The old lie about seduction is that it's only works on stupid girls. A variant of this criticism is that it only works on "bar whores" or "club skanks". Hopefully, everyone in this subreddit knows that these claims aren't true.

But there's another type of limiting belief lurking in this subreddit that surprises me. It's the belief that you can't find smart/intelligent/educated women in clubs and bars. Or rather, that if your taste in women is more 'refined', that you should stick to coffee houses and bookstores to pick up women.

Let me break it down for you.

One of the benefits of going to a school where everyone was smart and most people were very smart was that I got to see the full range of intelligent personality types. Let me give you a hint: the intelligence is irrelevant.

Sororities are for stupid girls? At my school, the average SAT score of the "stupid" sorority was 1500 with an average GPA of 3.7. Loud parties are for stupid girls? Tell that to the girls who hit summa cum laude while rocking fratboys at beer pong. Clubs are for dumb whores? Tell that to the incoming analyst class of JP Morgan.

If we define "intelligent" to be 90th percentile of intelligence (by whatever marker of intelligence you choose) then the odds of finding an "intelligent" woman in a random setting are not that great (say, 1 in 10). [Let me also say that not all the individuals who complain about the lack of "smart" girls come off as too intelligent themselves]

What an environment lets do you do is choose personality, not intelligence. You're going to find more introverted girls in a bookstore on 9pm on a friday. The more extroverted ones will be at the club. You're going to find coffee-drinkers at Starbucks and alcohol-drinkers at the bar.

But don't pretend that those are predictive variables for intelligence. Thinking shyness = intelligence is the kind of circlejerk which gets AFCs into trouble in the first place. It's a limiting belief.

I don't know what the basis of it is, but I'd suspect it's a defense mechanism. A lot of guys spend their early years pursuing extroverts - the friendly, outgoing girls who will say hi to them in the halls. When they get friend-zoned or outright rejected, they rationalize it away by saying that they are only interested in introverted girls. They further rationalize it by saying that since THEY'RE introverted (it seems that most guys who get into PUA are introverted) and smart, that introversion = intelligence, and that they need to find their soul mates in similarly introverted girls.