A blog post that appeared on the Crunk Feminist Collective about dating with a doctorate is making its way around the blogosphere. Entitled, "She Got a Big Ego? Thoughts on Dating With a Doctorate," the post addresses the challenges of being a highly educated black woman and trying to find black men to date who can deal with it.
The writer discusses being told that she's "throwing her degree" in a suitor's face after being intellectually challenged by said suitor. Meeting men whose opening line is "You're going to have a hard time finding a partner" is standard. Meeting men who think it's their duty to make you submit to traditional gender roles based on a predilection for patriarchy is also popular.
Check out what the writer has to say in an excerpt below. What are your thoughts?
Recently, my romantic interested accused me of throwing my Ph.D. in his face. Most Black women with Ph.D.'s will know exactly how egregious an accusation that is, especially since we are hypersensitive and overly vigilant about making sure never to "throw our degrees" in the face of less-accomplished potential boos or family members.
During a casual phone convo about our respective college experiences, Dude who is a high school math teacher and has a couple of advanced degrees in math fields remarked to me that he found most humanities/social science majors, including English and Political Science — my undergrad majors — "illegitimate." Now given that all of my degrees are in humanities fields, I was majorly incensed.
And although I'm used to — and normally [unfazed] by — these inanely conceived verbal jousting matches that dudes engage highly educated women in in order to see if we are really as smart as our degrees seem to indicate, this time I was pissed.
It's college administrators and other knuckleheads who think like him that make my job so hard in the first place. Thinking like this explains, partially anyway, why my students can't write for [s—-] and why my salary is a comically paltry percentage of the amount of student loans I owe.
When I questioned his logic, he got defensive. When I further exposed the flaws in his arguments (skills courtesy of my humanities education), he explained that he would not "back down" or "give in," even though he could admit that his opinion "wasn't well thought out," because he knew that this is what I was used to men doing … "backing down to stroke my ego." Projection, anyone?
What I'm actually used to men doing is attacking me once they start intellectual fights they can't finish. I'm used to men putting me in the friend zone because they find my smarts intriguing but not sexy. I'm used to men straight up belittling and insulting me — calling me stupid, unattractive, or using "feminist" like an expletive — in order to get the upper hand when they feel intellectually outmatched …
Read more at the Crunk Feminist Collective.
In other news: Hotel Maid Nafissatou Diallo Sues DSK.