You're Wrong About - Alpha Males

Episode Date: August 4, 2018

Sarah tells Mike that animal behavior is an imperfect template for human society. Digressions include rabbits, Bob’s Burgers and online dating. Mike makes an awkward observation about locker rooms.��Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

Why is it that every time I'm writing an article that means something to me, I end up feeling like William H. Macy at the end of Fargo, where the police attract him down to his motel room and he's like, yeah, just a sack, climbing out the window. And that's how I relate to editors. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where, without even meaning to, we find ourselves repeatedly asking straight men, what happened to you, and why do you continue to be like this? Is that the universal tagline? Is that the theme for every episode now?

Well, I just listened to the Godfather episode, and that's definitely about that. And I think our episodes tend to be about the foibles of humanity more broadly, but since we're talking about American life, politics, and history, we do get back to the reactive woundedness of the straight male population quite often. I can hear the clap emojis between all of the words that you're saying. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for The New Republic and The Believer and BuzzFeed. And today we're talking about alpha males.

Oh, God. What is the first thing that you think of? Like, what do you see on your little homeland red string board when that phrase pops into your head? So until you told me this a couple of months ago, I had no idea that this was like even up for dispute. I thought the situation was simply that like wolf packs, I guess bear packs. I don't know if bears are in packs. Sleuths. Uh, yeah, like gorillas and chimpanzees and stuff.

There's like an alpha male. There's like one dude who's at the top of the pecking order and everyone kind of bows before this figure. I mean, I also, to be totally honest, the first thing when you told me this, the first thing that I thought it was the how to train your dragon movies, which I'm totally obsessed with. I only say the first one, but it made a big impression on me. So the second one is about his dragon trying to become the alpha of all the dragons.

All the other dragons just unquestioningly follow the alpha. So once you're the alpha, everyone else just does exactly what you say without questioning it. It's an animated movie about dragons. So it's like obviously exaggerated, but most of us kind of accept that concept that there is some sort of inherent hierarchy in these animal societies. And then there's obviously like right wing weirdos who believe that we should have that kind of hierarchy in the United States of America in 2018. And there's alpha and betas and cucks.

Yeah, I guess cuck is the new omega. It's much taxier. Not to get too deep too fast, but I feel like that is a way that people seem to sort of relate to the world. There's these kind of ubermensch men and then there's like the follower men. And then there's like this lower level of men that are just being humiliated by these like studly brawny dudes. Yeah. I think that it is like a handy little rosetta stone for understanding the world for a large

and potentially growing portion of the male population. This is just the way that they organize things. I think alphanus is something that does exist, but just not in the way we tend to want it to exist like so many other things. What I found most surprising going in and researching this was how relatively recent this term is because it's one of those things that's just become absorbed into our cultural consciousness and we feel like we've had it for forever. But I did the little graph thing where you enter a phrase into Google and it shows

how often it appears in books. And it really is in almost no books at all, no printed material at all until the late 60s. Interesting. And then we start seeing it a lot. And then it starts having an upswing I think in the late 80s. And then it's continued to really grow since then. But it's been continually getting more and more visibility since the 60s. Like and we are more inundated with this term now than we were 10 years ago,

more 10 years ago than we were 20 years ago. Which I find surprising because you think that the myths of patriarchal masculinity are evergreen, but it turns out that they're a fluctuating mass. And so the first historical text that I looked at in researching this that I found a passage that I want to read to you first because I feel like it might be the most annoying excerpt that we encounter today. This is from an issue of Life magazine published February 20th, 1970. The cover of this issue of life, the headlines in order are Teenagers on Heroin.

Robert Ardrey, the case for population control. And then an architect runs away to join the circus as a clown. And the cover is a picture of a guy half in clown makeup and half not. Which is like what a great after-school special that would have been. So it's just it's a time when the teenagers are on heroine and the architects are joining the circus. And everyone's like what's the fucking point? And so this is from the cover article by Robert Ardrey.

And he makes an argument about well in animal populations, the lower ranking animals have higher stress. They more frequently die from stress. So he's saying transitioning to humans. In Australian experiments, K. Myers has shown that among rabbits subjected to density pressures, it is the low-ranking female who suffers the greatest fetus mortality. We may speculate then that the quote temperament of a population may well be determined by the random incidence or absence of a powerful alpha male or female whose very presence

acts to forestall the disintegration of social organization. So we're already going in some scary directions. Continuing, the relative immunity of the alpha and vulnerability of the omega or lowest ranking member of a social order is suggested in a 1968 study of men. In that year, our journal Science published a medical study of 270,000 male employees of a major American corporation. Okay, sounds like good, keep going. The mammoth investigation linked educational background, job achievement,

and incidence of coronary heart disease. Now there are a bunch of ads for air travel. The corporation offered, like a perfectly arranged laboratory condition, a single controlled environment. Operating units, whether in Georgia or New York state, had similar structures, fulfilled similar functions, provided similar jobs. All was directed by a single top management policy with the same system of pensions and security, insurance and medical practices, and perhaps most important, of record keeping.

