Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe...Question for smart women...?

Question

Do you find it depressing that even a highly intelligent man chooses to marry a woman like Marilyn (if he has the chance!), rather than a less beautiful woman who is his intellectual equal?
Einstein, too...he divorced his first wife--the one who had intellectual ambitions--and married a comparatively simple woman who cooked and cleaned for him. He slept around with young women on the side.
Also, I read about a study that found that men who score well on IQ tests have, on average, better-looking wives than men of average intelligence. The article said that the higher a man's IQ, the better looking his wife will be.
Isn't it all depressing?

I asked this question in the Women's Studies section yesterday, and I was wondering if it would receive responses of a different tone if I asked it again in a different category.

By the way, I'm not suggesting that Marilyn was stupid. However, their marriage was publicized as the union of beauty and brains.

Answer 1

I think it's unfair to classify Marilyn as unintelligent. It's easy to see her as less than a full person based on the way she was presented by the industry she chose to work in. Likewise the era in which she lived did not expressly support or encourage women to be smart, strong, and independant. While I have no more information on this than the next person, I would like to think that there was an internal conflict within her that faught between being the ' dream toy of every man ' , and a full person with hopes, dreams, and ambitions respected by the people around her. As far as her marriage goes, I believe it was a marriage of popularity - the star baseball player and the star of the screen. Promoting their popularity and their status more so than their relationship with each other. I can't escape the sense that they were each others trophy mates and there was not much else to be had. When you say that their marriage was publicized - that's exatctly the problem. It became the business of everyone and less so the business of the two people involved. This brought external expectations and control, however this is part of the cost of being a celeberity.

You might also consider that Einstein was possibly not out for an intelectual partner. Consider that he works his day job thinking deep thoughts, being a scientist and so on - which entails debate and research and challenges by his peers for the length of his work day. Would he want to come home to the same thing? Perhaps he just wanted to come home, relax, have a meal and not have more of what he just left behind at the office. I present this theory based on my personal life. I have found that dating within my professional circles a trying experience - because when you have the bad habbit of taking work home with you , it becomes a topic of discussion and who wants that when you are on a date? When your pillow talk can drift to work talk, the relationship becomes an extension of work. Once I stopped dating within my professional circle I found that I was enjoying it more, loving more , and arguing less.

As for the rest, I think that any study that simplifies women by them being " better looking " is really subjective. Unless you can clearly define what is " Better looking " then it's mostly pointless. This points to the sociological norms of what is good looking, and what men perfer. For the most part people are given suggestions daily by way of social expectations, media, and family as to what " Good Looking " is, and do not spend enough time and effort on developing what they personally feel " Good Looking " is. I think the article is basically bunk, because it is a thinly veiled statement of ' Higher IQ means a higher possibility of success and good looking women are drawn to success ' , and that is an even more obvious ploy to say ' Women are drawn to money ' , something that while partly true also takes away from the women who rise above such things and look to their potential marriage partners with their heart, and not their expectations of financial reward.

What is depressing is that as a society we do not fight more against expected norms and constructs, and instead ebrace our own personal feelings and take charge of our lives on a personal level. We surrender too much to the machine of society when it comes to personal expression. We allow the media machine to define how we dress, who we desire, and what status symbols best define us. We surrender personal opinion in favor of social acceptance. In the endgame we are all human beings, who care cpapble of loving, cheating, succeeding, failing, and falling prey to external controls that lead us down these paths. The key to escaping this is a stronger sense of self, personal responsibility and the refusal to be lead by the nose by a social machine that is designed to tell us how to live our lives. This applies equally to both men and women.

Answer 2

Well, of course, Marilyn (aka Norma Jean Baker) wasn't stupid. But the media need fodder to feed on. There are lots of men who don't feel good about themselves, so they seek strippers, prostitutes, etc., yet other men who esteem themselves seek self-esteeming women as well for relationships. It doesn't matter what a man's accomplishments are, if he doesn't think well of himself as a human being, how can he connect with a woman who does? That's why you see all these jerks on this site who can't connect in a viable way with a woman, and are angry and blame women in general, when it's their own stubborn and self-pitying attitudes that won't allow them to mature into full adulthood.

Answer 3

I suppose some intelligent women can be boring, I mean look Marilyn shoe gorgeous but acts like a bimbo but in true she's a pretty bright lady. So men like Arther Miller and Einstein are smart. They marry the pretty bimbo and get an intelligent women in one.

Answer 4

Not to be rude but what type of responses are you looking for? I answered this question yesterday and despite your changing the question to a new category, I wouldn't change my answer. Depressing? Perhaps but human nature is human nature and if a geek can get a hot chick, he'll do it every time. Well maybe you are right. That is depressing!

Answer 5

How their marriage was publicized, and how things really were aren't necessarily the same thing. Marilyn Monroe is said to have been very troubled, but I've never heard anybody say she stupid. In my opinion, from pictures of the "real" Norma Jean, she was an attractive enough but ordinary young woman who had the benefit of the hair, the make-up, and the clothes. In other words, she and/or her managers were smart enough to know how to make her into what she was. For most average-attractive women it would be possible to glamourize them up and have people who find that look beautiful find them beautiful.

