My daughter is in gifted classes, etc. - more the book worm/nerd type. She actually asked me if she should act dumb around boys. I told her to just be nice and smile and be fun but not to change herself. Women get conflicting information. Angelia Jolie or Marilyn Monroe? Tough or sweet? Unavailable or available? Dominant or submissive? Or is it like with men, a little bit of both? Do the same things that impress women, impress men?No, the same things that impress women most certainly do not impress men. The first thing a smart young girl should contemplate is how sexually attractive she finds Stephen Hawking. Now divide that by a factor of 100. That's about how much value boys place on her intelligence as a factor in how attractive they find her. Now, I understand there are decades worth of movies that have equated snappy, disrespectful banter with a) intelligence and b) attractiveness to men, but it must be kept in mind that these were movies written, produced, and directed by gay men, many of which starred secretly gay men, and not infrequently also happened to be starring women with lesbian leanings.
A triple-gay play is not a reliable model for successful heterosexual behavior. This is why those women who based their approach to the sexual market on Sex and the City tended to fail in spectacular fashion. Acting like a homosexual man is really not the ideal way to attract normal men. The only time men place any value whatsoever on female intelligence is a) when they are looking for a sugar mommy, or b) when they are contemplating the propagation of the species. If the male object of a woman's interest doesn't presently fall into one of those two categories, her intelligence is simply a complete non-factor.
And it is worth nothing that the tedious snappy banter that too often passes for intelligence is the hallmark of the mid-witted, not the genuinely intelligent. The hallmarks of the truly intelligent tend to be a) social avoidance of the intellectually inferior, b) effortless mastery of the crowd with one sardonic remark that cracks everyone up at the expense of the dancing alphas, c) murdering everyone for their failure to adjust their behavior to suit the rational utopian society one has designed to improve upon the previous model.
I try to limit myself to (a) and (b), but it is worth noting that (c) is more conclusive and seldom requires much in the way of repetition.
However, the answer to the main question is "no, a smart girl should not act dumb because she is hypergamous." An intelligent girl should actively look for more intelligent men because she will eventually find herself unhappy if she chooses less intelligent men. Tall girls are happiest with taller men, rich girls are happiest with richer men, and smart girls are happiest with smarter men. However, she should understand that she will be competing with less intelligent women who will be equally appealing to those smarter men despite their lack of intelligence. The main thing to avoid is foolish reliance upon a non-existent advantage; in short, a smart girl should use her intelligence rather than rely upon it, or any supporting evidence of it such as academic credentials, being attractive in itself.
The problem is that because smart women find male intelligence intoxicating, they find it very difficult to imagine that smart men don't feel the same way. But because female intelligence tends to express itself in a fairly light and haphazard manner, it doesn't actually look all that different from a lack of intelligence to the intelligent man. Gifted classes and academic degrees mean nothing. I'm simply not going to be impressed if a woman indicates that she has heard of Sextus Empiricus or makes a reference to the Skeptical school of philosophy, especially if she does so in passing before spending the next half hour rambling on about people in exactly the same manner as the hot blonde with the implants and the perfect gym-honed posterior does.
Intelligence that is unused or foolishly directed is not substantively different than a lack of intelligence.
