Since the subject of this thread in women's mating choices, let's tie the concept of male intelligence back to conventional mating and the mating dance.
In the early stages of interactions, women are the gatekeepers. Women are the gatekeepers to sex and to early stage dates. Sex is one of the most foundational parts of a mating interaction. When sex happens in conventional mating, it either happens after some number of dates (a social framework of an interaction) or from a spontaneous, same night interaction at a nightlife venue.
Men's intelligence is part of how women decide about which men to let through the gates to sex. Attraction and seduction are based on looks, money, status, and personality. Men's intelligence can be a partial factor in money, status, and personality. It could tangentially relate to looks based on the decisions men make with choosing to spend time focusing on physique and appearance related activities.
When intelligence is discussed, it's most discussed around a metric of Intelligence Quotient (IQ). That is one way of measuring raw intelligence. It's an imperfect metric, but that's a side discussion for a different thread.
When intelligence is measured with the IQ metric, there's something noticeable when it is examined by biological sex. Women's IQ's tend to cluster around a certain range with limited variability. The difference between the highest scoring IQ women and the lowest scoring IQ women isn't that great. Men's IQ scores tend to have greater variety. The difference between the highest scoring IQ men and the lowest scoring IQ men is much greater than the variance in female scores.
IQ does not measure sociability, social cues, or emotional management. As humans, we are social beings who live in an interactive environment. The psychology discipline was researching this many decades ago. This idea gained traction in psychology in the 1950s-1960s, but really took off in the 1990s based on the work of Daniel Goleman, who wrote Emotional Intelligence in 1995. There's an idea of an Emotional Quotient (EQ) that functions alongside of the Intelligence Quotient (IQ). One's emotional skills as measured by some EQ metric have impact on the course of one's life similar to IQ.
Why am I bothering to mention all of this? How does this relate to mating and getting your penis wet?
It is known that women tend to operate more emotionally/feeling based and men tend to operate more rationally/factually based.
In mating interactions, women tend to make decisions based on feelings in the moment. With interactions with more intelligent men, they often find it more difficult to make those emotional connections that will create the feelings necessary for sex to happen. Many high IQ intelligent men tend to lack emotional management skills and have low EQ scores. While these men do well in the rational/factual world, they have poor social skills and poor emotional management skills. Therefore, in dealings with women, they don't emotionally connect with them and fail to get laid with them.
This has less of an impact in hiring decisions for white collar STEM type jobs, as more of that is based on IQ than EQ.
Success in mating, especially early stage mating, is more related to one's emotional management and social skills. Men with middle of the bell curve IQs (or even low IQ men) tend to have stronger EQs and are more relatable to women.
