff, and a lot of very smart people lost their shirts because they took out mortgages they couldn’t afford.
I have coworkers, friends, message boards, and random strangers I can talk to about healthcare reform. None of those people will make me feel better with a random gesture of kindness or a long hug after a bad day like a girlfriend/wife can.
I’m not choosing unintelligent over intelligent. The question was, “why don’t men value intelligence as much as niceness?”. If the choice is between intelligent and not that nice, and nice but not that intelligent, I am taking nice every time.
[QUOTE=treis]
The question was, “why don’t men value intelligence as much as niceness?”. If the choice is between intelligent and not that nice, and nice but not that intelligent, I am taking nice every time.
[/QUOTE]
You asked MoL to explain what smarts get you, as if it’s a complete mystery as to why a man would value an intelligent woman.
It is not a radical thing to want someone who is nice. In the real word, no one is ever forced to choose between smart and nice, because mean and unpleasant people arent even supposed to be in the running. That’s how much niceness is a given to the whole species. Smart/nice is a false dichotomy anyway.
That’s what I kind of thought, before the global economic meltdown of 2008 that was caused by people not understanding that you can’t buy things you can’t afford.
My cousin, who is a surgeon, expressed this more than once and went ahead and married based on his beliefs. Do I like him? No, he’s an unpleasant dick who does crap like routinely insulting my sister’s medical specialty to her face because she went to a higher ranked med school than he attended. Do I like his wife? Yes. She’s sweet, loyal and puts up with his ass-ishness on a daily basis. She’s no intellectual, but I think she deserves more than him. He may make shitloads of money, but she’s the nicer, more pleasant person to be around.
His parents had previously set him up with umpteen doctors, lawyers, engineers and whathaveyous and he roundly wrote all of them off as high maintenance before admitting that he wanted a stay at home wife with no interest in a career. The fact is that he has huge issues with control, and not having a financial upper hand over a woman makes him nervous. I know a few of the women he “rejected” (most of whom ran the other way because he’s such a dick) and smart and uber-nice are not exclusive. He wanted nice and financially dependent and that’s what he got.
It was a rhetorical question. I understand the benefits of being with a smart person, but ultimately they are insignificant. Do you really expect me to say: “Gee, Sally was fun, attractive, and always did the sweetest things for me. But she wasn’t very bright and I was worried about her genetic suitability for mating, if she could handle our personal finances, or talk intelligently about politics, so I broke up with her.” Of course not.
I’ve never consciously thought these words, but a lady colleague of mine told me I have a predilection towards dating airheads. So perhaps the proof is in the pudding, in this case. I don’t know why the hell you would voice such an opinion to someone you were dating, though.
“Gee, Sally was fun, attractive, and always did the sweetest things for me. But she says the most embarrassing things, she doesn’t like to challenge herself, and she’s always doing really stupid things that make question her parenting abilities. So of course I broke up with her.”
It may not be what you would say, but I think most people do care about an individual’s intellect to a certain extent. There’s “book smarts” and then there’s the “good sense that your mama gave you.” A lot of people lack the first, but they make up for it with the last.
If we are just talking about intelligence (my previous post interpreted the OP as really meaning personality) then I’m not convinced it’s such a huge plus for women either.
Stuff like ambition, charisma, sense of humour etc women like, but you can have all that and be hopeless when it comes to understanding new concepts or solving abstract problems. Intelligence, at least in the traditional sense of the word, I just don’t see being a big factor at all.
Obviously you’ll rarely see, say, a female doctor falling for the janitor, but IMO that’s more a social status thing than IQ.
And there is a big wide zone of acceptability between “so stupid they are actually irritating” and “pretty fucking smart”.