The Dangerous Myth Of The Smart Girl -- Being Clever Is Cute Until It's Inconvenient

I used to think being the “smart girl” was a compliment.

You know the type — she always has a book, always has a comeback, and always knows exactly how to ruin a man’s argument with a single obscure historical fact and a facial expression she borrowed from a disappointed Victorian governess.

But here’s the thing no one tells you: the world loves a smart girl until she’s smarter than them out loud.

When you’re a smart girl, you get praised for being precocious until it becomes pretentious. You’re celebrated for being clever until someone decides it’s condescending. And the moment you ask a question that makes a room go quiet — not because you’re wrong, but because you’re too right — the energy shifts.

Suddenly, you’re intense. Or too much. Or my personal favorite: intimidating, which is just fear wearing cologne.

It starts young. In school, I was the girl who read during recess — not because I didn’t want to play, but because I preferred fictional drama to the politics of tetherball. I was told to “let the boys answer sometimes.” Later, I was told to “tone it down” in discussions. Then in dating, it became: “You don’t have to be so analytical.”

I’m sorry, is there a casual way to deconstruct power structures?

Bookstore Geek was born partly out of rebellion. If I were going to be too much, I might as well go full Greek chorus. If I were going to be the “smart girl,” then fine — let’s weaponize the footnotes.

And look, I know being smart isn’t a personality. But being book-smart, emotionally-aware, joke-forward, slightly neurotic but in a captivating way? That absolutely is. It’s niche. It’s niche with a cult following.

So this is for the other smart girls out there — the ones who get excited about paragraph structure, who overthink emojis, who’ve been called intimidating and pretended it was a compliment (it is, by the way).

You are not too much. You are the exact amount — just not for everyone.

And that’s why we’re building our own library. Alphabetized by vengeance.

See you in the true crime section,

– Bookstore Geek