And the 270,000 case histories provided a sample so large that even small variations from the expectable would have statistical significance. The variations were not small. From bottom to top in the company's pecking order, the study found that workmen contract coronaries at the rate of 4.33 per thousand per year. Their immediate superiors, the foreman, have it slightly worse, 4.52. But supervisors and local area managers dropped to 3.91, then comes a leap. General area managers have a mere 2.85.

We then come to the high competitors, the high achievers, the high executives. Coronaries occurred a rate of 1.85, about 40% of the level of workmen. While we may say that many a coronary customer could have been eliminated before reaching the alpha rank, we must also reckon that the high executives are much older. I mean, so basically, okay, so to try to summarize all that, he's basically saying, first of all, he's making almost like a Thomas Hobbes Leviathan argument. Your cousin. That, yes, my dad.

That like to have a strong society, you need to have a strong alpha or a strong alpha female. If such things even exist in your species, which like- Right, which maybe they do, maybe they don't. Let's not get into these specifics. But basically, the metaphor is, A, you need a super strong alpha. And B, in hierarchical systems like corporations, the stress of being lower on the totem pole gives you higher cardiovascular risks and makes you more unhealthy. And so there's these kind of alphas that are at the top

who are like very healthy and very robust and are doing fine, even though they're older. I don't want to impute bad faith to this journalist. But I would love to see the actual study of this corporation that it's based on, because there's a million other reasons why people at the top of a company would have less cardiovascular risk. I mean, first of all, cardiovascular risk is not a perfect measure of stress. So it's not clear that that's the one thing. It's an interesting finding.

But you can think of a million other ways to explain that finding, other than this like one little thing that you've decided alphaness is what explains this. Like maybe it could be better access to medical care. Maybe it could be they're getting less discrimination in daily life because they're wearing suits and they just kind of look more affluent. Maybe it's because more of exponentially more of the workers in this unnamed corporation are people of color who have higher rates of coronary complications. Right.

You don't want to take away the finding. It's an interesting finding that there's lower rates of cardiovascular disease at the upper levels. To me, that feels like that's the beginning of coming to the explanation. Whereas this journalist is casting it as like, oh, here's this one thing that explains it. It feels like you need like another decade to figure out what's actually going on here. Like, does this apply to other corporations? Does this apply to like manufacturing companies but not software companies? Does this apply in Georgia but not in Oregon?

Does this, I mean, there's a million other things you would have to look into before saying, hey, we think what's really going on here is this thing. But he's like, let's look at penguins and one study of a corporation. Boom, alpha males. Well, that's how you prop up a somewhat specious argument is by cherry picking data. I mean, as a journalist, I've definitely been in this situation. Oh, fuck, I need to like, I wish this study said this more unequivocally. And like, I'll just write about it as if, I mean, I pride myself on the fact that I haven't done

this, but there is huge pressure. You read through an entire academic study and you're like, oh, this is actually pretty nuanced. I'll just, I'll just write up the abstract. Most academics, when you show them, like, hey, I saw your study and I have concluded this from it nine times out of 10. They're like, we don't think so. We think we need to do a lot more research on that. And so I wonder what, if that was the conclusion that the researchers themselves drew from this

study, or if he's kind of taking this raw material and putting it into this mold. Yeah. And you don't really, you don't get a headline out of good science, typically. Like, I feel like occasionally it happens. But yeah, a good study tends to not be able to say very many things definitively in what it often leads to is, oh, we should, we should do follow up on this. We should investigate this further as opposed to, and therefore, it's also interesting to me that in this article where he's examining animal populations and that, you know, the

classic alpha male rhetoric too is millennia ago at the dawn of man, animals needed to section, section. Therefore, this is how humans should behave in suburbia. And it's like, why is it that we, when we're taking tools from the dawn of man to use in our modern lives, it always involves being dominant or taking someone else's stuff. Right. And the thing that initially got me interested in this, and I'll just read this to you, was, you know how everyone has a very specific favorite piece of taxidermy at the American

Museum of Natural History in New York? Like, we all do, obviously. Obviously, yes. Yeah. And my favorite is the Wolves in the Hall of North American Mammals, because it's this really beautiful exhibit where it's, the wolves are chasing a deer in the moonlight and they've used, I think, marble dust or something as the snow. And the wolves are taxidermied in mid-leap.

And it's this beautiful uncanny lifelike piece of taxidermy. She's an art form that I appreciate very much. And it's, you know, they're hunting, but it's a quite beautiful moment in wolf life. And the little plaque that accompanies it says, an alpha pair dominates the family. An alpha female will snap and snarl at lesser females to prevent them from mating, for only she gets this privilege. The alpha male is the chorus leader and decision maker, which I also really like. It is a description.

