Quick, Put Some Bromide In That Woman’s Tea
It’s no secret that a lot of straight women find brainy men swoonworthy, including me (Armando Ianucci, be still my beating heart).
Add a sense of humour to nerdiness and we’re gone, which explains why Stephen Colbert was chosen as one of the sexiest men alive ( “Eat it, James Dean!”), along with the enduring popularity of shows like Beauty and The Geek.
But this next, from Salon via Pharyngula, just makes my skin crawl and all my many and various sphincters clench, it’s so over-the-top, schoolgirl crushy. Even my toenails are cringing. Though if a schoolgirl ( at least at my school) had written this and her friends found it, they’d be dancing round her in a circle singing “Take the shame, take the shame!”. She’d never live it down, ever. It’d turn up on Friends Re-united or MySpace 30 years later. The piss-taking would just go on and on, with excerpts read at her funeral.
Yes, it’s that bad. Have a sick-bucket handy.
After South Park made such a botch of it’s portrayal, this might be some vindication: Salon names Richard Dawkins as one of the sexiest men living. It’s a bit gushy, I’m afraid.
Wonder is sexy. Knowledge is sexy. And embodying both as much as any man in the world today is a man in a tweed jacket riding his bike around the Oxford University campuses, the damp English breeze sweeping a curtain of silver hair from the delicate bones of his face. Yes, those cheekbones, those piercing eyes, that pursed bow of a mouth — but that brain, oh that brain, oh, god, that brain — is what makes Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist and the most famous atheist in the world, the sexiest man around.
Dawkins is the professor I never had an affair with, whose very sentence structure threatens to weaken my concentration on the content of his words. Call me deluded: I ache for his atheism; I reel from his reasoning. He is my James Bond, a well-attired, fearless seeker of truth in the face of nihilism. And yet, for all his pedigree, he enthusiastically appeared this fall on “South Park” to spread the gospel of science, his dashing cartoon figure covered in the feces of a teacher who scoffs at evolution.* While scatology isn’t my thing, straddling the highest of the ivory highbrow with the glorious lowest of the low: Now that’s sexy.
Gushy? I applaud PZ’s dignified restraint. I might’ve said something much more extravagant, like oleaginous, or slavering. And it’s Cambridge that’s more famous for its hundreds of bikes.
Damn it, it doesn’t even make any logical sense; Dawkins is the professor none of us ever had an affair with. One can only hope the writer at least has the excuse of youth and/or intoxicants on her side. But a horrible thought occurs – is Peggy Noonan moonlighting? It is rather reminiscent of her at her servile, fawning best. Naah, it can’t be – she’d never have the hots for a godless atheist like Dawkins. But no, actually the byline says Lauren Sandler.
Take the shame, Lauren!
[Image by the Romance Novel Cover Generator]
Read more: US Media, Sexiest Men Alive, Richard Dawkins, Lauren Sandler
