Dear Rachel: Why Are Guys Intimidated By Brains?
Dear Rachel,Why are guys so intimidated by brains?–CarleyDear Carley, you totally smart girl for asking,Here are big reasons guys get intimidated by smart girls:Guys can feel pressure to act like slackers, so they come off like they don't care about school or being smart (even though so many of them are secretly working really hard behind closed doors). The nature of slacking is that you don't think brains are sexy. You think picking your butt is. So you're not going to act super psyched about a girl who's anti-slack. To him, she's a wet blanket.
Masculinity is an issue. I don't mean the sensitive new aged kind, but old-fashioned, conventional masculinity. A lot of guys think it's cool to be strong, never cry or show feelings, and drop things out of windows to see what happens.
Hand in hand with this very classy and mature way of being goes an expectation that girls – YOU – will play the "damsel in distress" role to their big Thor manly man. You will be conventionally feminine: cute, small, passive, bubbly and ditzy. (Have you ever noticed how when girls act stupid in class they get big laughs from some guys? That's what I'm talking about. The girl who's breaking down the roots of class warfare isn't getting a lot of love.)Or it could be because they're acting like idiots. That one just stands on its own, dontcha think?The unwritten rules of how to act and look like a cool guy plague both guys and girls throughout school. Veteran readers of this column know that you can't take high school (or middle school for that matter) as an indication of how real life will roll for you. Most of you are just going to have to suck up and deal with the warped rules of who gets attention, boyfriends/girlfriends, status and rewards until you are freed, I mean, graduate.But it gets better, really! Not long ago, one of the biggest tools I went to high school with called me up. He was like, "I am so sorry for being such a tool. I don't know what was wrong with me. I get it now. I am a normal human being. Can we be friends?" And we totally are. So the good news is, people change. They get strong enough to challenge gender rules and be themselves.
Bottom line is, you keep on being the smart thing you are. Work hard, get passionate and outraged about what matters to you, and you'll launch yourself in to the world you want, not the world you're forced to deal with in high school.
Someday soon, you'll have much more freedom to choose the people you meet and hang out with. And you'll discover that a lot of the guys who used to act like idiots have come to their senses.Good luck!This post originally appeared on teenvogue.com