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The Men Obsessed with IQ
Why men who think they're ruled by logic may be much more emotional than they think.
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There is a particular kind of man you eventually learn to recognize online and offline. He’s very interested in IQ. He has opinions about intelligence. He talks about logic a lot. He may have taken an online IQ test or several and would like you to know the score. He puts it in his dating bio (still slightly better than putting other numbers there, if you know what I mean).
He has strong feelings about critical thinking, rationality, facts, evidence, and the supposed inability of women to understand any of these things because we’re too emotional.
I don’t know about you, but nothing screams ‘questionable intellectual capacity’ for me quite as hard as some dude bragging about his alleged IQ.
And there are plenty of scientists who study IQ and agree with me, by the way. Here’s one for the haters: an actual (male, sic!) neuroscientist who shares my view on this. He discusses it here in more detail.
But the kind of guy we’re talking about is, naturally, also very proud of how unemotional he is.
This is one of those things that becomes funnier the longer you look at it. Because the man who spends three hours angrily explaining that women are irrational because they have feelings is not demonstrating an absence of emotion, he’s just showcasing a very specific relationship with emotion: he doesn’t recognize his own.
And I think this is more interesting than the usual observation that men who obsess over IQ are often misogynistic. Obviously, there is a long-standing cultural association between men and reason and women and emotion. Research actually finds that people tend to associate men with thinking and rationality and women with feeling and emotion, both explicitly and implicitly. In a series of studies involving more than 900 participants, researchers found exactly this pattern, including an association between male faces and judgments of rationality.
So yes, the “men are logical, women are emotional” thing is misogynistic.
But there’s another problem with it. The man who thinks he’s being logical is simply experiencing an emotion he has renamed and is deeply in denial about.
Anger becomes logic
A woman says, “That hurt my feelings.” He says she’s being emotional.
A woman says, “I don’t want to do that.” He says she’s being irrational.
A woman rejects him. He produces a twelve-point analysis of why women are shallow, narcissistic, biologically hypergamous, corrupted by feminism, ruined by social media, or whatever the current manosphere theory happens to be.
And somehow the conclusion is never, “I’m disappointed that she rejected me.”
No. He’s observing a pattern.
This is where the fantasy of the rational man starts to fall apart. Human beings aren’t machines that receive information, process it without bias, and output a conclusion. We have desires, fears, insecurities, attachments, resentments, status concerns, sexual frustrations, jealousy, shame, pride and approximately seventeen million other things happening inside our heads before we’ve finished our morning coffee.
That’s not a moral failure. That’s just being a person.
The problem comes when you decide that all those things happening inside you are irrelevant because your conclusion feels logical to you.
A man can be jealous and call it pattern recognition. He can be angry and call it a principled objection. He can feel rejected and call it evidence that women are shallow. He can feel threatened by a competent woman and call her behavior “arrogant.” He can want control and call himself a man who simply values order.
Suddenly nobody is emotional anymore.
Except women, obviously.