Bitterness isn't attractive, you know.

Kinda depressing article about the anxiety and pressure we put on the daughters of the rich and educated:

And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing girls, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.

You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Esther’s classmates, Kat Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on her SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”

“Effortlessly hot,” Kat added.

Please let's not have any "but smart women are hot!" comments from clueless people who don't realize that the implication there is that hotness is still the bottom line. (And do read the whole article: the looks thing is mentioned only in passing, and the jist of the thing--that high-achieving women feel a constant sense of inadequacy--is pretty well-covered. I also like how the young woman the article focuses on most is shown to be not only smart and ambitious but also "good" by refusing to take advantage of SAT training courses, or take more than two AP classes--while I think the motivations she expresses for not doing these things *do* reflect a genuine sense of morality and fairness, I also think the article might have pointed out explicitly that they also show that a healthy sense of self-preservation.)

For more on why it just isn't enough to be smart and accomplished, let's just turn to another article in today's Times, this time about another well-off, well-educated young woman: Jane Austen.

Summary of NYT article: too bad she wasn't prettier. Oh, and also she might have become arguably the greatest English-language novelist in history only because she was too homely to land a husband.

Gosh, I just have no idea where the bright, ambitious, high-achieving young women of today get the idea that being bright, ambitious, and high-achieving isn't enough.