Alpha Males

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. 

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Transcript

 Alpha Males

Sarah: 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 had tracked him down to his motel room and he's like, yeah, just a sec, climbing out the window? And that's how I relate to editors.

Welcome to Your 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? 

Mike: Is that the universal tagline? Is that the theme for every episode now?

Sarah: 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.

Mike: I can hear the clap emojis between all of the words that you're saying. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: I am Sarah Marshall. I'm a writer for The New Republic, and The Believer, and BuzzFeed. 

Mike: And today we're talking about alpha males. 

Sarah: Oh God. What is the first thing that you think of? What do you see on your little Homeland red string board when that phrase pops into your head?

Mike: So, until you told me this a couple of months ago, I had no idea that this was 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. 

Sarah: Sleuths. 

Mike: 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. 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.

Sarah: I have only seen the first one, but it made a big impression on me.

Mike: 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 and 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 alphas and betas and cucks. 

Sarah: Yeah, I guess cuck is the new omega, it's much catchier. 

Mike: 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 Uber mensch 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 studley, brawny dudes. 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.

Sarah: I think alpha-ness 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 sixties. 

Mike: Interesting. 

Sarah: And then we start seeing it a lot. And then it starts having an upswing, I think, in the late eighties. And then it's continued to really grow since then. But it's been continually getting more and more visibility since the sixties. And we are more inundated with this term now than we were 10 years ago, or 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 there are fluctuating mass. 

And so, the first historical text that I looked at in researching this I found a passage that I want to read to 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 afterschool special that would have been.

Mike: Yeah.

Sarah: So, it's just time when the teenagers are on heroin 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, ”An Australian experiment K. Myers is shown that among rabbits subjected a density pressure, it is a low-ranking female who suffers the greatest fetus mortality. We may speculate them that the quote temperament of a population may well be determined by the random incidents 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 direction, 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 and that year, our journal Science published a medical study of 270,000 male employees of a major American corporation.” 

Okay, sounds legit, keep going. “The mammoth’s investigation linked to 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, 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 Workman can try coronaries at the rate of 4.33 per thousand per year. Their immediate superiors, the foremen 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 at a rate of 1.85 about 40% of the level of workman. 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. 

Mike: What? 

Sarah: Yeah, take it away. 

Mike: 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. 

Sarah: Your cousin.

Mike: Yes, my dad. That like to have a strong society, you need to have a strong alpha, or a strong alpha female. 

Sarah: If such things even exist in your species, which like. 

Mike: Right. Maybe they do, maybe they don't. Let's not get into these like 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 unhealthier. And so, there's these kinds 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’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 alpha ness is what explains this. 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. 

Sarah: Maybe it's because exponentially more of the workers in this unnamed corporation are people of color who have higher rates of coronary complications. 

Mike: 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, 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 this thing. But he's like, let's look at penguins and one study of a corporation, boom, alpha males. 

Sarah: Well that's how you prop up a somewhat specious argument is by cherry picking data. 

Mike: I mean, as a journalist, I've definitely been in this situation like, oh fuck, I need to, like… I wish this study said this more unequivocally. And 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 write up the abstract. 

Most academics when you show them like, hey, I saw your study and I have concluded this from it, 9 times out of 10, they're like, uh, we don't think so, we think we need to do a lot more research on that. And so I wonder 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.

Sarah: Yeah. And you don't really get a headline out of good science, typically. I feel like occasionally it happens, but yeah, a good study tends to not be able to say very many things definitively. And what it often leads to is, oh, 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 such and such, therefore, this is how humans should behave in suburbia. And it's like, why is it that when we were taking tools from the dawn of man to use in our modern lives, it always involves being dominant or taking someone else stuff? 

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, we all do, obviously. 

Mike: Obviously. 

Sarah: And my favorite is the wolves in the hall of North American mammals, because it's this really beautiful exhibit where 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, which is an art form that I appreciate very much. And they're hunting, but it's a quiet, 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 as a description because 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. 

Mike: I wonder if that turns out to be problematic later.

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

Mike: According to Schenkel, how are these alpha male and females getting to be the alpha and maintaining their status as the alpha? 

Sarah: Well, 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 its 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 Royale. 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.

Mike: Oh my God, I love tiny little debates like this, debates within a field, “Fuck you Schenkel”. Like yelling at each other across a like Marriott ballroom conference thing of like, no, you're studying them in captivity. “My methodology is sound”, shoving each other. I just love this.

