We think we are prettier than we really are in the study of assessing own beauty…
So we end up in a world where we’re all secretly believing we are a 6.5/10, despite the fact that the average must be 5.
Primates
When a male becomes the dominant male in his range, he grows the two big flanges on the side of his head. Somehow his biology responds to his position in the dominance hierarchy.
Females will voluntarily mate with the alpha, seeking out sex, riding him cowgirl, just going total slut.
A few million years ago their common ancestor ended up divided by a river in central Africa. One side of the river had more food, the other had less (and had gorillas to compete against). The plentiful side turned into bonobos, and the scarce side turned into chimps. Though they look so similar that for a while people thought they were the same species, their behavior is cartoonishly different.
The life of a chimpanzee female is a brutal one; you get used as a pawn, get sexually assaulted, kidnapped, physically beaten on a regular basis. You’d think the extreme control males have over the females would lead to the alpha male exhibiting extreme dominance over reproduction. But in this world, somehow, the dominant male fathers the lowest percentage of offspring compared to all of the other nonhuman great apes.
Part 4
Most people who are “immune” to hierarchy may be in a flat hierarchy environment.
For example, most child sexual assault is not traumatizing or upsetting to the child at the time, it’s after the child grows up and realizes the context that the trauma sets in. This context is usually the realization that: someone who was supposed to protect me, was in fact doing something they had good reason to believe would harm me. It’s the sensation of being used, of having trust betrayed.