Einstein and his first wife had a long-time affair/relationship, and before they were married they had the mystery baby-girl that nobody knows what ever happened to. The relationship lasted long enough to be considered "long-term", and there is the good chance that, as with many long-term situations, they just grew in different directions.

People with very high IQ's are used to living in a world where their intellectual equals are few and far between. They learn if they want relationships they had better not be looking for a that intellectual equal. The art intellligent enough to realize that intellect alone isn't enough to base a relationship on, and there are many other things about people that are as iimportant, if not more important, as intellect. They get used to living their lives kind of alone when it comes to intellect, but they love someone else for how kind or thoughtful or hard-working or generous or sweet they are. They know there are so many things that human beings have in common just because they're human that intellect alone, while sharing an equal one might be nice, just isn't enough to build a relationship on.

So, I'm guessing, that because very intelligent people are so used to just accepting that many other people aren't their intellectual equal they accept that when it comes to their relationship as well - and, I suppose, if Einstein had run into another intellectual equal maybe his second wife would have been someone different. (Just a note: Einstein wasn't known as someone who had his emotional house in order. It is now said there's a chance he could have had Asperger's Syndrome, so he isn't a good one to use an example anyway.)

So, if you assume that the very intelligent person just accepts that the pool of potential partners doesn't usually include an intelletual equal that could explain some of it. I believe if most people weighed the important of intellectual equal over "generally good partner all around" they would probably choose the latter.
Highly intelligent people know that their intelligence isn't such a big deal "in the scheme of life", and if they're well adjusted people (and very intelligent people who are well adjusted to exist) they learn young to "tuck away" the intelligence issue and deal with the world based on all the other personal attributes that make them part of that world and not make them different in it.

So - if a very intelligent man has linked up with a particularly beautiful woman it may only mean that he is intelligent enough to know he find someone beautiful and maybe attract them with his intelligence. Another factor is that sometimes people get something out of being able to do something for the other person rather than having nothing to offer the intellectual equal.

There are different types of intelligence, and people with the kind (math-leaning) that Einstein had often do lack some things "in the personality/emotional department". Such a person may find that someone just like he doesn't offer him anything new or otherwise complement his personality.

People who are either extremely intelligent or very, very beautiful have one thing in common: There is a tendency on the part of "the world" to want to compete with such people, to want to take them down a peg, or even to hate them. Such people may have gone through life getting pretty much the same treatment from "the world" (not everyone in it but enough to make their lives less pleasant and to make them feel attacked for no reason), and maybe they find each other because they each know what its like to live in a world that often attacks them for no reason. It could be this is the bigger thing that keeps them together once they find someone else who understands and who won't attack them.

A separate issue: The beauty of being beautiful is that one can attract men more easily than the not-so-beautiful woman can. That's a biological hard-wiring thing that can't be denied. Some women have more beauty. Some have less, and the one's with less do have just a little harder a time catching the eyes of men. Some people in this world have more intelligence, some have more beauty, some have more athletic ability, some have more money, etc. etc. The woman who has had the "benefit" of not being drop-dead beautiful has also had the benefit of realizing that she needs to build her identify on what's on the inside. She learns to value beauty less, and she can't understand why men would appear to value it the way they sometimes do. (The above are a few possible reasons.) Very often such women can start to get a little "attitude" about feeling overlooked, and very often then they fuel the self-fulfilling prophecy that men aren't going to notice them (because men sense the "attitude" and move on to someone who doesn't seem to have that particular "attitude", which would be a more beautiful woman).

The woman with a very high intelligence comes to build her identity on that, but very often there is the chance that she develops a "superiority complex" and forgets that the measure of any person is far more than their degree of intellect. Intelligence is just one thing on the "life score card". She may be so accustomed to not thinking her appearance is important that she doesn't try quite as hard as the Marilyn Monroe type does. The intelligent woman doesn't want to bleach her brown hair platinum blond and wear spike heels to be noticed, but the reality is that (or some less ridiculous version of it) is what gets women noticed by some men.

Very intelligent women need to know that because they are women they need to pay attention to it all - not just their intellect.

Finally, one other point: The world tends to associate someone like Einstein with high intelligence (rightfully, its true; but there is an over-attributing to him as a model of all intelligent people). There is such a thing as a beautiful woman with exceptional intelligence, but if she doesn't "librarian-up" herself and instead is very feminine nobody even realizes how intelligent she is. (Maybe that was Marilyn's situation.) There is a kind of ingrained response that people have to feminine women that makes it impossible for them to imagine that she may be very intelligent or more intelligent than some less attractive man. In a world where people often can't see past femininity and beauty and realize how intelligent a person there may be "in there" its no wonder someone like Norma Jean could get so lost.

and that's my take on the whole situation........

Answer 6

I live near where Miller and Monroe lived, and they were both known to be good people. Who are you to say that people of certain intelligence should marry people of equal intelligence? I'm sure there's much more too it than that.

Answer 7

Men will be men, brainy or not.