Here's a story to round out this thread.
My wife went to school with a girl who became a fitness freak type. Said chick came from a hyper fundy family that discouraged their wimmenz from being strong physical specimens (which is completely nonsensical, given the attitude towards childbearing in those same circles. But I digress)
Wife started working out with her while they were both at the Bob and the chick gained mass easily and became quite strong. So strong that she joined the USMC and they were going to send her to OCS.
Some of you have a notion of how difficult it is to get into USMC OCS. It is a highly selective program and in this day and age you cannot even consider getting in as a white male unless you are Jesus, and maybe not even then. (Also, Jesus wasn't White, but I digress yet again).
So this young lady secured her spot to go to OCS about a year out. In the mean time she came down with a debilitating sickness (mono I think), but had several months to recover after that. In the mean time,she became engaged to an enlisted man.
However, following the sickness, she failed to rebuild her strength, as in, failed to even try to obtain her previous muscle mass and endurance, but then proceeded to Quantico anyways, where she promptly washed out. The version I heard is that her family essentially really got onto her, despite the fact that she was living 800 miles away from home, telling her that if she worked out too much then she wouldn't be attractive, and probably some other head games as well.
So this pisses me off on several levels.
1. Her family is retarded.
2. Her enlisted boyfriend/fiancee obviously sucks because he didn't demonstrate enough leadership to quash her family's head games and get her back in the groove.
3. if men and women use the same set of slots for OCS, she wasted a slot that could have been given to a deserving woman, or more likely, a man. The fact that she did not recognize this does not bode well for her leadership potential or the Corps' analysis thereof.