I was a smart enough chick to be a bit of an odd kid. I started talking at around four months and started reading by the age of two and I imagine that it must have been more than a bit strange to look at me carrying on a decently smart conversation with popsicle smeared all over my mouth. I was a smart kid. However, I was no genius or child prodigy.
Child prodigies really interest me. These are kids who are so good at one area of study that they excel on an adult level before the age of 13. These are the kids who compose music when their peers are watching cartoons. These are the kids that can do math at a level I’ll never reach before they can reach the water fountain without a step stool. These are the kids who start college before they start puberty.
I’m particularly interested by female child prodigies. There are a few reasons for this. First of all, there just aren’t that many women listed in lists of female prodigies. Second of all, these women tend to excel in specific areas of life including poetry but not in male-dominated fields like chess or math. And third, those women who do make it into the annals of history as female child prodigies tend to have far more interesting lives than their male counterparts.
One woman that I’ve become interested in as I’ve studied female child prodigies is Sufiah Yusof. This chick was born in 1984 which makes her younger than I am but before I was in my senior year of high school, she had been accepted at Oxford University to study math. A female math child prodigy is an interesting and rare thing indeed.
However, things didn’t go so smoothly for Yusof once she was immersed in college. She became a runaway who gave up her studies in math for jobs in waitressing followed by work in prostitution. She got famous for awhile as the child prodigy who made it as a high-priced hooker and gave several interviews about how much she loved being a prostitute. Apparently, at least according to Wikipedia, she now regrets that time of her life and has returned to school and “respectable work” as a social worker.
I can’t tell you how fascinating I find all of this. And a lot of that fascination stems from the fact that I think it’s tough for smart women to make it in today’s society. Yes, there are many doors open to us that weren’t open to us before. But the social world for women remains different than it is for men. Our sexuality is tied to us no matter how much we’re praised for our smarts.
I can’t even imagine what it would be like to enter college at the age of 13. When I was 13, my precocious intelligence was taking a back seat to an interest in pop music and a concern for how to make it navigate the walls of a tough junior high school. Dealing with entering puberty was tough enough around my peers; I can’t even imagine how it would have been if I’d been amongst college kids.
I think there are a lot of people out there who would judge someone like Sufiah Yusof for the choices that she made. But I wonder, did she really have much choice? Propelled into an adult world before she was emotionally mature enough to handle it, is it really any wonder that this female child prodigy ended up where she did. And for that matter, is where she ended up really so bad in the end? Truly smart people use their smarts to figure themselves out and then to help others and that sounds like exactly what this woman is doing.
Tags: child prodigy, child prodigy prostitute, hub pages, kathryn vercillo, prodigies, prostitution, smart women, sufiah yusof, women, women in society
