was talking with someone the other day about a brilliant critic. oh yes, yes, she agreed, he was so brilliant, my god. "i want to have his babies!" she gushed. and i'd been thinking about that particular way she put it, not at all unusual for women in school, in fact i'm always hearing women in school say that, i say it myself half the time. i particularly remember one time some of us in prof t.'s fan club were exclaiming how much we adored him, and i announced, "oh yes, i would totally sleep with him!" whereupon a chorus of "me too!" broke out. why do women, smart women, academic women, tend to experience intellectual admiration as sexual desire? as far as i can remember i've never heard a male colleague say that they wanted to sleep with (female) professor so-and-so because they were so brilliant (though there was, you know, old hermann mussert: "this woman was teaching me new words! there's no doubt about it. i am in love with her.") we so easily get high on reading something incredibly smart - and the intellectual stimulation so naturally and immediately translates into physical sensation - you needn't have seen the person - you simply know that anyone who writes like that can do anything he damn well pleases with you. witness even our own puritanical su-lin who expresses her adoration of stephen fry in these words: "of course i'll sleep with him" (which woman wouldn't if he were straight, right? speaking of which, on last year or the year before's review of isihac, a recorded electronic voice: "you're so clever, stephen, we computers have always seen you as one of us." stephen fry: "i feel the same way - if only you weren't windows but a mac.") and yvonne was telling me that josephine once was introduced to rushdie by her tutor, and all she could do was blush. that sounds about right to me.

i'm sure some people will think this merely the biological imperative to trade upwards - you know, wide child-bearing hips on the one side, and can he go to law school and make pots of gold and provide for my thirteen children on the other, although what this sounds like seems to me to be something different. i think we understand some of it in a slightly different way, in the renaissance sense of being called to be fruitful and multiply, and, of course, a way of guarding against death and loss, i.e. genius must have issue, and it were as if we were clamouring pick me pick me to be the bearer of your babies. . that makes us all sound dangerously like dorothea brookes i.e. a genius must be supported by an understanding woman. (reminds me of a medievalist friend whose mother gave her middlemarch and said, don't do that.) i suppose the implication is also that we point back to leda "wearing his knowledge with his power." and vanity too, that somehow that glorious intellect is, in a form fractured and attenuated of course, but somehow mirrored in ourselves - to be chosen means we are far from equal but at least perceived as acceptable intellectual matches. i wonder if any social scientists have ever tried to make a study of how many times "oh my god he's so smart" uttered by a litty woman, is followed by "i want to sleep with him!" and whether this can be considered eugenic rhetoric.