It is a paradox remarkably often noted: why would otherwise intelligent women, educated to a high standard, interested in global politics, etc, etc, worry about something as meaningless as their weight?

This curiosity is currently being interrogated by India Knight who, with her friend Neris Thomas, has written a diet book.

It must be an intelligent book, since they are both manifestly intelligent, as attested by their high professional status (Knight is a writer and Thomas a film producer). And yet it is also, undeniably, about dieting. Riddle-me-ree.

Behaviours that are very different tend to cluster together where food is concerned: so, being fat, dieting successfully, attaining a more normal shape, this is a funny old thing for an intelligent woman to be concerned about.

At the same time, being a normal shape already, fixating over the deficiencies of said shape, developing an abnormal relationship with and neurotic strategies around food, this is apparently the same “paradox”. “We’re intelligent,” runs the mantra, “how extraordinary that in this area we should be so irrational.”

Few people are rational all the time. Irrationality remains concomitant with intelligence only for as long as it is self-aware, limited and doesn’t make too much of a song and dance about itself. To return to the original paradox, then.

No, it is not a paradox. Women, who fixate on their weight, unless we’re dealing with eating disorders, are not intelligent.

Intelligence is not bestowed at birth, assessed through childhood and fixed until death. It is an aggregate of what you’ve got and what you do with it.

I think the whole weight-loss industry has flourished in tandem with a wider, so-called ironic embrace of low culture. You can’t be called on it, because you’ll just turn around and say: “Oh, but I was just being silly! Can’t you see?”

But, second, and more importantly, I think women get away with it by painting themselves as victims of society’s objectification.

As a strategy, this is an incredible betrayal of feminism: women still are victims of objectification, there still is a case to answer; but this feverish, industrial narcissism is a different matter altogether.