How easily we give some men the title of "genius"
No surprises what they have in common!
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When the Titan submersible became lost on a dive to the wreck of the Titanic, many global news shows had an oxygen countdown on the corner of their screens. I, like so many others, watched with an almost hungry kind of horror as the minutes and hours wore on. I couldn’t look away or fathom anything worse: trapped in a glorified pebble which had sunk to depths beyond my comprehension, aware of the increased labour of my breaths as life itself was exhaled, moment by moment, from my lungs.
Of course, this is not what happened. Titan imploded faster than conscious thought—perhaps the one saving grace of an otherwise terrible fate. But finding this out only caused the horror to reshape itself. As more and more details emerged, we began to understand that this was not some dreadful accident, act of God, or even rich people’s stupidity. It was one man’s flagrant arrogance and deliberate deceit.
At the time, it was easy for those of us who a) would never have the $250,000 ticket fee, and b) would hate to be plunged to the sea floor for the sake of tourism, to tar all Titan’s passengers with the same brush. They are simply idiots with more money than sense etc etc. But armed as we are now with facts and hindsight, it’s evident that Ocean Gate CEO, Stockton Rush was aware of the dangers of his creation, ploughing on with a broken idea because he couldn’t face the shame of being wrong, endangering the lives of others because he needed the investment to pay off, and hiding behind the mask of a “genius”.
“Rush himself received mediocre grades in education, but his enthusiasm for ocean exploration was constantly emphasised.”
As I watched both the BBC and Netflix documentaries on the disaster, I started to notice the way people still used the word to describe Rush in spite of the obvious. Titan was a pile of shit. The carbon fibre hull wasn’t built to reach Titanic depths over and over again, and every other person involved - from interns to Head Engineers - could see that from a mile off. Why, then, are people still so generous with his genius?
Inevitably, I thought of what words would be used to describe a woman who had created an open-to-the-paying-public death pebble, which in the end caused her own demise. That genius would be one of them is almost laughable. Rush himself received mediocre grades in education, but his enthusiasm for ocean exploration was constantly emphasised.
I am enthusiastic about history. I am not a historical genius.
It was hard - especially given that his name was brought up due to how much Rush idolised him - not to also think of Elon Musk, the supposed genius whose increased involvement in the everyday running of his company Tesla directly corresponds with poorer business performance.
What doesn’t take a genius to see is what these two people have in common. They are white. They are men. They are very very rich.
The likes of Rush and Musk simply have both the money and the ingrained confidence to throw money at their endeavours and hire better people to get them up and running. Although, in the case of Rush, the idea was so poor that the rules of physics would’ve had to bend to see it succeed.
So, what of female genius? Well, though there are plenty of white rich women out there girlbossing in 2025, rarely do they achieve the same label of genius. In fact, in a recent poll of attitudes toward genius cited by writer Janice Kaplan, 90% of Americans said that geniuses tended to be men, and the only female genius respondents could name was Marie Curie, the Nobel prize-winning scientist who discovered radioactivity.
“Geniuses are men. And what makes them geniuses is rarely quantifiable by merit or IQ, but vibes, personality and PR.”
That the likes of Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, Gladys West, Virginia Woolf, Chien-Shiung Wu, Mary Shelley, Florence Nightingale, Annie Easley and countless other women are, despite all their tangible achievements, still rarely credited as geniuses when the likes of Musk and Rush are shows just how gendered the term is. Geniuses are men. And what makes them geniuses is rarely quantifiable by merit or IQ, but vibes, personality and PR.
When it comes to being a genius, I think it’s fair to suggest that you’re only as genius as the last very stupid thing you’ve said or done. Kanye West, whose Netflix documentary jeen-yuhs was a play on the word, may indeed have been a musical genius in his youth (“Never Let Me Down” still raises the hairs on my arms to this day), but it feels lazy when people act as though he’s made from some everlasting strain of genius. In recent years, West has increasingly relied on low-hanging fruit for shock value: Nazi references, the objectification and subservience of women, and allying himself with the likes of Andrew Tate. If that’s genius, so is every unwashed misogynist on 4Chan.
Really, it doesn’t matter all that much who gets called a genius. The word has become so watered down that it’s more a flippant turn of phrase than anything particularly meaningful. But if a millionaire moron with a bucket full of enthusiasm can earn the accolade, we do really need to find a new word for bell hooks.
I was just listening to the new Amy Poehler podcast with Natasha Lyonne and she says at some point that we need to stop calling men geniuses so much. Great minds think alike :)