Today, I need to prepare a certain faction of our population… I need them to be grromed for what’s in store… So that they are ready to embrace the terrible things that they face… Let me explain…
Ok, so today let me offer a word of warning to all you clever and intelligent females out there… Those females that dare be intelligent in public especially need to take heed of my words today… A public display of your intelligence could have the population turning against you… You need to prepare for the worst.
You may be called unpleasant names: Being labelled “a complete bitch” is the
tip of the iceberg, and you’ll need to have an ice-induced emotional numbness if you are to cope with what ensues.
Oh yes, because your looks are going to be discussed… Then all of those exams you have excelled in and all of those equations you have solved count for little else than mere flights of fancy while groups of people gather around water-coolers to discuss the hot topics of your attire, your chest, your chin, your skin and other related, yet extremely pertinent subjects too.
I must not forget to mention that people you have never met before will suddenly pay attention to and care about what you wear… The up-close scrutiny may leave you feeling violated. Expect it to be as merciless as a flock of papparazzi around a drunken, fallen celebrity…
Strangers will suddenly have opinions of you… They’ll severely dislike things about you that no-one ever noticed before… Like the way you tilt your head when pondering something and the way you dare to hold your hands together.
To top it all off… Many of those who have started to dislike you- as well as many of those who actually do like you — will discuss and imagine what sex with you might be like.
Because oh yes… If you enter the realms of this crazy behaviour… If you publicly display sheer intellectual brilliance… If you offer up a public display of a brain that works fabulously well… Then complete strangers from around the world will discuss:
Would you do her? Would I? Who’d give her one?
We all need to hide our brains away, do we? Because this is exactly what is currently happening to one of our own home-grown graduate students, namely Gail Trimble.
She has thrashed the competition on TV’s long running high-brow quiz show University challenge… She answered a massive percentage of her teams questions all by herself… She knows loads about subjects from science to theatre and everything in between… She triumphed!
The bespectacled 26-year-old virtually carried her team of fellow Oxfordians to victory this week… Are we celebrating her cleverness? Are we raising a glass in admiration and respect for the wonder of how she uses her brain to such marvellous effect?
No, not one bit.
In fact, her triumph has now spawned waves of hatred in blogs, where visitors are calling gail Trimble a “horse-toothed snob” and a “smug cow” and much worse.
It has featured on prime time news, even they discussed how so many people are taking a dislike to this girl.
“I can honestly say I have never seen an urchin of such intolerable smugness as that foul Trimble mess,” wrote a visitor to this hatemongering blog.
During the shows when I have watched her and when I have seen her interviewed, Gail Trimble came across as rather shy and self-effacing, and afterwards she seemed genuinely pleased to have won.
“Hated her! Really got quite angry!” posted another.
“Not for some time have I been so angry at a complete stranger as I was with this Trimble character,” raged yet another. There is more of this stuff:
“I wish her parents bible-bashed her a bit round the head before setting her loose on TV audiences. She ruined my already crappy Monday evening.”
No-one made you tune in! I can’t believe the assumptions and innuendo being made, even including references to her family…
“What she needs is a bad kebab about an hour before the final. Lets see how clever she is when it’s coming out of both ends!”
“By the way She’s deffo a V.”
“She looks like she would sob if someone cut more than two inches off her hair,”
“She may have exam/ quiz skills but does she have any social skills?”
Where are all these snipes coming from? Why is there so much disdain and seeming hatred for someone that I believe should be celebrated?
Educated at an all-girls’ private high school, Trimble was accepted at Oxford after earning top test scores in Latin, Greek, English literature and math. A classics major working toward a Ph.D in Latin, she has won a declamation prize for Latin recital, sings with choirs as a soprano, and teaches courses on Ovid and Hellenistic poetry.
There is a minor flipside of opinion… Yet the discussion content is still verging on hilarity:
“I must admit that I found her sexy,” ventured one blog visitor. Another mused:
“She’s a smoking hot minx with those sturdy, yeomanlike thighs itching to clamp you in their embrace.”
Hahahahaha… Man oh man…
It always seems to come down to that, doesn’t it?
Sure, the public disses and dissects and imagines sex with models and celebutantes as well. But what is it about brainy females that inspires such venting and wheezing?
This current example has surely gone beyond the standard anti-intellectualism by which many people equate high intellect with class struggle. But surely it can’t simply be that extreme intelligence in females is threatening. Surely it can’t be so reductive as that. Surely it can’t be that old chestnut, that ancient feminist cliché.
