Erotica Makes You Dumb?
A friend pointed us in the direction of Booksthatmakeyoudumb, a “scientific” inquiry into the correlation between what books you’ve read and how smart you are — or at least how good your SAT scores are.
What’s interesting — to us at least — is that all three books that are classified as “erotica” fall towards the “dumb” end of the scale. Does reading erotica actually make you dumb? Or are smart kids just less likely to admit to reading the dirty books?
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It’s either going to make you dumb, or really smart. Seeing how a good number of women that read erotica aren’t the type of lady you’d want to take home, to anyone, I can see the corrulation. Also men rarely actually read erotica, and seeing how masturbating to porn isn’t on the scale I can’t comment in that direction. Though I’m sure it doesn’t help our score much.
January 29th, 2008 at 1:44 pmI like to think it’s made me a super genius with an amazingly extensive vocabulary. If by “vocabulary” you mean “knowledge of euphemisms for fucking.”
January 29th, 2008 at 1:58 pmI saw this on Boing Boing and I have three big problems with this site: One, some of the books listed, such as Lolita, I wouldn’t classify as erotica; two, the books classified as “African-American” were near the low end of the spectrum and I’m pretty sure most of the schools with the lowest scores were predominately African-American; three (which kinda ties into two), SAT scores aren’t a good indicator of intelligence but rather how well you can guess A, B, C, D or E on a bubble sheet.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:55 pmRD:
All good points — though Lolita is classified as a Classic.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:24 pmErotica certainly makes me stupid. Even the sight of a pretty girl in a cotton dress on the first warm day of spring makes me lose all powers of speech, most powers of navigation and coordination, and the majority of my higher cognitive functions.
The difference is that the study implies that erotica-based stupidity is long term, while I’ve always found that my faculties return in the afterglow period, or after a cold shower.
January 29th, 2008 at 3:35 pmAh, but Lolita is way up on the scale. And literature doesn’t get much more (at least seemingly) erotic than that :). Smart people just like smarter sexy things!
January 30th, 2008 at 7:05 amLolita was originally identified as erotica, but was changed to classic when site viewers took issue with the classifications. I think classic is more appropriate because it’s not really meant chiefly to titillate.
I think these books were culled from lists of “favorite” books. A lot of erotica tends to be “easy” to read because it’s meant to be hot, not great art (and only a few masterpieces are really both, like Lolita). If your favorite book, out of all the wonderful literature in the world, is The Notebook, or something by Zane, or even Wuthering Heights, then maybe you don’t so much lack IQ points as lack imagination.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:41 amLeave a reply :