Sarah: 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 tweedy footnotes, where they're like this author wrote this in 1958. 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 4 or 5 people would join you in cattiness about. 

But yes, in the post Schenkel world, the Schenkel and Schenkelian belief is that 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 wild as 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 and a dominance hierarchy. However, in natural wolf packs, the alpha male or female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack and dominance contest 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 and alpha is usually no more appropriate than referring to a human parent or a doe deer as an alpha.”

Mike: Ooh, burn. 

Sarah: Burn. I know, call the burn unit. 

Mike: Take that Schenkel.

Sarah: “Any parent is dominate 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 for space dominance hierarchy.”

Mike: Wow. 

Sarah: That is some academic shade.

Mike: Brutal.

Sarah: Yeah. That's what I live for. 

Mike: But I mean, if you're going to pull a metaphor out of this, it's actually interesting. I mean, one of the metaphors you could draw is that something about being in captivity changes natural patterns, right. Being in captivity is profoundly unnatural.

And that it's almost like a debunking of like 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 are like, no, it's just a normal family structure.

And so, it's interesting of like you think about all the other stuff that we learned 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. 

Sarah: Right. I mean, it's a little bit like studying humans and having, you know, the circumstance that you're finding them be a prison. 

Mike: Humans really like trading cigarettes for stuff, what a weird human trait. Wow, we've learned so much about humans today. They love cigarettes. 

Sarah: And it is not, not true, but it's in a specific context and so primatology is a field that continues to grow. It's hard to understate how amazed Americans seem to be by all of our revelations about primates in the sixties and seventies, 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 like, and so primatology studies in the sixties and seventies continue, you know, actually go into the wild to the extent that they can and look at the power structures and 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 having, you know, the male in charge and, you know, higher primates 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 into 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. 

Mike: But so, the alpha male thing does sort of exist, but not in wolves.

Sarah: 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 Deval and other primatologists talking about chimp behaviors and maybe we can compare this to humans and to the alpha behavior of the chimp versus the corporate big wig. 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 toward 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 just like becoming an entrepreneur. How do you act like an alpha, how do you boss everyone around? This is part of pickup artists 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.

Mike: That's a great summation of like the relationship between those dudes to women. 

Sarah: And this is my own personal reading of all of this, is, you know, all of these arguments are like, well, 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, hmmm, I don't know how great those behaviors are for running a society or a family or a community. 

I think we actually need the actual alphas of nature, 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? 

Mike: Does everybody have an umbrella? Does everybody have a coat? It is gonna be cold.

Sarah: Right? Yeah, the alpha is really, you know, the soccer mom of the natural kingdom. It'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.  

Mike: I am 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. 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.

Sarah: Right. You know, why is no one like, well, the male sea horse 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, you know, 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 an 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. 

Mike: How did this get laundered into human behavior, like were there Time and Newsweek articles about like, hey, look at this thing that animals do, let's do it too?

Sarah: Yeah. I mean the first real spark jump was with the chimpanzee behavior book that comes out in 1982 and that makes the 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 we'll 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 gonna 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 Schenkel, before any of this rhetoric really starts percolating, alphas are the ruling class in Brave New World, remember that book?

Mike: Yes. But I do not remember that aspect of it. 

Sarah: 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 like clearly being used as rhetoric to prop up a totalitarian dystopia. We don't really think of it that way now.

Mike: I mean I do. 

Sarah: Yes, you do, I do, we do. 

Mike: 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. It's weird to me that it wasn't picked up by like a political party or the activist movement. 

Sarah: Yeah. How do you see that?

Mike: 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 liked 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? You're always like there's genetic superiority and 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 like, I happened to be at the top, but really, it's like a natural thing.

Sarah: It's really a burden to me. I'm having the hardest time with having to go around sterilizing everybody. 

Mike: And so 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. 

Sarah: It is terrifying. 

Mike: Oh, it's dark. Yeah, I even read that fucking The Game, the like pickup artists Bible that like pretends not to be a pickup artist Bible. 

Sarah: What does it pretend to be like about having like self-love or something?

Mike: He is like an outsider to the pick-up artist culture. I mean, that book sort of started the whole pickup artist thing, where it was for this journalist, 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 that we are all familiar with now, like negging and they would dress in these like flamboyant clothes. It would like get people's attention. 

Sarah: Do they think they invented flamboyant clothes? Like have they never seen a seventies movie before. 

