I cannot, we have established beyond all doubt, correctly predict which posts will be popular or controversial. I'd fare better by throwing darts at my monitor, frankly. Squarely in the "I'm still getting comments about that? Really?" category is my remark that competence is the trait I consider sexiest.
I teach a little class (or a large workshop) based on some work I did in graduate school. There, it was a 10-week class with a 50% failure rate. When I "workshop" it, it's an intensive 20 hours or so. The topic: hard-core sentence diagramming, where we learn that verbs are adjectives and clauses are nouns. It's not for the intellectually flaccid.
The first individual to whom I taught the workshop? None other than Fucking Amy, who needed it for a tutoring job. She might have space for rent where her soul should be, but the chick is seriously bright. She inhales information, and to my astonishment and great pride, she mastered 10 weeks' worth of material in about 6 hours, acing the actual final exam. I fell more in love with her that day. I remember the feeling clearly. Dead. Sexy.
Plus she could turn a double-play.
I've taught the workshop several times since, and there've been varying degrees of speed and success. The only other girlfriend I've taught the material to was the dread Approval Whore (AW). It's not often that you know the exact moment the bloom fell off someone's rose, but in her case I do. This was it. It was in a professional environment, and she was one of several editors at the table. As always, I began slowly and built incrementally on what they'd just mastered. It's rather like algebra—if you fall behind, you're hopelessly lost. She was hopelessly lost in about two minutes. Worse, she smiled and tried to fake it (in this as in all endeavors, as it turned out). The other editors started working ahead by themselves, but AW furiously spun her wheels, lapsing into what got her through high school and college: nodding her head like an idiot, pretending to understand, trying to steer the subject toward whatever pictures she saw in Us magazine that week. She was increasingly and visibly flustered by what was becoming excruciatingly obvious to all present: the woman with whom I was in love was the dumb student in the class. Of course, my embarrassment wasn't what was upsetting her, nor was it the knowledge that she was the stupid one. It was everyone else knowing that upset her. As for me, I cannot describe how mortifying it is to empirically prove that your girlfriend is dim. Not only dim, but dishonestly dim, dim with a vapid, arm-waving, giggling, this-is-boring-let's-go-shopping, cheerleader flourish. Dead. Unsexy.