So you're like, oh, wolves are Mormons, I guess. To ensure group hunting and pup rearing, he will block members from leaving the pack. Still, some underlings do split off to form packs of their own, whereupon they become the competition. I mean, why is this the most relevant thing about wolves? This is the whole wolf part of this whole exhibit. And we could also talk about how wolves mate for life or something aside from the human reminiscent wolf politics that we have attached to wolves.

And so before it trickled down to humans, wolves were the first species that the alpha label was applied to in popular science. So this all comes back to a study done by a scientist named Rudolph Schenkel, that was published in 1947. And he studied captive wolves in Switzerland, and then extrapolated from that to talk about archetypal wolf behavior. I wonder if that turns out to be problematic later. I don't know.

Do you think that possibly that could skew the results? I have no idea. I also have come to mistrust studies done around times of societal upheaval, which to be fair, there aren't any that don't have that. But if you're doing a study on animal behavior during World War II, and then publishing results immediately after World War II, I think that that affected the kind of mindset, the kind of needs that people bring to the science.

And so here's a quote from Schenkel. By incessant control and repression of all types of competition within the same sex, both of these alpha animals defend their social position. So he's saying there's an alpha male and an alpha female, and they're in charge. And anyone who tries to question that gets dominated and controlled and pushed back down. According to Schenkel, how are these alpha male and females getting to be the alpha and maintaining their status as the alpha?

Well, and let me see, I have another quote. The emotional reactivity of the dominant cub, the potential alpha animal of the pack, might be measurably different from the subordinate individuals. And it might then be possible to pick out the temperament characteristics or emotional reactivity of potential alpha or leader wolves and of subordinates. Furthermore, under normal field conditions, it seems improbable that timid, low-ranking wolves would breed.

This is another author named L. David Mech, who published his own book on wolves in 1970, The Wolf, after studying wolves on Isle Royal, and then decided that his previous research was flawed and has been one of the leading voices of the sort of anti-Schenkel, the second wave of wolf behavioral science of the 20th century. Oh my god, I love tiny little debates like this, like debates within a field.

Yes. Fuck you, Schenkel, like yelling at each other across a like Marriott ballroom conference thing. Yeah. Of like, no, you're studying them in captivity. My methodology is sound. Yeah. They're shoving each other.

I just love that. Yes. Debates and scholarship are the most delicious things. And especially when someone has written an article on the humanities, the antinomian controversy, where they have all these sub-tweetie footnotes, where they're like, this author, wrote this in 1958, which my research suggests may have been based on a misreading of a primary source.

And it's like, oh my god, when you're being catty about something that only four or five people would join you in catniness about. Yeah. But yes, in the post-Schenkel world, the Schenkel and the Schenkelian belief is that, yeah, wolf cubs are born and show these dominant or submissive traits, and that it's an innate trait of the future dominant wolf cub to just be an alpha from birth.

And what the wolf studies that come after this and that study wild populations find is that Schenkel's research was flawed partly because he was examining captive wolves that were living a little bit unusually compared to the standards of wild wolves, which is that they had non-family members living together, which apparently in the wild wolves don't tend to do. What scientists who've come in the post-Schenkel universe have studied

are wolves that live in the wildest family units. The alphas, the alpha male, the alpha female are the mom and the dad. So Mech has a great quote. Labeling a high-ranking wolf alpha emphasizes its rank in a dominant hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with the other wolves are rare if they exist at all. During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none.

Thus, calling a wolf an alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha. Oh, burn! I know, call the burn unit. Take that, Schenkel. Any parent is dominant to its young offspring, so alpha adds no information. Why not refer to an alpha female as the female parent,

the breeding female, the matriarch, or simply the mother? Such a designation emphasizes not the animal's dominant status, which is trivial information, but its role as pack progenitor, which is critical information. And then he adds, the point here is not so much the terminology, but what the terminology falsely implies, a rigid force-based dominance hierarchy.

Wow. Yeah. That is some academic shade. Brutal. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I live for. But I mean, if you're going to pull a metaphor out of this,

it's actually interesting that, I mean, one of the metaphors you could draw is that something about being in captivity changes natural patterns, right? Yeah. That being in captivity is profoundly unnatural, and that it's almost like a debunking of learning very much at all about the animal kingdom from animals in captivity, simply because it is always going to change their behavior

in ways that are very difficult to see at the time. Like, it looked very obvious to Schenkel that there were these dominance displays, but then the minute you get into more natural conditions, you're like, no, it's just a normal family structure. Right. And so it's interesting of like, you think about all the other stuff that we learn

about animals from captivity, that not all of that is going to be bunk, but you have to consider the possibility that some of it is going to be bunk because we're just creating conditions that don't exist in nature. Right. I mean, it's a little bit like studying humans

and having, you know, the circumstance that you're finding them in be a prison. Right. Humans really like trading cigarettes for stuff. What a weird human trait. Wow. We've learned so much about humans today. Right.

