You and your erotic capital

So what’s it to be girls – mastermind or model? Having dreamt about being both at different points in my (clearly misguided) childhood, there’s a part of me that’s instinctively drawn to those geniuses and beauty queens who did make it.

Until recently, when Jade was crowned the winner of Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model, Monday night TV allowed me to indulge in this beauty-brain fetish: brainy quiz University Challenge, followed by brainier quiz Only Connect, followed by the seventh series of the quest for a new top model. Excellent.

But boy did I know my role as mere spectator well. I usually average at about 1.3 correct answers on University Challenge, while my only chance of success on Only Connect comes in the final, quick-fire ‘Missing Vowels’ round in which you have to identify words or phrases from the consonants alone. The remaining consonants are squidged up a bit, but to you and me it remains a round that essentially pays homage to txt spk. Again, not symptomatic of a huge brain on my part then. Equally, at five foot four inches, with legs that my mother has only ever been able to describe as ‘strong’, I don’t think I’ll be strutting my stuff on a catwalk near you any time soon.

I never felt like I had to justify watching the quizzes. If you’re interested in taking yourself at all seriously, then watching University Challenge seems almost to be expected of you. But I always felt like I was letting the side down when I flicked to Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model.

The problem with the programme is that it runs the risk of contributing to what columnist Julie Burchill describes as an ‘all-consuming beauty culture’. In a society where Cheryl Cole tells us we’re ‘worth it’ and Christina Aguilera insists we’re ‘beautiful, in every single way’, beauty can seem, wrongly, all-important.

But while these programmes celebrate the singular extremes of beauty and brainpower, attractiveness and intelligence are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Nor should they be.

Of course there will always be those who cherish fake eye lashes and chicken fillets more than their own intelligence, just as there will always be those who pride substance over appearance to such an extent that they fail to see much point in a crisply ironed shirt or a smack of lippy. This makes for a varied society based on individual choice.

But I can’t help thinking that there are a lot of women out there who have unwittingly made the wrong choice; though they think they are waving the feminist flag, they are in fact doing the sisterhood no favours.

Since the glory days of the Suffragettes, many British women are reluctant to show any real care for their appearance beyond the odd shower. Pallid, hair sprouting and clad in ill-fitting clothes, these women fear spending any more time on their appearance lest they undermine both their own intelligence and the hard-fought and courageous battles of their female emancipators.

Well-intentioned but misinformed, these ‘feminists’ give weight to the theory that women only ever want to look good to impress men. This is just not true. Most of the time, women want to look good for themselves.

As Bryony Gordon writes, ‘you can be a feminist, you can be strong and independent and clever, and you can wear a nice frock and high heels while you do this.’

Apparently, girls, it’s about cashing in on our erotic capital, a term coined by Catherine Hakim to describe a mesh of attractiveness, intelligence and sex appeal.

If you think about it, men have been exploiting _their_ erotic capital since the invention of the codpiece. It’s why the modern day man goes to the gym and splashes out on new suits and painstakingly tames his stubble. They’ve even invented a word for him. The metrosexual.

Embracing your erotic capital does not jeopardise your IQ. It’s simply making the best of what you’ve got. Do it.