Weird how “I prefer to date intelligent women” and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” have totally different levels of social desirability.
The former conceals the fact that the latter may not apply to the woman reading it. That’s why one is Feminism but the other is Low-Status Male.
No, that’s not how I see it at all. IQ isn’t the same thing as intelligence! It’s just a measure of it, not the thing itself; and presumably it’s intelligence that you actually value, not the measure of it. Like, even if you believe that IQ tests are flawless instruments that always measure intelligence accurately, and measure exactly the same intelligence-concept that you’re valuing—you can entertain the possibility that you’re mistaken about this, and that actually it would be possible for two people to get scores on IQ tests in the reverse order from their actual intelligences. In such a counterfactual scenario, it’d surely be the actually more intelligent person you’d prefer, not the one who got the higher score. So, unless your preferences are really weird, “I prefer to date intelligent women” is the accurate statement, and “I prefer to date women with a high IQ” is just wrong. Of course this’d just be a nitpick if everybody agreed that IQ tests were basically unproblematic measures of intelligence, but… they don’t, so the casual conflation of IQ and intelligence is naturally going to annoy people who don’t agree that the two things are more or less the same.
And even somebody who’s happy to regard IQ as just a synonym of “intelligence” might observe that it’s a rather technical way of saying “intelligence”; why not just use the everyday English word? Using needlessly technical vocabulary generally comes across as obnoxious.
I admit I was being a bit snarky due to the Feminist movement’s bad habit of ending up as part of a gender-based status war.
Most people think that they are some level of intelligent, especially the sort of cishet women who identify as feminist IME. However, most people don’t have high IQs.
The male neckbeard, by specifying a way that intelligence can be studied with some reliability, not only exposes this disconnect, but also has the nerve to place himself higher on the status hierarchy by demanding it - higher than he deserves, for this focus on such things is often done by unhygenic or awkward people! He’s supposed to recognize his low status and show sufficient deference.
And what’s more, many people who don’t think they measure up on other qualities use intelligence as their last bastion of defense of the ego. Most of them probably don’t need to, but society can be pretty harsh.
So you have all that, plus Feminism doesn’t like men deciding their own standards. Plus the other stuff.
