In this somewhat tongue-in-cheek article we examine the difference in intelligence between men and women. The normal bell curve distribution is often addressed metaphorically to describe women’s distribution in parameters like intelligence as being taller and narrower, while that of men’s is flatter and wider. This essentially makes the point that men occupy a wider variation on parameters like intelligence; from incredibly dumb to incredibly smart, while women occupy a comfy medium. There is less variation in performance and abilities among women than there is among men. It turns out that, on average, the intelligence of men and women is the same.
This is all well and good, except that there is another dynamic playing out in gender differences. There is something called sexual dimorphism. [11] This is a term from the mainstream biological sciences where the male and female evolve to acquire different phenotypic traits. And in the case of intelligence, there are actually grounds to infer that provided-for women who never have to do anything except shop shop shop, text text text and dance dance dance finish up actually losing their intellectual capabilities. In their provided-for lives, without moral responsibility, their brains actually appear to rot. They do become dumber. In order to appreciate why this should be so, we need to dump the mainstream evolutionary psychology (EP) paradigm grounded in genocentrism. [5] If this offends genocentrists, then be warned. Muff your ears and cover your eyes. This article is not for you.
Habits of indulgence
Men and women value attractiveness in women. Especially within the Anglosphere, a woman’s entire worth is established almost exclusively on her physical appearance and how she packages it. The EP crowd have an explanation for the importance of female beauty. They will blather on about attractiveness as being an indicator of health, superior genes, etc. Meanwhile, the Game and PUA community worship beautiful women at the Altar of the Vag, and women who can package themselves to look attractive enjoy privileges and entitlements that are not extended to those women who either fail to pay attention to their packaging, or for whom no amount of packaging can salvage.
But there is one dimension of womanly existence that is never taken seriously, especially within our current zeitgeist, and that is a woman’s intelligence. Personality may rate to some extent…her readiness to laugh at men’s jokes, her social savvy, her ability to get drunk just like men do, her ability to establish belonging within a huge group of girls, etc. But these are aspects more related to group-think and conformity rather those deeper qualities that we associate with intelligence… such as curiosity, integrity, skill, commonsense, courage, etc. This raises a most important question. Can the disconnect between beauty and brains ever be reconciled? In terms of universal possibilities, I’m confident that it can; in terms of human life on Earth and our current trajectory, the answer is no, it cannot. Trying to reconcile the beauty-brains disconnect within the context of our zeitgeist and culture is a fool’s errand.
Atrophy of the mind
It is well established now that PUAs, as performing seals begging for fish, routinely work themselves into a lather about what women think of them, and then construct elaborate strategies to demonstrate to their objet de l’amour that they don’t care what women think of them. The extent to which women’s opinions matter is proportional to where these women rate on the attractiveness scale. The unspoken rule is that the opinions of nines and tens are weighted more than the opinions of fives and sixes, while the opinions of ones and twos are weighted probably nothing at all. There is no rational reason for this instinctive association between attractiveness and credibility. It’s a subconscious reflex, a bias.
This manner of thinking comes about because of the EP paradigm and the genocentrism on which it is based. Women who are deemed to be attractive are valued more, and so game theory extends the fantasy by rationalizing that they must also be “better” at other things, such as intelligence. These “higher quality” women demonstrate their intelligence in their social savvy. This is naught but projection, receiving its inspiration from a culture obsessed with female beauty and then attributing to it various assumptions that are unfounded.
But let’s take a closer look…What if the reverse is actually true? What if intelligence is more likely to be inversely proportional to attractiveness? There is sound reason to expect precisely this to be the more likely truth. There are various theoretical frameworks available to suggest this; whether they are grounded in religion, customs, psychology, semiotics or science, for example, and within many of these frameworks is the idea that habits play a crucial role in character formation. [6][7][8][9]
Sometimes these habits might be described in terms of “units of imitation”, and this brings us to the field of memetics and the spread of memes. [10] Where do these habits, or memes, come from? The answer is…culture. The provided-for sex has permission to be, well, provided for. These days, a woman has permission to work (if she wants) or to do nothing (if the fancy takes her). Affirmative action grants her freebies and entitlements to which men have no comparable access. And of course the prettier that a woman is, the more privileges and entitlements she can wallow in. For all her practical utility, she might as well be a brain in a vat.
Traditionally, women’s stay-at-home option was a part of the marriage contract, a division of labour that came with responsibilities, from raising and schooling children to domestic and social duties. Implicit within this contract was moral conduct. Sharing the load with her husband, these environmental pressures and the attendant division of labour between the sexes constantly tested everyone at the boundaries between self, family and environment. So imagine how intelligent…not…today’s prettiest stay-at-home must be, given that she no longer bears the onus of these responsibilities. Today’s provided-for stay-at-home must be the ultimate hippopotamus wallowing in freebies for which she does not have to account. She is a parasite sucking the lifeblood from her clod provider and as useless as a brain in a vat. A brain in a vat is not sustainable – without stimulation from the environment, it is destined to turn to mush.