So what is it then? It has me very perplexed and utterly disappointed…
Reading that “hate piece” about Gail Trimble on that TV Scoop blog is an odd experience. As spiteful and full of rubbish as that “hate piece” is, it is quite clear that only someone with a strong intellect could have written such a piece.
The argument in the “hate piece” is nonsense and so full of holes you could drive a truck through it. But you would need to be quite intelligent in order to construct such an argument. I’m not sure whether “thick people” really exist but I’d hazard a guess that, if they do exist, they don’t vent their frustrations in online articles. Somehow, the writer of that “hate piece” learned how to write and how to construct an argument. That, in my mind, would make the hate piece writer very intelligent. Wrong in their views and infantile in their attitude but intelligent nonetheless.
So, what is the writer of the hate piece actually saying? I could be wrong but- if anyone can be bothered to dig a little deeper- I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that the writer of the “hate piece” is not a hugely popular, life-and-soul-of-the-party person but a frustrated intellectual who wasn’t asked to be on TV.
I have to say that I found Gail Trimble to be very, very sexy and- as far as I can gather- a kind hearted, nice person. I wasn’t sat there watching University challenge, periodically emerging from my TV watching to mouth moronic things like: “I’d give her one” or “I’d do here”. I found her sexy. She is beautiful physically but that wasn’t it. It was her intellect that made her sexy. As far as I could gather, her personality was good too and the idea that she was a nice person was also sexy but I was watching through a TV screen and one really ought not to make too much of a jugdement of someone’s character based on a TV show appearance.
I do not seek to and I hope I do not demean any woman by stating that one of the reasons I find her sexy is her intellect. A few weeks back there was a discussion on the journalism forum I network on about whether men feel threatened by intelligent women. One or two female journalists made the point that some men are not threatened by a woman’s intellect so long as that woman happens also to be physically attractive. I’m not trying to set myself up as some sort of perfect, new modern man. I make as much of a tit out of myself as every other man does. But quite a lot of men (myself included) reject the nonsense ideas of “universialism” (the corrupting darkness that suggests that one thing/form and one thing/form only is attractive and everything else is ugly. The fashion industry’s pet philosophy).
Attractiveness is and always has been relative. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and attractiveness is a composite picture. Intelligence is an attractive quality and intelligence does make you attractive but that attractiveness cannot survive unless it is matched by other factors within the personality or within the person.
Now, of course, an intelligent woman with a great personality and amazing passion for life goes up from attractive to gorgeous and that’s true of the male gender to.
As I said earlier, I don’t really believe in the existence of “thick” people. Intelligence is a powerful thing but knowledge is useless without application and there are many different forms of intelligence. Being able to do 100 sums in a minute isn’t much use when you’ve fallen down a hole and nobody’s got a rope to hand.
A lot of people have not been given the learning opportunities and encouragement that they need in order to follow their learning related dreams. This is not really anyone’s fault. Yes, there are terrible teachers out there but the majority of teachers are brilliant and work long hours for little pay. Yes, governments make nonsense decisions but there’s only so much Tax money to go around and human beings make mistakes.
One of the comments left on the “hate piece” article sums it up pretty well:
“Your hate piece seems less about her than about your own feelings of inadequacy. Try and remember that your failings are not her fault.”
The writer of that hate piece had decided to place the blame for their own failings at the feet of Gail Trimble. Sometimes, I worry that certain sections of the population seem to think attacking someone they’ve never met in an online public forum is a good idea. That’s not arguing. That’s cowardice. Would they say such things about her to her face? No. Because, like all bullies, they are just voices whispering in the darkness.
But what I worry about most is that anger is an energy source. You can use anger to have a positive impact on the world. You can use anger against the injustice of people dying or children not having enough to eat to raise hundreds of pounds for charity. But these days, quite a few people choose to throw their anger away by writing nonsense “hate pieces” about people.
Thank the Goddess for blogs like Adam’s where people can discuss ideas and respect each other.
I’d never heard of her since we don’t have that show here in the States, so I watched a bunch of Youtube videos of her performance and interviews, and I just don’t get why people are saying she sneers and smirks and does all that haughty smug stuff. She seems like many of my intelligent friends and quite frankly seems a bit shy and sweet. She seems like someone I’d love to have tea with, and is obviously someone with whom you could enjoy AMAZING conversations. It’s really a shame that she is the target of such vitriolic hate. I think she’s an inspiration. And really, in the places where I could see that someone might think she was smug or gloating, I thought it was clear that it was actually simply a case where she was enjoying the game. She was sitting upright with a very heightened-looking sense of awareness, and it looked like she was totally engaged in the competition – so I think the bottom line is that se was just having fun. How sad that se’s being so unfairly raked over the coals when she should be paraded through the streets.