They love cigarettes. And it's not true, but it's in a specific context. And so primatology as a field continues to grow. It's hard to understate how amazed Americans seem to be by all of our revelations about primates in the 60s and 70s, you know, and Jane Goodall figuring out that the Great Apes are using tools,

and oh my God, and no one believed her. And when you look at that now and you're like, they have hands. And so primatology studies in the 60s and 70s continue, you know, actually go into the wild to the extent that they can and look at the power structures and in primates. And primates actually do seem to have alphas

much more than wolves do. They do have groupings that are larger than just a family unit and have, you know, the male in charge. And you know, higher primates do do scary shit. Chimps wage war on each other and consume the flesh of their enemies and stuff. I don't know whose idea it was to start putting them

in tutus and roller skates, but that seems like one of the pieces of human folly that I don't know suggests a particular kind of blindness about the intelligence and the sheer strength of the animal you're fucking with. But so the alpha male thing does sort of exist, but not in wolves. Well, to an extent.

I feel like it's an idea that it applies to animal behavior, but when we as humans try to appropriate it, do this Prometheus thing with it, we tend to interpret it in the ways that are most convenient for us. And so this book comes out in 1982, which is Franz de Waal, another primatologist, talking about chimp behaviors.

And maybe we can compare this to humans and to the alpha behavior of the chimp versus the corporate bigwig. And this seems to be the moment that the spark kind of jumps in 1982 from animal behavioral studies and academics sub-tweeting each other to this popular understanding

that we have now of alpha males. And we appropriate this Schenkelian idea of that there are born alphas and some people just are more dominant and that we naturally tend to word power structures led by alpha males. And where we are with that now seems to be, you know, a lot of the uglier little corners

of the internet of the red pill discussion boards and things of guys talking about, you know, how do you become an alpha? So it can be a self-made man thing, I guess, like becoming an entrepreneur. Like how do you act like an alpha? How do you boss everyone around? This is part of pickup artist culture,

which always makes me think of there's a pickup artist character on Bob's Burgers who has all of these little tips. And one of them is never make her pancakes. Make her make you pancakes. That's such a great summation of like the relationship between those dudes to women. And this is my own personal reading of all this.

Is, you know, all of these arguments are like, well, you know, the alpha male is the leader of the pack, the leader of the society. Society needs leaders and we're the leaders. And so the alpha is someone who fucks whoever they want and isn't nice to anyone and never makes anyone pancakes and is constantly engaging in feats of dominance and clashes and things like that.

And you look at it and you're like, hmm, I don't know how great those behaviors are for running a society or a family or a community. Like I think we actually need, I think the actual alphas of nature, if we're talking, if we're going to call the breeding pair of a family wolf pack the alphas, which we can, or if we're going to talk about

alpha chimps or whatever are the ones who think in terms of the community and in terms of the greater good and the safety of those around them and like, has everybody eaten? Does everybody have an umbrella? Does everybody have a coat? It's going to be cold. Right. Yeah.

The alpha is really, you know, the soccer mom of the natural kingdom who's like, okay, we're going to go to Dairy Queen. Does anyone have a nut allergy? The alpha is the one who figures out who has nut allergies. They're not the person constantly pushing everyone around. I'm curious how this concept went from animals to humans because animals exhibit an infinite number of behaviors, right? And there's only a few that were like,

well, this one explains humans. Like dogs eat each other's feces. I don't see anyone being like, oh, there's like the cuck eats the feces of the other cucks. Right. Or, you know, why is no one like, well, the male seahorse carries the fetus. So therefore, I think that this came along at the moment when the first popular science discussion of the alpha male

begins with the wolf study immediately carried out during World War II and published right after. And this is also the time during which corporate America is really rising in a way that it hadn't before. And our need for corporations and workplaces that comprise these vast hierarchical structures, the scale of hierarchy that most Americans interacted with as part of their job suddenly became so present and so inescapable.

And we really started as a society to lose our grasp on communal living. When we look at how we interacted with the idea of alpha males, especially, you know, looking at animal behavior and being like, right, animals also live in a rigid hierarchy and they have bosses. And the bosses are required to wage war on anyone who disagrees with them slightly

and constantly make sure that everyone is under them. And what animals and humans really want, I think, is not a boss, but a parent. How did this get laundered into human behavior? Like, were there time in Newsweek articles about like, hey, look at this thing that animals do. Let's do it too. Yeah, I mean, the first real spark jump was with

the chimpanzee behavior book that comes out in 1982 and that makes a link between chimpanzee and higher primate alpha behavior and corporate humans. And this idea of the alpha is the person who rises above the competition and takes control of the situations. And human society needs alphas because we're mammals and primates just like everybody else.

And we just have this idea of, well, look, this is how humans organize themselves. This is our society and how it always has to be and will be. And so you're either going to be an alpha or you're going to be getting bossed around by the alpha. So if you can emulate and become the alpha, might as well. Oh, another really interesting thing is that pre-shankle, before any of this rhetoric really starts percolating,

alphas are the ruling class in Brave New World. Remember that book? Yes, but I don't remember that aspect of it. Someone made a reference to, well, Huxley talked about this in Brave New World and it was this very much out of the current alpha idea because there it's clearly being used as rhetoric to prop up a totalitarian dystopia.

