Gramsci bit what would have been his tongue, had he had a tongue to bite, had he not been a spider.
"Surely it's such a dysfunctional strategy, it would have been wiped out aeons ago by common sense?"
"Well," Gramsci muttered tentatively, "if it's survived this long, it must be effective, surely?"
The Cow rolled her eyes dramatically. "Studies indicate that people pair up with other people of roughly equivalent mateworthiness. And mateworthiness seems to differ between genders - in a woman, men favour physical attractiveness, say; whereas women reputedly favour those attributes that translate into ability to provide resources of one kind or another - so while you might get a stunning woman with a creepy-looking guy, he's probably either loaded, or loaded!"
Gramsci shrugged. Nothing new there, but he couldn't help thinking of Anna Nicole Smith.
"So then," the Cow persisted, "what's with these high maintenance women?"
Gramsci reflected. In the same way that the studies showed that women preferred older men, and men preferred younger women - but some younger men had to settle for older women because that was all they could get given their own low mateworthiness - perhaps it had something to do with what was feasible under the circumstances?
The Cow shook her head. "No, I don't buy that," she said slowly. "Then you'd get lower-end guys stuck with the high maintenance women. Mostly it's decent guys, who could be doing a lot better for themselves. Though, admittedly, sometimes their own ranking of themselves is a bit off, and they settle for less than they could get."
"Hmm," mused Gramsci. "Perhaps it's a strategy to fool men into thinking they're more mateworthy than they really are! Like playing hard to get?"
The Cow paused. There could be some sense in that. If a woman was demanding and difficult and needed a constant stream of attention, reassurance or material goods, rather than signalling that she was difficult and demanding and not worth the effort, she might in fact confuse him into believing that surely she _must_ be worth the effort, or she'd not be doing that? It made no sense, but then, little about mating games did. And hey, it seemed to work for many of those women.
"But what if he wakes up to the fact that she is just difficult and demanding and not worth the effort, after all?" she asked.
Gramsci chuckled. "We're talking men here, right? Which man is going to admit he was fooled into thinking some unmateworthy woman was more attractive because of such a strategy? He's invested in maintaining the myth!"
The Cow nodded. It explained many things. Hormones had a lot to answer for!