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A headline I spotted recently in the Sunday paper read "Profilers Find Helen Hunt Sexy, Smart and Amazing." In the column, from the New York Daily News, writer Sherryl Connelly lambastes media males for making a big deal out of the fact that a woman (in this case Hunt) can be both sexy AND smart, as if these two things were mutually exclusive. Connelly quotes a feminist scholar who says, "What they're saying essentially is that if you're beautiful, why would you bother with brains? It's like a double major." I say, nothing wrong with a double major these days.
I always loved the librarian stereotype seen so often in movies and television. There she is, a vision of dowdiness in her too-heavy glasses, her tightly bunned hair and her fusty brown sack dress. But she knows her Dewey Decimal system and can quote Shakespeare with the best of them. Suddenly, her workday over and seemingly no public eyes upon her, she takes off her glasses, lets down her hair and cinches up her overcoat, and va-va-va VOOOOOM! There's a drop-dead gorgeous woman fronting those brains.
It seems to me this male fantasy of "pretty is as pretty pretends to be an idiot" is, thankfully, a lot more rare than it was even twenty years ago. Back then, a woman had to hide her feminine wiles in order to be a competitor in the game played by the boys in the three-piece suits. For a time, women in the business world even affected the look of the suit and tie by wearing those ridiculous floppy bowed blouses underneath their darted suit coats. No more.
"That Girl" may be a bit dated, but the idea of "free to be you and me" lives on. And while it's no good for anybody to be walking around the office — or standing in front of the lecture hall — dressed like a tart, there is no longer a need to hide the fact that in possession of those brains is indeed a woman, and maybe even a tantalizing one. More and more, it's becoming less and less of a surprise to men to have a lascivious Ms. come up to them and, suddenly, ignite their intellect.
Bernadette Noll lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband Kenny and their daughter Lucy. Her e-mail is [email protected].
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