Stop Telling Girls They're "Intimidating"

I was an abrasive child.  It’s hard to believe it now, I know, but it’s true.  When I was younger, I was as stubborn and opinionated as I was precocious.  I was a bossy, wild-haired girl who knew she was the smartest person in the room and wasn’t afraid to make sure everyone else knew it, too.  I was the first to raise my hand whenever a question was asked.  I got the top score on every test.  I even occasionally corrected my teachers. I didn’t worry about what other people thought of me, and yet (somewhat surprisingly, in hindsight) I had several good friends, some of whom I’m lucky enough to still call my friends today.

I still remember the first time I was told that I was intimidating.

It was an innocent remark.  My friend’s mom was driving me home, and she asked me if any boys liked me.  I was only in the fifth grade, and while I had a couple of good friends who were boys, I definitely wasn’t interested in them.  I’d had crushes, of course.  The boy who gave me Chicken in a Biskit crackers in third grade, for example.  And of course my fiancé from preschool, who held hands with me at naptime (Christopher Mattson, if you’re out there, I still think we’re meant to be).  But, for the most part, I thought of boys primarily as carriers for cooties.

So I said no.

“But you’re so beautiful and talented and smart!” said my friend’s mom.  “Boys are just intimidated by you.”

I was also only eleven.  I’m pretty sure boys mostly thought of me as a carrier for cooties as well.  But I was already being trained to think that if boys weren’t interested in me, there must be something wrong.

This conversation and variants thereof has been repeated countless times over the decade since then.  The same question and the same answer, always followed by that same well-intentioned phrase: “They’re just intimidated by you.”  It’s clearly meant as a comfort and a compliment, and almost always accompanied by a list of descriptive adjectives: “you’re so smart/pretty/talented/whatever.”  But the meaning underneath, unintentional as it may be, is this:

“If you are too smart/pretty/talented/whatever, boys will not ask you out.”

I can honestly say that I didn’t care at first. I didn’t care what boys thought.  I didn’t care what anyone thought. People liked me or didn’t.  I wasn’t going to change for anyone.  But the changes happened unconsciously.  They happened after the tenth time I was asked if I had a boyfriend, or the twentieth, or the hundredth.  They happened so slowly that I didn’t notice them.  I smoothed off the edges of my personality.  I stopped raising my hand in class. I stopped talking about my test scores or the latest book I’d read.

I didn’t try to dumb myself down, but I did stop voicing my opinions.  And then, without even realizing it, I stopped having opinions.  “I don’t know, what do you think?” became my default answer to any question.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve grown a lot as a person since elementary school.  A lot of the changes in my personality came from recognizing the importance of other people. I’ve grown less selfish and more caring, and I’ve learned to let go of a lot of my competitiveness.  Those are good things.  But I also lost a lot of self-confidence along the way.  And yes, I know that teenage girls are stereotypically insecure, but I think a lot of that comes from the pressures of our society.  A lot of our societal worth as girls and as women comes from whether or not we are desirable to men.  I’ve had a lot of conversations where “do you have a boyfriend?” precedes any questions about school or work or other interests.  An innocent question, but one that perhaps shows where our society’s priorities lie.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my 21 years on this earth, it’s that words have power.  “Boys are intimidated by you” and its variations (“the good guys probably think that you’re already taken”, “they’re just afraid you’ll turn them down”, etc.) are damaging words.  We are telling girls that being too smart or too talented makes them undesirable or unapproachable or undatable.  We are perpetuating a submissive feminine ideal in which women should be less intelligent or less talented than men.

That’s my opinion.  I know there will be people who disagree with it.  But, for the first time in a long time, I’m putting it out there anyway.

And as for me, I think I’ll hold out for the guy who honestly wants to know my thoughts on the Biedermeier period or the fusion of paganism and Christianity in the High Middle Ages or whether I preferred Faust or Doctor Faustus.  I think he’ll be well worth the wait.