Ashley Mears: evaluation

Transcript context

…As you probably know, there’s some modest degree of evidence that attractive people are smarter, on average at least. So why isn’t it the case that these supposed party girls — a lot of them are quite bright — they figure out ways of signaling that they’re smart, which is not hard to do in conversation, but have some well-to-do men who maybe find it hard to meet the beautiful women they want to marry, and they go to the club, and they look for the signals from the really smart party girls. Why doesn’t the market work that way? What keeps them apart? It definitely can work that way. There’s lots of success stories where it does work that way. Melania Trump, for example, met Donald Trump at one of these parties — not one of these parties in these nightclubs, but she was introduced at a party that was run by her then fashion-modeling agent, who was actually a regular in this whole VIP circuit. So she was kind of connected to this world, and that’s where she met the very rich and successful businessman. By the way, she also had to work pretty hard when she was introduced to the national stage to clear the reputation that she’s not a party girl. There was all this effort to say Melania Trump was a good girl. She didn’t go out too much. She happened to be at this one party, but she was not a party girl. So it can work. There’s probably lots of stories where that does work, but for the majority of the cases of the young women who are brought to these clubs with the promoters — it doesn’t work for them because they’re staying with the promoter. The promoter’s job is to keep them at the table. Their primary purpose being there is signaling their beauty. It becomes difficult to try to forge any kind of meaningful connection when the lights are low and the music is loud. I know people are talking, but really like shouting into each other’s ears. The setup of that kind of a situation works against any woman who’s trying to show that she is a real intellectual or she has some kind of occupational or educational prestige. I have so many naive, uninformed questions, but why is the music so loud in these clubs? Who benefits from that?…

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