Mike: That's the thing. I mean, it's not like these people are like learned scholars, right. But like completely doing this from scratch. 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, 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 I think they even used this phrase, established 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, every 45 minutes you're supposed to be like, let's go to a different bar. 

Sarah: Like you've kidnapped someone and are trying to disorient them.

Mike: I mean there is all this like pseudo-science 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. So that establishes intimacy. 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.

Sarah: Right. But it's based on hacking the female brain in some way.

Mike: 100%, yes. 

Sarah: White men can't be motivated to do anything unless you call it a hack and then they'll do it. 

Mike: 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, it colonizes it. And so, in the same way, this pickup artist stuff, they've adopted this pickup artist language and this pickup artist community, but then they need this whole world view to kind of justify it and make it bigger than just trying to get laid. 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 as 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 it. Some people are simply more capable, 5, 10 years later, once you get into the intel 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 gonna win.

Sarah: Or you have to wildly overcompensate by 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, I'm playing with all these handicaps, so it's fine if I cheat in the sand trap. 

Mike: A friend of mine, a female friend of mine whose name I'm not gonna use because she's like totally embarrassed about this, went on a date with a guy years ago from I think Ok Cupid or Match.com or one of these things. And so, it's like, let's meet at a bar 7:00 PM, 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, you know, I know we're about to go out for a movie, but you know, do you mind if we pop back to my apartment? Because like I need to feed Wolfgang or whatever the puppies name is, I need to go back and feed Wolfgang. So they go back to his apartment and then there's like this whole routine that he has set up.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike: Oh, do you mind if I just play guitar for you a little bit, 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 like, 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 that you've been fed your puppy. It all kind of clicks into her brain and it became really clear that he had this like script that he was running through and that he had probably done this like dozens of times before. And so, between the making out and the sex stage, she was like, ah, this is fucking weird. I'm going to go, and he was just like, okay. As if it was Groundhog Day and he had like tried 50 million other times.

Sarah: That is so insane. Coming into an interaction with another human being as if you're playing halo and there's all these little hacks and all these little tricks in order to hack into the mainframe. And then like you're cheating the casino by getting the slot machine to do a big jackpot for you. Yeah, 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 says, “Across three studies, Lauri Jensen-Campbell and colleagues found that it wasn't dominance alone, but rather the interaction of dominance and pro-social behavior that women reported were particularly sexually attractive.”

Mike: Ooh, interesting.

Sarah: In other words, dominance only increased sexual attraction when the person was already high and 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 as a Midwesterner by choice. 

Mike: What else does the article say? It talks about the cultural history of the ideas and just 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.

Mike: Weird. 

Sarah: When allegedly Naomi Wolf 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. 

Mike: That's an awful idea. That is awful.

Sarah: Oh, there's also a great Al Gore quote source in this article said “He stays with the same woman, he likes his kids. He's photographed with the grandchild. He doesn't hide his age. He's perfectly decent and real men aren't perfectly decent.” 

Mike: Oh, that's dark.

Sarah: 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 mine 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 super mouthy the other day and I wasn't entirely sure why, and I was like, okay, let's get you to calm down. I have her sit in front of me and plant my legs around her and just like hold her and she calms downs. 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.  

Mike: Where it is 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. 

Sarah: Yes. It's the opposite of that. It's like you're beside yourself and you can't figure out how to get un beside yourself because you’re a puppyish 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 calm herself. I think of that as something much closer to animal kingdom alpha ness, Wolfpack alpha ness, then you know, tricking a woman into her sex with you by taking her to multiple locations. 

Mike: You should teach pickup artists classes.

Sarah: Do your best to figure out what someone's emotional needs are and then do that. 

Mike: I just think that we shouldn't take any lessons whole cloth from the animal kingdom frankly.

Sarah: We are in fact, our own species.

Mike: 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, like animals kill each other constantly, animals eat their young quite a bit. And there's this kind of thing of like, oh, you know, that's just something that animals do. There's no, it's really obvious, right that we're not all supposed to start killing and eating our young, however, 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. Or I remember even in the debate over gay marriage, how people would always see these, like things that would go viral of like these two lions at the Cleveland Zoo are 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? Like, I think things like I shouldn't be impoverished if my husband dies because his family takes all the inheritance and I get nothing. 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. 

Sarah: Those two lions were business partners. 

Mike: I just think that all animal kingdom behavior is interesting, but none of it should be used.

Sarah: If you're taking precedent from the animal kingdom, then it's like, yeah, that's true, but so is everything else.

Mike: 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 Mech 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. 