We don't really think of it that way now. I mean, I do. Yes, you do. I do. We do. Well, one thing that's always struck me is this alpha male concept is bouncing around for decades. And then it gets picked up by, of all things, the dating community.

Like, it's weird to me that it wasn't picked up by a political party or an activist movement. Yeah, how do you see that? Well, I mean, it's not like pickup artists have some great reverence for the fucking animal kingdom. Obviously, what they're doing is they're cherry-picking concepts that they like to justify this worldview and also this vision of reality in which

there are natural hierarchies. Whenever anybody envisions a natural hierarchy, they always put themselves at the top of it. Nobody ever says, like, there's genetic superiority, and I'm like fourth, right? And you're always like, there's genetic superiority, and oh, oh, oh, look, I guess I am at the top. How strange.

Interesting. Let's just go about organizing our entire society around this hierarchy where I happen to be at the top. But really, it's like a natural thing. It's really a burden to me. Like, I'm having the hardest time with having to go around sterilizing everybody. And so, I mean, I've spent a decent amount of time

reading these like pickup artist guys thing, because I find it like morbidly fascinating and really terrifying. That's terrifying. It's dark. Yeah, I even read that fucking The Game, the like pickup artist Bible, that like pretends not to be a pickup artist Bible.

What does that pretend to be? Like about having like self-love or something? Well, he is like an outsider to the pickup artist culture. I mean, that book sort of started the whole pickup artist thing, where he brought, it was this journalist for, I think he wrote a story in Rolling Stone that then got turned into a book about this culture of these dudes in LA that had all these like tactics

we're all familiar with now of like negging, and they would dress in these like flamboyant clothes that would like get people's attention. Do they think they invented flamboyant clothes? Like, have they never seen a 70s movie before? Well, that's the thing. I mean, it's not like these people are like learned scholars, right?

They're like completely doing this from scratch. And the trick, of course, is you never hit on the hot girl. You hit on her friend to make her think that she's not hot. And so the whole thing is basically never allowing a woman to think that she's valuable. You have to always be, this is the negging concept too. So you say like, oh, I like your nails.

Are they real? Which is like kind of disguised as a compliment, but you're actually kind of sending the message like, oh, you're fake and you're not putting one over on me. It's like these little ways of not letting her control the interaction and to, and I think they even use this phrase, establish dominance, that you establish dominance

in the interaction at all times, that you're choosing the location, you're choosing the times. There's this whole thing of like, you have to move them to different locations. Like every 45 minutes, you're supposed to be like, let's go to a different bar. Like you've kidnapped someone and are trying to disorient them.

I mean, there's all this like pseudoscience that goes along with it. And the pseudo psychology that goes along with it is that like, if someone has known you in a series of locations, they think they've known you longer. What? So that establishes intimacy. Like, oh, I've seen him in three different places.

I must have known him for longer than like two hours. I mean, there's no, like, I don't know what the basis for any of this shit is. Right. But it's based on hacking the female brain in some way. 100% yes. White men can't be motivated to do anything unless you call it a hack and then they'll do it.

Yeah, exactly. But of course, I mean, what's interesting about any of these hobbies, that whenever anybody gets a hobby, they need like a whole worldview to go along with it, right? Nobody just like does yoga. Everyone needs to like do yoga. And it's all about mindfulness and being at peace.

And in the rest of my life, I try to do like, it kind of like colonizes the rest of your life. And so in the same way, this pickup artist stuff, they've adopted this pickup artist language in this pickup artist community, but then they need this whole world of you to kind of justify it and make it bigger than just trying to get laid.

Right. So they create this whole world in which there's a hierarchy and the females are like doing their thing to climb up the hierarchy and males are doing their thing to climb up the hierarchy. And what you need to do is establish yourself. It's like one rung on the ladder above the women.

And then, of course, it goes into like the way that society is structured, right? And so that's where all this alpha stuff comes in, of that some people are simply more capable. Five, 10 years later, once you get into the incel stuff, then it's much more about men who have this ratio of their upper lip to their nose is more attractive to women. There's all this weird genetic stuff,

the spacing between your eyes and the idea is that if you are lower on the totem pole in these ridiculous proportional face shit, you're an omega and you're never going to win. Or you have to wildly overcompensate by your for your upper lip to nose ratio by taking women to a bunch of different locations on a date. So they get disoriented and have sex with you faster, I guess.

Like, yeah, it's like you're like, well, I'm playing with all these handicaps, so it's fine if I cheat in the sand trap, yeah. A friend of mine, a female friend of mine, whose name I'm not going to use because she's like totally embarrassed about this, went on a date with a guy years ago from, I think, OK, Cupid or Matt.com are one of these things.

And so it's like, let's meet at a bar, 7 p.m. The dude shows up and he has a puppy with him. And he's like, oh, do you want to meet my puppy? Do you want to pet my puppy? I go to this bar all the time because they let me bring my puppy here. Isn't he nice? So she pets the puppy.

