Lemondrop

Sometimes it's called the "pretty woman discount" -- the way life caters to the good-looking -- but these hot professors say it's more like a tax.

Last May, Lemondrop -- fans of cute, brainy men that we are -- nominated the 50 Hottest Professors in America, a list of learned guys, like Professor Robert Brinkerhoff, left, we'd happily clap erasers with.

Then, last week, the Chronicle for Higher Education published "Professors: Hot at Their Own Risk," a story featuring many of these same male members of academe complaining that the honor we bestowed on them made it hard to be taken seriously by their colleagues.

And we quote:

"Research shows that attractive people do better in life. They are treated better by teachers, doctors, even strangers, and are more likely to be hired and promoted than those who are less attractive. But in academe, being hot has a downside: Professors who are considered too good-looking can be cast by their peers as lightweights, known less for their productivity than for their pulchritude."

To that we say, with a politely raised hand, "Excuse me, professor ... have you ever considered that this is what most women face every day?"

After all, as any woman knows, being pretty in the workplace is a delicate tightrope walk, one that's particularly precarious if you do it atop a nice pair of legs.

You risk being underestimated if you're a babe, overlooked if you're not a looker, or -- as Hillary Clinton knows -- being labeled a "bitch" if you stand your ground in gender-neutral pantsuits.

Just yesterday, the trope of attractive women being valued only for their assets was illustrated in a rabidly viral Internet meme: The Chive featured a post on "Jenny DryErase" -- a hot, 20-something assistant and aspiring financial broker -- who quit her job in a series of pointed messages penned on a dry-erase board. Her reason for walking? The fact that she'd overheard her male boss call her a HPOA -- or Hot Piece of Ass -- on the phone.

That the hoopla over HPOA was revealed as a hoax only further proves our point: The cliché of pretty women being underestimated and forced to contend with unwanted attention is so enduring that seemingly the entire Internet willingly believed.

Go, Jenny! Stick it to the man who wanted to stick it to you, they seemed to say as they forwarded the story on Facebook. "Jenny Dry Erase" quickly became a trending term on Twitter. Because even if "Jenny" wasn't real, she was an eerily accurate stand-in for so many women like her.

"I think every woman knows what it feels like to be thought of as a piece of ass," Elyse Porterfield, the actress who played "Jenny" told Lemondrop, as a means of explaining the meme's popularity. "I don't care who you are, everybody does."

And HPOA? That's just the acronym of the week.

Back in June, there was the MILF who was canned because of her comely can.

Citibank infamously demoted, then fired, Debrahlee Lorenzana, 33, left, because her mere presence proved too distracting for her male co-workers. And that was after the bank forbade the 5-foot-6-inch, 125-pound banker to wear "turtlenecks, high heels, suits or pencil skirts" -- all otherwise admissible in Citibank's dress code.

So, just what are these poor, embattled PILFs -- Professors We'd Like to ... attend office hours with -- whining about?

"I was too embarrassed to admit I knew [about the list]," said Brinkerhoff, a professor at the Rhode Island School of Design. "Something like this does begin to compromise your credibility."

To which we say: Try being dressed down by H.R. for looking too good in business casual.

Gary A. Hoover, a professor of economics at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, who routinely had flirtatious notes of the "Tell me what it would take to lasso you" variety slipped under his door wound up moving 45 minutes away from campus.

But before you go feeling too sorry for him, consider his reasoning, which sounds more like he didn't want to unwittingly hit on a student while out on the prowl.

"I don't want to end up in a bar and see some nice-looking lady," he told The Chronicle, "and then come to find out, 'I'm in your Tuesday/Thursday class.'"

Too true. And in this case, as any girl who's ever been creeped on by a teacher (and wondered what effect denying his advances would have on her grade) can tell you, what occurs more frequently in nature is the PYT in the cross-hairs of the pervy prof.

So, we suggest these professors just smile pretty and embrace their acronym like men.

Nice-looking ones, if they'll accept the compliment.


Carrie Sloan is the editor of Lemondrop. She still shudders thinking about conjugating verbs with a certain French professor. And it has nothing to do with the past imperfect.