Now it is true that women often derive considerable stimulation from texting, gossiping, shopping and dancing. However, these forms of stimulation are not comparable to things like fixing a car, creating a computer, composing a work of art, or working out a business strategy. So what do we notice here in the differences in the ways in which men and women think? In women, it’s the absence of decision-making. There is no outcome to decide on in the process of texting, gossiping, shopping or dancing, beyond consolidating popularity with your girlfriends or more simply: pure indulgence for its own sake. And while housework and shopping for the family have an important part to play in domestic responsibilities, decision-making is rarely as consequential for women as it is for men.
There are limited risks in deciding on one brand of hairspray over another. For women, there are no consequences for mistakes that are comparable to getting sand in your engine, or misaligning the head of your engine, or messing up a masterpiece, or creating a short circuit on a circuit board, or your opponent getting wind of your strategy. Men have to make things work… often to the extent that it can become a matter of life and death. For women, texting, gossiping, shopping and dancing are not quite as dangerous or risky. Many things that women do can be done in their pyjamas, without even having to venture beyond the front door. Women’s activities may stimulate memory and white matter (glia), but they won’t stimulate the grey matter…the neurons. Maybe that’s why women age so much quicker than men…with the limited stimulation that texting, gossiping and dancing can provide, things must get old for them very quickly.
And here we come up against an essential property of all living things. Namely, a mind that is never tested is a mind that atrophies. Use it or lose it. And it does apply as much to men as it does to women, it’s just that men’s role as utility device limits their options for being an unproductive parasite. There is evidence that the “use it or lose it” principle is pervasive throughout the animal kingdom.
Sexual dimorphism in the Angler Fish
Feminists will be delighted to read of the apparent role reversal between the male and the female Angler Fish (refer Wikipedia here). [1][2] The female Angler Fish is everything that the “you-go-grrrl” crowd could hope for. She is the embodiment of what feminists project that they notice in men. She patrols the ocean as an independent, free spirit, hunting for her food using the fleshy lure dangling in front of her mouth to attract food. She is the provider, maintaining her modest harem of clingy males in the lifestyle to which they have become accustomed. The differentiated sex roles of the Angler Fish is an example of sexual dimorphism. [11]
It wouldn’t be quite accurate, though, to think of her harem of clingy Angler Fish dudes as castrated. Rather, quite the opposite – it’s not their testicles that disappear, but their body. Their testicles become the most important aspects of their being. Their only value appears to be in becoming testicles. If we recall Germaine Greer’s famous quip describing women as life-support systems for wombs, well, the poor male Angler Fish’s mind and body amount to nothing more than a homing device for testicles. Once this homing device for testicles has accomplished its goal – which is to pair up with a female (much like a PUA) – the rest of his being atrophies. His brain, his digestive organs, liver, eyes – everything but his testicles – basically, “poof”…vanishes.
The reason that the human PUA does not atrophy as completely as the male Angler Fish, however, is that though his intelligence, honor and integrity are compromised in his reliance on validation from women; he is a utility device who still has to provide for himself. His somewhat diminished existence continues to be tested in the workplace. His productivity would be rather limited if all that remained of him was a pair of testicles. Now, as disappointing as the PUA is as a human being, his usefulness as a utility device will exact demands of him that will always test his existence at his boundaries. In the case of the male Angler Fish, by contrast, no comparable demands are placed on his survival, because he is fully provided for in the nutrients that he receives from his provider host – his entire identity is thus destined to atrophy, though his testicles will remain. The male Angler Fish, in contrast to the male human, can sustain his existence as a pair of testicles, once he has found true love in Angler Fish heaven.
So what can we make of this, in terms of understanding the nature of human intelligence? The nature of intelligence has always been a source of controversy. How do we measure it? We won’t attempt to answer this question in the course of this article. However, we can infer some appreciation of the nature of intelligence by considering the behavioural trajectory of the male and female Angler Fish.
The male Angler Fish, for all intents and purposes, ceases to exist once his testicles, attached to the female Angler Fish, become the last remaining vestige of his being. The female, by contrast, maintains a robust identity, with her body and brain fully developed. Attached to the end of her elongated dorsal spine is a fleshy “lure” that she is able to dangle in front of her mouth. She is thus able to provide for herself. As a provider, her conceptualisations of reality are constantly being tested, and so she maintains a fully functioning mind-body that does not atrophy. Furthermore, not only is she able to fend for herself, but she is also able to provide for her harem of clingy males (up to six at a time), who draw their sustenance from her body at the point at which they first attached themselves, back when their minds and bodies were intact as homing devices for testicles (before they became mere testicles).