They stay there for like 15 minutes. And then he's like, oh, I know we're about to go out for a movie, but do you mind if we pop back to my apartment because I need to feed Wolfgang or whatever the puppy's name is. I need to go back and feed Wolfgang. So they go back to his apartment and then there's this whole routine that he has set up. Oh, my God.

Oh, do you mind if I just play guitar for you a little bit? 00:32:17,840 --> 00:32:19,280 I've been practicing. Do you mind listening to a song that I made? And then he's like, oh, I was just watching this movie. Do you mind if we just watch a scene? And so my friend was saying, as they're kind of getting into bed and they're making out, she has this moment that she's like,

wait a minute, we didn't need to go back to your apartment. Hang on a minute. You haven't even fed your puppy. It all kind of clicks into her brain. And it became really clear that he had this script that he was running through. And that he had probably done this dozens of times before. And so between the making out and the sex stage,

she was like, this is fucking weird. I'm going to go. And he was just like, OK. As if it was Groundhog Day. And he had tried 50 million other times. That's so insane. Coming into an interaction with another human being is if you're playing Halo.

And you have to use all these little hacks and all these little tricks in order to hack into the main frame. And then like you're cheating the casino by getting the slot machine to do a big jackpot for you. And it's the competitive idea of dating and how if you're trying to trick someone constantly, you can avoid the whole question of human intimacy because it's just a contest.

This is from a New York Magazine article. It says, across three studies, Laurie Jensen Campbell and colleagues found that it wasn't dominance alone, but rather the interaction of dominance and pro-social behaviors that women reported were particularly sexually attractive. Interesting.

In other words, dominance only increased sexual attraction when the person was already high in agreeableness and altruism. So this is, I think, a conclusion I'm going to arrive at repeatedly, but my conclusion after reading through all of my debunking material was, the biggest power move of all, just be fucking nice. There's no bigger power move than being nice. That's one of the things I've come to believe

is a Midwestern or a bike choice. What else does the article say? It talks about the cultural history of the ideas and gets this idea of an ironclad hierarchy of alpha, beta, omega, and also talks about how the term got more traction during Al Gore's campaign for president. Weird. When, allegedly, Naomi Wolfe was brought in as one of his consultants,

which, what a time. They were like, we need a consultant for this presidential candidate. What about a famous feminist? Okay. And she let slip to reporters that she was trying to cancel him to be naturally dominant. That's an awful idea.

That's awful. Oh, there's also a great Al Gore quote. Source in this article said, he stays with the same woman he likes as kids. He's photographed with the grandchild. He doesn't hide his age. She's perfectly decent and real men aren't perfectly decent. Oh, that's dark.

That's dark, man. That's one of those moments in 1999 where you're like, I can see how we ended up with this whole situation. But I mean, since I've been working with dogs, let me tell a dog story. The dog love of my life is this dog named Maggie. She's a sled dog. And I love her because she's a problem child.

Someone who refuses to run, who has trouble with obedience, who doesn't relate well to others. So I was spending time with Maggie recently. She was being like super mouthy the other day and I wasn't entirely sure why. And I was like, okay, let's get you calmed down. I have her sit in front of me and clamp my legs around her and just like hold her and she calms down.

And we did that for a few minutes. And then I got off and she was still completely mellow. And I was just thinking about how, you know, to me, that's alpha behavior. Or it's like, you need this. I'm going to do this thing for you. It's not necessarily like the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Yes, it's the opposite of that. It's like you're beside yourself and you can't figure out how to get on beside yourself because you're a puppy-ish dog and I can understand what you need and I will restrain you. So it feels as if there is dominance involved in that, but it's me being like, remember, I know what you need and I'm stronger than you and I can remind you that it feels good to not be hysterical.

And it's me leading her to something that's better for her and better for me, but it's not a show of force for the sake of force. It's not about punishment. It's not about control. It's about connecting her with her calmer self. I think of that as something much closer to animal kingdom alphaness, wolf pack alphaness

than tricking a woman into having sex with you by taking her to multiple locations. You should teach pickup artist classes. Do your best to figure out what someone's emotional needs are and then do that. I just think that we shouldn't take any lessons whole cloth from the animal kingdom, frankly. We are, in fact, our own species.

Yes, it just isn't immediately clear what is useful from the animal kingdom and what isn't. Animal kingdom has an extremely high murder rate. Animals kill each other constantly. Animals eat their young quite a bit. And there's this kind of thing of like, oh, that's just something that animals do. It's really obvious that we're not all supposed

to start killing and eating our young. However, okay, well, that's something that animals do. Obviously, that's not something we should use. And then this alpha male concept comes along and we're like, no, that sounds pretty good. Yeah. Or I remember even in the debate over gay marriage, how people would, you'd always see these things

that would go viral of these two lions at the Cleveland Zoo or like in love with each other and they'd been married. And I was always just like, well, can people be able to visit their partners in the hospital regardless of what lions do? I think things like I shouldn't be impoverished if my husband dies because his family takes all the inheritance and I get nothing.

