<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # That is why the books were hidden, and the hiding... > That is why the books were hidden, and the hiding was not treachery; it was the oldest risk management a female primate performs. The audit was read aloud for years, at dinner, in the car, in the dark, in the form the men call nagging, and it went quiet at the exact moment it became a decision, because a female animal that announces her departure to a guarding male while still inside his reach is, in every species where males guard, an animal that has miscalculated. She priced the confrontation the way the ghost prices the explanation and the way the coalition prices the expulsion, and she found that the cheapest and safest exit was the one he heard about last. {{She did not keep the books secret because she is a schemer. She kept them secret because the last mate that read a departure aloud to a guarding ape was answered with a rock, and her nervous system remembers.}} And the demographic footnote the sociologists offer, that educational hypergamy has fallen and women now increasingly marry men with less schooling, describes the supply, not the appetite: the schools filled with women, the men with degrees ran out, and women married down on paper while still pricing every man against rank and resources with the same instrument their grandmothers used, which is exactly why the women married down on paper are the ones now walking. {{Women did not stop trading up. They ran out of men to trade up to, married sideways, and kept the ledger open.}} Monkey branching, the term the men use as an accusation, is how an animal moves through the canopy: no primate releases one branch before its hand has closed on the next, because the alternative is the ground. {{What the men call monkey branching is what the women call not dying, and the men know it, because the men do it too, with a younger branch.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “That is why the books were hidden, and the hiding was not treachery; it was the oldest risk management a female primate performs. The audit was read aloud for years, at dinner, in the car, in the dark, in the form the men call nagging, and it went quiet at the exact moment it became a decision, because a female animal that announces her departure to a guarding male while still inside his reach is, in every species where males guard, an animal that has miscalculated. She priced the confrontation the way the ghost prices the explanation and the way the coalition prices the expulsion, and she found that the cheapest and safest exit was the one he heard about last. She did not keep the books secret because she is a schemer. She kept them secret because the last mate that read a departure aloud to a guarding ape was answered with a rock, and her nervous system remembers. And the demographic footnote the sociologists offer, that educational hypergamy has fallen and women now increasingly marry men with less schooling, describes the supply, not the appetite: the schools filled with women, the men with degrees ran out, and women married down on paper while still pricing every man against rank and resources with the same instrument their grandmothers used, which is exactly why the women married down on paper are the ones now walking. Women did not stop trading up. They ran out of men to trade up to, married sideways, and kept the ledger open. Monkey branching, the term the men use as an accusation, is how an animal moves through the canopy: no primate releases one branch before its hand has closed on the next, because the alternative is the ground. What the men call monkey branching is what the women call not dying, and the men know it, because the men do it too, with a younger branch.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-books-hidden-hiding-men-younger-branch ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->