On the Corner of Nerdy and Gaslit

Boys won’t like you if you’re smarter than them. Who here has heard that old chestnut before? Or, if not that exact gem, something like it. I imagine a lot of hands are going to right now.

Even if we charged Lucy’s psychiatry prices every time, I think we could have avoided college debt. At the very least had a consistently swanky spring break.

My least favorite, or maybe it’s my favorite from a certain point of view, is the variant involving games or sports. To this day, my mom still uses that one. Although, in her case, it’s an absolute joke at this point. I both give and expect no quarter. This has been my policy since I can remember.

Being the baby of the family by a significant margin, I was always the youngest person at the table. And I could always tell when I was getting a pass on something. Words cannot express how much I dislike that sensation. I learned quickly to play up to everyone else’s level. And if I can do it, so can anyone else.

With age not being a factor worthy of special consideration, gender certainly wasn’t going to change my mind. In short, this was a lesson Mom was never going to impart to me. And the admonishment has passed into something she says to amuse herself. I like to imply there’s a certain measure of pride mixed in with the humor.

Our parents, friends’ parents, and authority figures aren’t the only ones on the hook for handing us this baggage. You’d end up with it even if those sources of influence were staunchly opposed to passing that on. Magazines, TV shows, movies all reinforce this misinformation.

By the time you’re old enough where boys don’t have cooties let alone actually old enough to date, you’ve been hearing this refrain for the better part of a decade. We might as well have gotten a sticker at the same time as our first day that reads: Hello, my name is Paula Aton.

That’s the name of Ingrid Bergman’s character in the 1944 film, Gaslight. The title of the film is no coincidence. This film spawned the terms “gaslighting” and “being gaslit” (as well as Angela Lansbury’s career). Gaslighting, for anyone not familiar, is the psychological manipulation of someone resulting in the person questioning their own sanity.

Jesus, if the irresistible Ilsa Lund barely had a chance, what hope is there for the rest of us? That thought rolled around in my head for quite a while. Sure it’s just a movie, but the phenomenon is a legitimate one.

I know this scenario isn’t dealing with our sanity so much as it is dealing with our abilities. I’d go as far as this is questioning our own worth. All the same, I feel like gaslit is still the correct term.

1999 was a big year for this kind of gaslighting on the big screen. I drank every minute of what was on offer. She’s All That, 10 Things I Hate About You, and Never Been Kissed spring to mind.

Never Been Kissed was more of a “promise movie,” seeing as Drew Barrymore’s character returned to high school and received gratification post mortem, so to speak. This movie depicted a future where a nerdy girl can have it all. So long as you get a makeover first, obviously. Rolls eyes. On the other hand, She’s All That spoke to many of my most desperate wishes at the time.

Wikipedia would like me to know that this was a modernization of Pygmalion/My Fair Lady. This correlation affronted my sensibilities on two fronts- first, My Fair Lady was a far superior movie in every respect. Second, that shows that more than one generation of women has dealt with this sort of gaslighting.

Seventeen years old me gave zero shits about that. She saw an “ugly” girl plucked out of obscurity and transformed into drop-dead gorgeous with a traditionally handsome boy on the side. I probably would have given my right arm for that to happen to me. Maybe even a foot to sweeten the deal.

That desire didn’t abate any as time went by. I was a poster child for Cheap Trick’s “I want you to want me” into my thirties. To this day, I call it my old theme song.

For the record, if anyone is keeping score, that’s not a song you want to select as your theme song. The road to that lesson was bumpy and fraught with loads of emotional bruising.

As proud as I am of my obstinacy against throwing games, I didn’t fare so well against the other variations of the adage that started this post off. I’ve been guilty of veiling interests and trying to morph myself into someone more socially acceptable. Which added up to little, if any, benefit to me.

I mean, really, all of that kind of masking was supposed to prevent scenarios where I was told I was intimidating or too tenacious. At least, that’s what was implied. If I kept my brain under wraps, I would be rewarded with being attractive to the opposite sex. That’s the contract that was set up from early on in my life, right?

This is what happens when you buy into bullshit.

There were always boys who would have liked me just as I was. That I enjoyed the fact, I read Star Trek novels. Who didn’t care if I didn’t look and dress like the cool kids at school. And a whole boatload of other things about me too.

I was too busy focusing on the mirage that had been set up long before I was born. The one meant to trick girls and women into contorting themselves into pretzels for the sake of the male ego. It took the better part of two decades to untangle myself from that.

Which begs the question, why are we still pushing that narrative?

This is an antiquated piece of nonsense. It needs to be retired to a museum or the dusty archives of a single, remote library. If girls are intelligent, well, then they should be lauded for their achievements. The achievement or lack thereof, in their male classmates, should have no bearing on them. There shouldn’t be a thought of trying to hide such things in the same way Donner tries to cover up Rudolph’s nose.

As much as this is a disservice to women and girls, it’s also an equal disservice to boys and men. They should be able to handle it. No, they need to be able to handle something so small as inequity in ability. The mollycoddling of the male ego needs to stop. Men are never going to be able to live in the real world otherwise. And that fact leads to a lot bigger problems than the one I’ve been talking about here.

From a young age, girls are asked to pick up a steamer trunk full of emotional labor and carry it so that boys don’t have to. Emotional labor needs to be a shared responsibility. As someone who has lugged that shit around, I am taking only what I need to survive, and that trunk doesn’t have my industrial-strength hairdryer in it.