This young lady caused quite a stir last weekend when she made a bit of a hash of an answer to a question about the gap in remuneration between men and women. Sorry to say, why would we expect cogent and reflective answers to questions asked on the fly of a person whose intellect is clearly of secondary concern? Would we expect that she deliver a scholarly treatise on the development of the gender gap and a set of tangible and feasible steps to resolve a disparity that flies in the face of everything that we claim to support in our egalitarian and democratic society? Likely not, and perhaps we might have a quiet snicker into our popcorn bowl as we watch our beauty pageant, and perhaps we ought to muse on the way a life gets directed into public spectacle based on some idea of the perfection of the human body (and along the way, a thought about why we would be watching this stuff in the first place: no one watches, no sponsors, no pageants!). If the young lady in question mashes up a poor selection of pre-selected platitudes in a form that makes little sense, there’s likely a lack of general preparation in play, starting when she was a foetus and continuing through early childhood and school years, where it seems likely that athletics, cheerleading, modelling and film would have become increasingly important as it became apparent that she was not an ordinary physical specimen of a developing child/woman. Since we all are bathed in the same soup of sales and sex that produced this intellectual prodigy, we ought perhaps not be overly smug. After all, she could yet go into….

…politics.