This is a thought I have had the last couple of days, and I believe it to be born out of the knowledge that our Little Doodle was found to be a girl.  Whilst having a healthy, happy baby was far more important to me than having a preference on gender I did have a number of fears related to raising a girl, primarily those surrounding the unobtainable standard of beauty fed to us by our western culture at every turn, or the early sexualization of girls through the ever-increasing demand for adult clothing in children’s sizes.   And I started thinking.

The problem as I see it is we place too much emphasis on looks, clothing, and other superficial means of relating to one another.  Every way you turn there is another clothing store opening up offering the latest fashions sure to make you look fantastic and attractive.  Next to these clothing stores you have beauty shops, filled to the brim with every lotion and potion and pill you could imagine, from those that will clear your skin up to those that will help make you appear ten years younger.  There are salons for your hair, feet, and hands with people working inside who have made a career out of making these very specific parts of your body look as great as possible.  And for the all over makeover, the gym and health industry is a multi-billion dollar a year juggernaut.

And all for what?  To attract other people.  I would say to attract a mate but we know that such personal grooming doesn’t stop at the nuptials.  In fact, looking good is so important in our society that it is the first thing we judge a person on, we have made an industry out of idolizing the most gorgeous among us as celebrities, and to think how many hours of our lives go into dwelling on worrying about how we look, physically, to others.  How much of our own self worth is attached to this obsession for being attractive, thin, pretty, and therefore, worthy.

Could you imagine what the world would look like if we were just as obsessed with intelligence, instead of physical appearance?  Instead of those endless malls filled with clothing stores you would have book stores and libraries, learning centers and lecture halls.  The beauty stores would be replaced with stores pushing ways of being smarter, such as the newest technology in sleep memorization… and the audio CDs for any subject you could desire.  And, for the price and time of that mani-pedi, why … you could pop into an entirely different kind of spa and perhaps be given a 30 minute course in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, because a little knowledge in gothic literature would make you all the more attractive.

It would be a world where poetry and prose were discussed in circles of friends instead of the latest dirt on some vapid celebrity.  A place where red carpet events would be held for the greatest minds of this century for math and science, with the paparazzi close to hand to snap photos of these new kind of stars as they walked into the building. Where instead of a party celebrating the latest in mediocre films there would be a celebration of the latest breakthroughs in science.  Sports would be replaced by matches of intellectual prowess and the money of those past sports figures, oh God the amount of money that used to go into inflating the salaries and egos of  drug-fueled sports figures would go towards funding research for diseases, and these bright minds behind the research would be printed on posters that hang in a child’s bedroom, reminding the budding young enthusiast of what he could one day grow up to become.

But sadly this type of world would never exist.  It simply isn’t encoded in our genetics to value intelligence over looks.  After all, the pea hen does not inquire as to what the peacock thought of the morning sunrise, instead her determination to mate with him is based solely upon the intensity of his plumage and the manner by which he waves it around.  It’s the case in selecting a mate species to species, and hasn’t left our own primal ambitions simply because we’ve evolved into sentient beings. We will never live in a society like the one I’ve described because we are nothing more than, as the band Incubus put it, “apes with ego trips.”

So, to go full circle, I worry about raising a daughter in the world in which we DO live: the beauty obsessed, celebrity worshiping culture that has formed.  I worry that any influence I try to instill in the importance of intelligence will be equally countered by her peer group’s desire to discuss wastes of space like Kate “Jordan” Price, or that a good book in the park will not be as valued as time spent shopping for short skirts and lipstick.  And I worry, more than anything, that she will end up as I did: developing early, looking and feeling awkward among her peers, and being cast aside or even picked on for things that really shouldn’t matter in life.  Because really, what is the importance of intelligence to a child when they are made to feel bad about themselves at school?  I assure you, none of my peers cared I had read Gone with the Wind at age 9, or that at age 11 my reading level tested equal to that of a 2nd year university student.  They cared only that I was a little heavy and looked different.  And that’s such a shame.

We are faced with the challenges ahead in raising a girl, and I can only hope that we can give her enough confidence to hold her head high and be who SHE wants to be, and not what society tells her she should aspire to.

Share on Facebook

3 Responses to “The importance of intelligence.”