<!-- bryant-content-generator:start --> # Strip the nouns and both stories are pricing, and... > Strip the nouns and both stories are pricing, and neither animal is the civilized one. His version: I kept investing while she evaluated replacement value. Hers: I kept investing until the return became intolerable and stopped. A pair-bond is a revocable exchange of companionship, sex, labor, protection, status, money, childcare, identity, belonging and future opportunity, and either animal can discover that the bargain no longer clears; what differs by sex is not whether the books are kept but which books, and the primate record is unambiguous about both. The female instrument is the audit, and the audit runs upward. Female chimpanzees mate preferentially with high-ranking males and high-ranking males sire disproportionately; female baboons cultivate friendships with the males best able to protect their infants and drop them when a better protector appears; across thirty-seven human cultures women weight a partner's resources and status more heavily than men do, and they have in every society ever measured. The manosphere is not wrong about hypergamy. It is wrong only about the novelty. {{Hypergamy is not a modern female vice. It is the oldest female strategy in the primate order, and every woman who ever chose a man was running it.}} The male instrument is guarding, and guarding in the record ends in one of two ways: he provisions and patrols and defends access, experiencing the cost as devotion, and when the guarding fails he reaches for the stick. Male chimpanzees intimidate their mates for years and are rewarded with paternity; male humans kill their wives, and the criminological record is precise about when: the leading motive in the killing of wives is the wife's departure or suspected infidelity, and the weeks around separation are the most dangerous a married woman ever lives through. {{Men are not in love while women are in business. Both are in business. Her business is auditing him against the alternatives. His business is guarding her against the alternatives, and when the guarding fails, the record says, his business is the rock.}} **Source:** [[books/Chimping Out|Chimping Out]] ## Share on Social Media ``` “Strip the nouns and both stories are pricing, and neither animal is the civilized one. His version: I kept investing while she evaluated replacement value. Hers: I kept investing until the return became intolerable and stopped. A pair-bond is a revocable exchange of companionship, sex, labor, protection, status, money, childcare, identity, belonging and future opportunity, and either animal can discover that the bargain no longer clears; what differs by sex is not whether the books are kept but which books, and the primate record is unambiguous about both. The female instrument is the audit, and the audit runs upward. Female chimpanzees mate preferentially with high-ranking males and high-ranking males sire disproportionately; female baboons cultivate friendships with the males best able to protect their infants and drop them when a better protector appears; across thirty-seven human cultures women weight a partner's resources and status more heavily than men do, and they have in every society ever measured. The manosphere is not wrong about hypergamy. It is wrong only about the novelty. Hypergamy is not a modern female vice. It is the oldest female strategy in the primate order, and every woman who ever chose a man was running it. The male instrument is guarding, and guarding in the record ends in one of two ways: he provisions and patrols and defends access, experiencing the cost as devotion, and when the guarding fails he reaches for the stick. Male chimpanzees intimidate their mates for years and are rewarded with paternity; male humans kill their wives, and the criminological record is precise about when: the leading motive in the killing of wives is the wife's departure or suspected infidelity, and the weeks around separation are the most dangerous a married woman ever lives through. Men are not in love while women are in business. Both are in business. Her business is auditing him against the alternatives. His business is guarding her against the alternatives, and when the guarding fails, the record says, his business is the rock.” — Bryant McGill https://bryantmcgill.com/passages/passages-strip-nouns-both-says-business-rock ``` <!-- bryant-content-generator:end -->