According to the rules of good old Darwinian free-market ecology, women should be able to sit back (with their legs tightly crossed and/or their birth control firmly in place) and wait for suitors to come suiting. But the female finagling that leads to male competition skews the 50/50 balance of mates and means that females need to compete to be competed for. (English translation: women fight for the most suitable suitors.)
This isn’t always pretty.
But unlike men, who prefer whacking one another with sticks, the major model of the modern major female reproductive competition is to exclude opponents from social groups that ensure successful mating. This, in a nutshell, is why it sucks to be a middle-school girl.
Eye Hack: Che Lives!
Stare at Che. Keep staring. Now quickly look at a piece of blank, white paper (or another white surface). You should see an afterimage in which Che’s hat and beard are black. The effect is due to the photoreceptors in your eyes being overtaxed by the original image. The white overwhelms, and so the cone cells compensate by toning it down. If they’re dialing white toward black and you take away the picture, the white areas that are dialed down appear blacker than their surroundings.
