Well, that was the way it sounded to me, anyway. This was right before I was to start as a physics graduate student at the University of Chicago. I had come back from my year in England in mid-August, and I was hanging out with my fiance and his posse over in the math department before courses got going. That was when someone mentioned a book titled Essential Elements of Algebraic Geometry. But the title I thought I heard sounds much more interesting, does it not?

Of course, even then I didn’t believe that I’d really heard right. Abstract mathematics and the world of the senses don’t intersect in the popular imagination—or even in my not-so-popular imagination. (It’s been almost twenty years since I read it, but the novel The Mind-Body Problem by Rebecca Goldstein does bring together math and sex quite well, as I recall. And then there is the nonfiction book Mathematics and Sex by Clio Creswell, but although it’s a little cheeky, the treatment is as matter-of-fact as the title. Those looking for, ahem, optimal oscillation frequencies here will be disappointed.)

What brings this to mind is of course the latest headline in a most tabloidelicious week that just keeps on getting curiouser and curiouser. Or maybe not—I mean, who could have predicted Anna Nicole Smith’s death, but on the other hand, wasn’t unpredictability just about the only thing you could count on from her? Her life sounds like it’s ripe to be written into the update of a Greek tragedy by the same folks who adapted Mozart’s Don Giovanni into Jerry Springer: the Opera. And all this only three days after the female astronaut story.

Yeah, you’re thinking, who cares about Anna Nicole Smith anyway? No question, she was a figure of the supermarket tabloids, not the scientific journals. All sex appeal, no brains. I became aware of her because of the ubiquitous Guess? jeans ads featuring her in the early ’90s, and then hearing about her marriage to old-enough-to-be-her-grandfather J. Howard Marshall, which of course fit the stinking-rich-old-guy-marries-sexpot money-buys-sex-or-something-close-to-it narrative. I didn’t pay any attention beyond whenever the neverending litigation between Smith and Marshall’s son over the old guy’s estate would merit the occasional headline because some ruling or other had happened, or been appealed, or whatever. To me it was a joke of greedy rich ingrate son versus greedy rich bimbo, and I was waiting for the day when some side or other would ultimately win in a pyrrhic victory because all the inheritance would have gone to the lawyers by then.

But what’s fascinating about the juxtaposition of Lisa Nowak and Anna Nicole Smith this week is how they’re diametric opposites. Lisa Nowak, the astronaut, was the woman who went into the male-dominated field of mechanical engineering, and then on to NASA, where they don’t deem it worth the money to make a space suit in size small to accommodate more petite women (rendering them ineligible to go on space walks). In this highly rational—and unsensual—world of complex systems, people have to shape themselves to fit in. It’s a world of asexual flight suits, no makeup, being in control of your emotions (or hiding it if you aren’t).

And then, on the other hand, we have Anna Nicole Smith. Until her son died a few months ago, she was just a pathetic punchline—blond reality show bimbo, spilling out of her dress (do they make flight suits to fit hourglass figures?), out of control, stuck to the tar-baby of that interminable litigation that even wound up before the U.S. Supreme Court last year. Exactly the opposite of how any budding female scientist (OK, or any woman influenced by second-wave feminism) wishes to be perceived. Smith was not helping the cause, shall we say, in terms of educating misogynist critics on the equality of female and male intelligence.

But it’s not like geeky women get major media exposure for having it together (I hadn’t heard of Lisa Nowak before Monday, but then again, going into space isn’t as glamorous as it used to be), and we would have been really surprised if Anna Nicole Smith had turned out to be a faithful reader of, say, She’s Such a Geek or novels by Richard Powers (to pick a couple of examples of high intelligence and cultivated taste at random). Basically, braininess at math, science, and technology and sexiness are held to be mutually exclusive qualities. (Read Suzanne Franks’s essay in SSAG for much more on this.)

I’ve got more to say on this which is going to have to wait for another post, I think. But I’d be interested to hear what you think about this tale of two women (at least, those of you who aren’t above noticing the tabloid headlines at the supermarket checkout).

This entry was posted by Kristin A. on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 10:33 pm and is filed under Sex & gender. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.