Smart girls, be warned: Publicly display more of your intelligence than some sectors of the population can handle, and prepare for the worst. You will be called nasty names: "bitch" is the least of your worries. Your looks will be discussed -- and all those tests you've aced and equations you've solved suddenly make water-cooler topics of your chest, your chin, your skin. Strangers will care what you wear. The scrutiny burns holes right through your clothes. It's merciless. Strangers will hate aspects of you that never irked anyone before: the way you tilt your head when wondering, the way you fold your hands. Many of those who despise you -- and many of those who don't -- will fixate on what sex with you might be like.
Publicly display astounding intellect, my young friend, and strangers will ask each other and themselves:
Would you do her? Would I?
This is what's now happening to a British grad student named Gail Trimble. Answering questions on everything from science to theater, the bespectacled 26-year-old carried her team of fellow Oxfordians to victory on the TV quiz show University Challenge this week, spawning waves of hatred in blogs, where visitors rushed to call Trimble a "horse-toothed snob" and a "smug cow" and worse.
"I can honestly say I have never seen an urchin of such intolerable smugness as that foul Trimble mess," wrote a visitor to one blog. On the show and in interviews, Trimble came across as rather shy and self-effacing, albeit glad to have won.
"Hated her! Really got quite angry!" posted another.
"Not for some time have I been so angry at a complete stranger as I was with this Trimble character," raged yet another. Others chimed in:
"I wish her parents bible-bashed her a bit round the head before setting her loose on TV audiences. She ruined my already crappy Monday evening."
"What she needs is a bad kebab about an hour before the final. Lets see how clever she is when it's coming out of both ends!"
"By the way She's deffo a V."
(I'm just guessing here, but I think that translates to: "definitely a virgin.")
"She looks like she would sob if someone cut more than two inches off her hair," sniped one blog visitor. "She may have exam/ quiz skills but does she have any social skills?"
Educated at an all-girls' private high school, Trimble was accepted at Oxford after earning top test scores in Latin, Greek, English literature and math. A classics major working toward a Ph.D in Latin, she has won a declamation prize for Latin recital, sings with choirs as a soprano, and teaches courses on Ovid and Hellenistic poetry.
"I must admit that I found her sexy," ventured one blog visitor. Another mused:
"She's a smoking hot minx with those sturdy, yeomanlike thighs itching to clamp you in their embrace."
It always comes down to that. Sure, the public disses and dissects and imagines sex with models and celebutantes as well. But what is it about brainy females that inspires such venting and panting? It goes beyond the standard anti-intellectualism by which many people equate high intellect with class struggle. But surely it can't simply be that extreme intelligence in females is threatening. Surely it can't be so reductive as that. Surely it can't be that old chestnut, that ancient feminist cliché. So what is it then?