Like to me, I don't really care what happened to the Cleveland Zoo for like that to be bad. I don't find it to be a great argument. And then of course there were like the debunkings. Oh, it turns out those two lions were just friends. Those two lions were business partners. I just think that all animal kingdom behavior is interesting, but none of it should be used.

Like if you're taking precedent from the animal kingdom, then it's like, yeah, that's true, but so is everything else. Yeah. I wonder if there's something here about like the tendency to see, I don't know, to see metaphors and everything, to take lessons from animal behavior. It's just always really contingent. And usually the lessons are right in front of us.

It's pretty obvious that there is no genetic uber-mensch class and the acting in a dominant way and classifying the world into alphas and cucks and whatever. Even if it was 100% true in the animal kingdom, it's a shitty way to go through life and it's a shitty way to organize and describe human society. Right. Well, or that it's relevant to wolves,

but if we're going to take the argument of wolves do this and therefore it's okay for us to do this, it's like we're doing our own thing. We can just leave wolves out of it. Yeah, to me what that connects to is just in order to take, to accept a species for what it is, you know, whether it's rats or homo sapiens, you just have to say, well, every species on earth

is capable of a huge variety of behaviors. And the fact that we're capable of them doesn't mean that any of them are what we're meant to be doing or what we should be doing. It means that there's something that we can do. We can organize ourselves into large rigid hierarchical structures that relentlessly punish the people at the bottom of the pyramid. This competitive, paranoid way of existing in the world

where you constantly have to be dominating everyone around you, you can't trust women to have sex with you on purpose. Like that's a weird thing to have just accepted as a culture is bad or undesirable or scary. I mean, I think this goes in the category like crack babies of things that we don't need evidence to believe. For a lot of people, you don't need to be convinced of the idea that there's a hierarchy among men and that life is a struggle for dominance.

There's some people that just, no matter how thin the evidence, they're always going to go like, oh yeah, definitely, that sounds convincing. Or that life has to be a struggle for dominance and there's no other way of living. Because I really like Thomas Hobbes. I always think of this as a fundamental misunderstanding of what he means by Leviathan. That the point of that book and the point of his argument

is this idea of the state as Leviathan, that there is a hierarchy, but the hierarchy is determined by the state and that there's accountable institutions that deliver public goods. Whereas the alpha male concept is all about an individual at the center of it, not an accountable institution. So it's twisting this idea of like government is the will of the people. We vote, we hold institutions accountable in a million different ways. And that then reflects back to us things like anti-poverty programs

or they build roads or whatever. The alpha male concept is kind of the exact opposite of let's put an individual at the center of this, let's find like a Mussolini or somebody who's so quote unquote special that they don't need any accountability and that they can just move faster and that they establish the whole hierarchy. The hierarchy is a reflection of this individual or this personality rather than a transparent accountable institution.

Right. Dogs that tend to be dominant don't go around picking fights. Like if someone challenges them, if another dog challenges them and it's like, hey, I have to have a fight with you. They'll be like, all right, I will pin you. See, I win. There doesn't need to be any ambivalence here. Like, you know who's in charge. Does that make you feel better?

Okay. But like needing to go around picking fights to show your power is a sign of you feeling that you don't really have any. Why do you think this concept was so useful for dating? Well, doesn't it give you a rationale for being terrified of women? The your only route to physical or emotional intimacy is this game that you have to hack into and trick and that you can never have consensual emotional encounters

with anyone that you're not forcing to have them with you. In your dating life, did you ever come across any dudes who gave off like a pickup artisty vibe? Not really. I mean, I'm not a prolific dator. I did have this one. This is not the same thing as that, but was kind of, I don't know, maybe a little similar.

I went out with this guy once who like, he went to get us new drinks at the bar. And then when he brought them back, he like ostentatiously was like, you can have this one or that one. You can have either drink. And I was like, oh, you're mansplaining to me that you're not going to roofie me.

Jesus. But she was like kind of a depressing moment because I was like, so the norm is that if you get me a drink, like you will drag me. And you're like, by the way, I'm not going to roofie you. Wow. Yeah. I feel like with straight people,

every day is yalta for us. Where it's like, you know, the paddle of wills. I had a thing once. Can I tell my alpha male story? So first of all, I've noticed at the gym, I go to a gym that's probably 25% gay people and like 75% straight people. And I've noticed that the gay guys and the straight guys

look me up and down differently. In the locker room, you're changing your clothes. And other people are in there. And they do the thing my friend calls elevator eyes, where they kind of like their eyes go up and down you. And you can kind of tell that they're doing it. But I've gotten to the point where I can notice the difference. The gay guys do that.