So what lessons do we take away with us from the Angler Fish? Firstly, we need to incorporate a systems [12][13] view of life, and the idea that living entities self-organise in order to accommodate the choices they make (this contrasts with the evolutionary-psychology perspective that presumes that everything is accounted for in the genetic blueprint). In this context, the human brain rewires itself to accommodate the choices that a person makes – refer to Norman Doidge [3] and Gerald Edelman [4], and the idea that the brain is a kind of ecosystem comprised of neurons. Provided we accept the systems view, then the following reasoning makes perfect sense:
1) Any living entity whose existence is not tested at its boundary, atrophies. While aspects of this atrophy can be noticed over its lifetime, if the absence of environmental stimuli persists over the generations for all members of the species, then the atrophy becomes especially important to its evolutionary trajectory. If an entity’s muscles are not tested, they become flabby. If its eyes are not tested, then, over the generations, they disappear. And of course, if its conceptualizations are not tested, its synaptic connections degenerate, and its brain atrophies, both within its lifetime, and over the generations. Systems theory resonates with aspects of Lamarckism;
2) The sex that provides is constantly having its conceptualizations of reality tested at the boundary. Well-defined physical strength, mental agility, resourcefulness, agency, are resources that are essential to making decisions at the boundary (in this context, “boundary” refers to the point of equilibrium between organisational structure and environmental pressures – an organism is only as muscular or intelligent as it needs to be in order to ensure its survival);
3) The sex that is provided for also has its conceptualizations tested at the boundary, but because being provided for imposes fewer demands, atrophy in comparison to the provider is inevitable.
When pretty is ugly
So, what’s the bottom line? Intelligence might be difficult to define, especially given the current state of our life sciences. But the end points of a trajectory can be established with some amount of certainty. The mature male Angler Fish, at the end-point of his provided-for trajectory, for all intents and purposes has no brain. By inference, the mature female human, at the end-point of her provided-for trajectory, has an atrophied brain in comparison to the male. The only way that the human female can avert neural atrophy is by moral conduct, because it is only in moral conduct that her conceptualizations can be tested at any boundary that is comparable to that of the male. It is only in moral conduct that she can realize that there is a price to be paid for indulging in freebies that are not earned.
Affirmative action and the pussy pass in all matters costs men not only in terms of their rights, identity and dignity, but it also costs women in terms of their psychological and emotional development. And so it makes sense that, in immoral cultures where the most “attractive” women are the ones most likely to be provided for, they are going to have the most atrophied brains, they are most likely to find fulfilment as emotionally stunted doormats, and thus the least stimulating company…unless of course you are a PUA, who will linger on a dumb ten’s every word as the basis for his validation.
There is, however, a solution to overcoming one’s biases favouring “attractive” women. You can do this at a deeper, subconscious level. When you see a “beautiful” woman, learn to see an atrophied brain-in-a-vat. Her visage, insofar as you can extrapolate what lies beneath the makeup, is defined by a featureless topography devoid of the lines that define character. We need to revive ideas that have been practised in various world religions, from Christianity to Buddhism and Hinduism. The modern, pretty, atrophied brain-in-a-vat is a self-obsessed, vacuous, bovine creature that is unlikely to care for sharing in your adventures or hearing what you have to say.
Such is the reality of “attractive” women, at least within our zeitgeist. Men and women value physical attractiveness in women, but many of us value other dimensions of attractiveness, such as character. The idea of an attractive woman with courage, dignity and self-respect is, in the mainstream, logically incongruent. Within the contemporary zeitgeist, with its current moral decline, the combination of beauty and brains is pretty much mutually exclusive. It is a combination that is most likely to be realized only in cultures where men do not put women on pedestals.
CONCLUSION
With the impoverished state of our life sciences, the nature of intelligence has not been settled. This catastrophe is multiplied with the current state of our moral cultural decline. However, not all is lost. We can infer some things about the nature of intelligence from the developmental trajectories of other creatures, at their end points. We’ve thus been able to establish that organs, such as brains, do atrophy in the absence of stimulation from the environment. Indeed, in the example of the male Angler Fish, we have conclusively established that the atrophy can be virtually complete.
The bottom line is this. If the modern woman seems kinda dumb, well then maybe that’s because she really is.
REFERENCES
[1] Angler Fish – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglerfish
[2] Angler Fish (male) – http://theoatmeal.com/comics/angler
[3] Doidge, Norman – http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html
[4] Edelman, Gerald – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Edelman
[5] Genocentrism – http://darwins-god.blogspot.com/2009/05/genocentrism.html
[6] Habits – http://www.quotegarden.com/habits.html
[7] Habits – James, William – http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/Principles/prin4.htm
[8] Habits – Peirce, Charles Sanders – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Sanders_Peirce
[9] Habits – Sheldrake, Rupert – http://vimeo.com/11653660
[10] Memetics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memetics
[11] Sexual dimorphism – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_dimorphism
[12] Systems theory – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systems_theory
[13] Systems theory (Ludwig von Bertalanffy) –
http://www.panarchy.org/vonbertalanffy/systems.1968.html
