Of course it is always the well-educated literate women who complain most vociferously about the unfairness of it all. We of the chattering classes who work in the small minority of jobs that are intellectually gratifying and well paid seem to believe that most jobs have those characteristics. The problem is that many of these desirable(?) jobs exist on the toil of low paid men and women. A career in government and in many white collar jobs is make-work based on legal requirements, not on real creation of wealth. My wife, who has a masters from Harvard, has seen both sides. After retiring I became an entrepreneur. I should say that my stay-at-mome housewife and I became entrepreneurs. We raised millions of dollars from venture capital and federal sources and started a high-tech materials development company. My wife became the CFO, which means that she kept the books, worked with personnel matters, health insurance, liability insurance, etc. Her job was to keep us out of trouble financially. Of course our income was hit or miss, as opposed to the "professional" jobs that radical feminists aspire to. We have again become semi-retired, and she has gone back to her first love-composing serious music. Very few women (or men) aspire to working at Walmart, or becoming roofers, or garbage collectors. But these are the majority of jobs in this country. Most of the overpaid "professional" jobs depend on the hard work and low pay of the these jobs for their existence. When the rest of the world decides to stop lending us money, which mainly goes to the well-connected as a first stop and its way to those who shop at Walmart, many of these high paid, "demanding", "intellectually gratifying" jobs will disappear. Then we'll see how much that vaunted intelligence counts for.

BTW, read the latest issue of Scientific American. Womens brains are extensively rewired by motherhood. Their ability to care for children greatly increases, along with general intelligence. The increase in intelligence doesn't go away. Mens brains show no such effect. What does all this mean?

IQ and good looks are weakly correlated in women. A small waist to hip ratio correlates with fertility. I believe that being fat correlates with weak will and a tendency to self indulgence. An awful lot of "smart" people think that verbal smarts equals real smarts. There are many kinds of smarts. A lot of verbally smart men and women are utterly incompetent in motor skills or spatial visualization. But a lot of them manage to bullshit their way to positions of power and income. Congress and many major companies are loaded with such people. I'm lucky, my wife of 40 years is an excellent cook, can fly a plane, was a ski patroller, composes a lot of serious music that gets played a lot, is good looking, and screws like a demon. But she gives me a fair amount of trouble sometimes. So a small waist and lots of different kinds of intelligence is good, at least most of the time.

Hello Thekiti,

I'm 72, so I've been around awhile. This metabolic thing is mostly bologna. I've often thought about running a fat farm. Low calorie meals would be spaced 5-10 miles apart over rough terrain. Every day the participants would wake up and have to cover the miles to get their breakfast, and so on. I assure you that the most metabolically challenged would be thin in a month. The Puma Indians in the Copper Canyon of Mexico live that sort of life, and are thin and healthy. Their genetic relatives in SW US are grossly overweight and prone to all the ills of obesity. In other words, if you have the "thrifty" gene or whatever, you have to arrange your life so that arduous exercise is inevitable, and food is relatively unavailable. Fat kids were rare in my youth. High levels of activity were our everyday lives. There was no fast food, and we didn't have the money to buy it anyway. Every day we covered 10-25 miles, for fun, depending on whether we were on foot or on out primitive single speed bikes. My daughters are thin and very active in their thirties. We tried to teach them that high levels of physical activity were an everyday occurrence. The choice is not whether or not to "diet", but how to arrange your life so it's more like our ancestors. Not easy, but the rewards of having a strong, capable, and attractive body are wonderful.