Picture this scene between two stereotypical men who are friends, looking at a woman who has a perfect hip to waist ratio that will make a Coke bottle pop. Chances are they are not wondering whether that woman has an IQ that could win a succession of Jeopardy game sets. But for some reason I have yet to find out, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh and California recently did a study where they found some basis to claim that curvy women (and their children) are more likely to be smarter than their leaner counterparts. Their study was published in Evolution and Human Behavior.
When BBC online reported this study last Nov. 12, the reporter even cited Nigella Lawson, the culinary goddess who also happens to be Oxford-educated and author of many best-selling cookbooks. I was in New York at one time when Nigella Lawson happened to have a book signing. The line was so long that it coiled outside the bookstore and those in line were mostly men. Something told me that most of those men were not really there to express their gratitude to Ms. Lawson for having finally awakened their culinary passions or to test her knowledge of Medieval Literature (her course in Oxford).
This study flies in the face of common perception when we think of “sex goddesses” with curves that are, paraphrasing Bill Bryson, “shaped by a loving God,” their intellectual power not exactly the feature we automatically wonder about. In fact, history has largely perceived women to say that if nature has already carved your body in perfect form, it seems too much to ask for a mind to go with it. But fortunately, nature surpasses the average male IQ to surprise him and throws in curvy women who are intelligent as well and not consider it a fluke.
There were 16,000 women and girls who participated in the study. The research even found that the bigger the difference between your hips and waist, the better the intelligence scores get for these women and children. But they still do not know why this is so. Some of them speculated that it could be the Omega 3 fatty acids that are found in the hips. Many studies have shown that Omega 3 has positive effects on the mental abilities. But many also say that there may have been other intervening factors such as diet or social class that are entwined with the “shape” of a woman and her mental abilities.
Women are also aware that men generally really do not associate “hips” with “brain.” But women also know that men have relatively little going on up there than in his other regions when confronted by an alluring and shapely gait. In fact, we doubt if having kids, as biologists say, is prime in their minds. The philosopher Schopenhauer, even in his consistently depressed state, wrote that “the propagation of the species is not what men have in mind when they ask for a woman’s phone number.”
And men, be wary, too, of her dancing gait when she passes you because another study found out that this does not correspond to a woman’s readiness to breed. The biology of attraction has taught us before that women communicate what their bodies are ready for and a “sexy” walk seems to be one of the most logical gestures that a woman could employ to attract a man. However, to disappoint men once more, a study has found that the sexy walks do not really correspond to the hormonal levels that speak of a readiness to breed. In fact, the closer she is to ovulation, the woman seemed to show less of a sexy walk. This news reported in BBC last Nov. 8 was published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The researchers claimed that this defied common perception but it actually made sense because women have a reason to conceal their “fertile” peaks to men with whom they really do not want to have children with. In other words, women who do sexy walks not necessarily to attract potential fathers but maybe just for the fun of it, are, surprise, intelligent women who finally figured out how to render the shape of biology to protect their inner biology.
Imagine, so much concentration of scientific studies on Eve’s pendulum — her hip and her sway — because they are known to mesmerize men and cause them to utter unintelligible words and sound effects that a synthesizer would be unequipped to mimic. And while men are being mesmerized, Eves go on swaying because they are built that way, and with a grocery bag on one hand, and car keys on the other, they are whispering… “As I count to three, you will wake up…Three, two, one…. back to work, Adam.”
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