Reader Submitted
June 11, 2008
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SUBMITTED BY XORN SMITH: Here’s a question I’m asking myself a lot lately: if I find smart women attractive and then, because they’re attractive, make them the object of a sexual fantasy, am I really undercutting their intelligence and objectifying them? Or is it a good thing if I’m only objectifying them because they’re smart in the first place?

Case in point: a couple weeks ago I posted a thread about writer Ariel Levy and how I wished she wasn’t a lesbian so I could take her to coffee and eventually convince her to come back to my place and wear the Wonder Woman costume. (OK, I left the last part out.) Still, I’m attracted to her because she’s a smart, erudite woman, yet once the attraction kicks in, I revert to trying to force her into pre-programmed sexual fantasies that frankly have barely matured since I first conceived most of them in the early Eighties. So am I progressive and open-minded for being turned on by smart, insightful women or am I shallow and chavenistic for then making them the focus of my adolescenct fantasies?

Second case: for a while I’ve been struck by the fact that somewhere at Harvard University is two-thirds of the most potentially explosive threesome any smart-woman-loving guy could hope for, especially one who also likes redheads and international politics. I refer, of course, to the Belfer Center for Science and International Affair’s Meghan O’Sullivan and the Carr Center for Human Right’s Samantha Power. When it comes to hot late-30’s female intellectual redheads, Harvard is like the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls. (If hot red-headed intellectuals in their late thirties, were, you know, alien artifacts.)

For those who don’t know, Samantha has written two amazing books, A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, and Chasing the Flame, a biography of Sergio Vieira de Mello, the UN envoy killed by a suicide bomber in Iraq in 2003. For A Problem from Hell, she won the Pulitzer Prize. She also co-founded the Carr Center for Human Rights while still in her twenties. You might also know her as a senior adviser to Barack Obama, although she recently resigned from the campaign after having the bad sense to express an honest opinion in front of a reporter.

Meghan was rather unfairly dubbed The Lady Who Fucked Up Iraq by Wonkette. From my perspective, she was a mid-level official at the State Department when the war started and then invested the next five years of her life trying to make a really bad situation better, including spending extensive time on the ground in Baghdad. She went, she tried, and for that I give her mad props. She was purportedly banned from the Pentagon by Don Rumsfeld, which also has to count for something.

In short, both women are smart and dedicated to the public good and hot and at Harvard at the same time. Isn’t it only natural to imagine myself as the meat moderator in their bottomless debate? And, since they’re on opposite sides of the political spectrum, shouldn’t one’s mind naturally drift towards thoughts of intellectual chick fights, ideally involving whip cream?

(To recap, one risked her life trying to help sort out the mess in Iraq, the other wrote the definitive book on genocide and I’ve reduced them to bikini wrestling with dairy products.)

So once again I’m stuck with the question: chauvenistic or progressive?

Yeah, probably chauventistic. Maybe slightly progressive, with an overwhelming dose of immaturity, which actually sounds pretty accurate.

But look, I like smart women. I like shallow, cliched fantasies. At this point in my life I don’t think either is going to change. So I can see it now…

Meghan and Samantha are up late debating the necessity of obtaining a UN mandate before deploying military forces in support of humanitarian intervention. There’s a pause in the heated discussion. Meghan mentions she likes Samantha’s lip gloss. Samantha takes off her sweater because it’s getting hot with the AC shut down for the night. They both decide they can go for pizza and before you can say “Gina Gershon and Jennifer Tilly” I show up in my old Domino’s delivery uniform with a copy of Henry Kissinger’s A World Restored under one arm and in seconds we melt into an equilateral of hot, burning intellectually antagonistic love.

Is that really so wrong?

[Photo by Aaron Jacobs]