And they're like, do I want to have sex with this person? And the straight guys do exactly the same thing. But they're like, can I beat this person up? Like, is this person a threat to me? I've noticed these little interactions sometimes with straight people where like they really need to establish dominance. First of all, they need to establish

that they know more about this thing than I do, that they earn more money than I do, that they're more confident than me, or something. And there's this weird tension in the interaction. I've noticed this that I'll go to random whatever, urbanist happy hours or whatever. And there is this kind of weird tension in the relationship until they establish the dominance, right?

Where I'm like, oh, I don't know very much about the train systems in Tokyo. And they're like, what? Let me tell you. And then you can see them kind of relax. All of a sudden, it's like it's safe for us to be friends. Always interesting to me, like first of all, how palpable that is.

And secondly, this is how some people go through the world. That reminds me of, we've talked about mansplaining and how it's a scourge and people don't need to be doing it. And that's a conversation that's gotten big in the last five years. But I think it's still seen as like, this is what men do. And it's like, are we maybe just using patriarchal masculinity as a dumping ground for our most competitive

and maladaptive behaviors as human beings? And actually what we think of as masculinity is just a lot of unnecessary competitiveness and profound discomfort with the human condition. What if masculinity could actually be a bunch of good stuff and fun stuff and just the set of behaviors that we think of as archetypally masculine in America

are often responses to insecure attachment and lack of intimacy and security? One thing that I think about a lot is I remember reading years ago and trying to write an article about, but it never went anywhere. This study about testosterone levels and barfights, that if you look at different countries

have different levels of drinking, obviously, and some countries have like more binge drinking patterns like the Nordic countries, and some have they like drink a couple glasses of wine throughout dinner kind of patterns like the Mediterranean countries. And what's really interesting is that the number of barfights does not track the amount of drinking and binge drinking at all. That you would think countries with more binge drinking

have more barfights because people are more wasted, sure. No, the barfights are completely independent of the amount of drinking and the idea is that we tell ourselves that because drinking spikes testosterone when you're drunk, as a man, you're testosterone about doubles

and as a woman, your testosterone goes up around 400%. So when women are drunk, they have as much testosterone in their system as men do all the time. I mean, when I think about how horny I get after three ciders, yeah, that's rough. I'm sorry. The hypothesis of this article was when women are drunk,

they are as horny and violent as men are at all times, but we are just way better trained in how to deal with it, right? How to supplement that or take a cold shower or whatever everybody does. But women, it just like bursts through. And then the girls gone wild industry benefits from all that. Yeah, exactly. But what's interesting is this double,

so for men, it doubles. Men testosterone doubles. But you would think that would cause a pretty consistent spike in bar fights and just random drunken violence. But no, there's certain societies where men getting drunk is seen as a really nurturing, like there's a lot of Polynesian societies that have alcohol and have had alcohol

for hundreds of generations. But it's seen as you get drunk and you're in the I love you man stage. Basically, that's what alcohol is seen as. Alcohol isn't seen as a driver of violence, it's seen as a driver of kind of embarrassing displays of intimacy. And so the hypothesis of this article, and I haven't been able to follow up on it,

was that bar fights and violence while drunk is learned. That in certain societies we're given the message that fighting is what you do when you're drunk and we somehow internalize that. Like, oh, I'm drunk. I'd better like see these threats to my masculinity or it's exaggerating these smaller currents that are already there.

And that's what becomes these bursts of violence when you're drunk. Yeah, or again, like that alcohol functions like animal, kingdom behavior. We're like, well, we're drunk, so now we have to get violent and aggressive. And it's like you want to get violent and aggressive. And also that behavior is somewhat expected or rewarded, right? That there are certain cultures

that kind of see it as inevitable bar fights when you can imagine a culture 200 years ago, like duels, were a natural thing that happened in the world. Oh, we're going to take 20 paces and shoot each other. That was like, oh, it happens, shruggy. But then eventually they're like, no, that's actually socially constructed and we actually can get rid of that if we want to.

Yeah, we did get rid of duels. That's a silver lining. We don't have designated dueling areas anymore. I read an article about that years ago that it was the wives of prominent men got together and organized like a boycott of duels and basically got rid of the pride. The women were like, this is ridiculous, you guys.

Let's not do this anymore. And I'm sure everyone thought that they were members of the nanny state or whatever they were calling it then. Totally. Just so you know, how can men be men if they can't shoot or stab each other to death in an alley? Right. But I guess, I mean, the argument is that other forms

of kind of masculine violence, I guess from domestic violence on down, are also constructed in the same kind of way that we have decided that this is a normal output of drinking levels or of masculinity or whatever. But we haven't seen them for how constructed they actually are. Yeah.

We can kind of do whatever we want. We do not have to continue to behave competitively and individualistically and say we have to do it. We have to do it because the birds and the bees and the wolves and the monkeys and Thomas Jefferson did it. We can actually make our own choices. I just think we all need cuddles from wolf mommies. We all need cuddles from wolf mommies.

That's a much better alpha situation. Yeah. One loving alpha wolf mom at a time. That's how we heal this great nation.