Sarah: 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. To me, what that connects to is just in order to accept a species for what it is, you know, whether it's rats, or homosapiens, 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 if 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. That's a weird thing to have just accepted as a culture is bad or undesirable or scary. 

Mike: 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 are some people that just, no matter how thin the evidence they're always going to go like, oh yeah, definitely like that sounds convincing. 

Sarah: Or that life has to be a struggle for dominance and there's no other way of living.  

Mike: Because I really liked Thomas Hobbes. I always think of this as like a fundamental misunderstanding of what he means by Leviathan. 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 unaccountable 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 then that 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 established the whole hierarchy to hierarchy, is a reflection of this individual or this personality rather than a transparent accountable institution.

Sarah: Right. Dogs that tend to be dominant don't go around picking fights. 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, when 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 as a sign of you feeling that you don't really have any.

Mike: Why do you think this concept was so useful for dating?

Sarah: Well, doesn't it give you a rationale for being terrified of women? 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 then with you.

Mike: In your dating life, did you ever come across any dudes who gave off like a pickup artistry vibe? 

Sarah: Not really. I mean, I'm not a prolific dater. 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.

Mike: Oh Jesus.

Sarah: Which was kind of a depressing moment because I was like, so the norm is that if you get me a drink, like you will drug me. And you're like, by the way, I'm not gonna roofie you. 

Mike: Wow. 

Sarah: Yeah. I feel like with straight people, every day is Yalta for us where it's like, you know, the paddle of wills. 

Mike: I had a thing once; can I tell my alpha male story? So, first of all, I've noticed that 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 these 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, like 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 like more competent than me or something. 

And there's like this weird tension in the interaction I've noticed is that like, I'll go to like random, whatever urbanist, happy hours or whatever. 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, well, let me tell you and then you can see them kind of relax all of a sudden. And 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.

Sarah: That reminds me of, you know, we've talked about mansplaining and how it's a discourage 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, hmm, are we maybe just using patriarchal masculinity is 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 are the set of behaviors that we think of as archetypally masculine in America are often responses to insecure attachment and lack of intimacy and secure?

Mike: 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. The study about testosterone levels and bar fights 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 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 bar fights does not track the amount of drinking and binge drinking at all that you would think countries with more binge drinking, have more bar fights because people are more wasted. Sure, no, the bar fights 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, your testosterone about doubles and as a woman, your testosterone goes up around 400%. 

Sarah: Wow. 

Mike: When women are drunk, they have as much testosterone in their system as men do all the time. 

Sarah: I mean, when I think about how horny I get after three ciders. Yeah, that's rough, I'm sorry. 

Mike: 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.

Sarah: And then the girls gone wild industry benefits from all that, yeah. 

Mike: Yes, exactly but what's interesting is this double, so for men it doubles, men’s testosterone doubles, but you would think that would cause like a pretty consistent spike in bar fights and just random drunken violence. But no, there are certain societies where men getting drunk is seen as like a really nurturing, there's a lot of Polynesian societies that have alcohol and have had alcohol for like hundreds of generations. But it's seen as like you get drunk and you're in the like, ‘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 were given the message that fighting is what you do when you're drunk.

And we somehow internalize that like, oh, I'm drunk, I 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.

Sarah: Yeah. I guess they are, again like alcohol functions, like animal canine behavior. Well, we're drunk so now we have to get violent and aggressive and it's like, you want to get violent and aggressive.

Mike: 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, you know, 200 years ago, like duels were a natural thing that happened in the world, like, oh, we're going to take 20 paces and shoot each other. It is like, oh, it happens shruggie. But then eventually they're like, no, that's actually socially constructed, and we actually can get rid of that if we want to. 

Sarah: We did get rid of duels, that's a silver lining. We don't have designated dueling areas anymore.

Mike:  I read an article about that years ago that it was the wives of prominent men got together and organized like a boycott of duel and basically got rid and the women were like, this is ridiculous you guys, let’s not do this anymore.

Sarah: I am sure that everyone thought that they were members of the nanny state or whatever they were calling it then that know how men can be men if they cannot shoot or stab each other to death in an alley.

Mike: Right. 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 like we have decided that this is a normal output of drinking levels or of masculinity or whatever. But we haven't seen them for like how constructive they actually are.

Sarah: Yeah. We can kind of do whatever we want. We do not have to continue to behave competitively and individualistically. 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.

Mike: I just think we all need cuddles from wolf mommies. 

Sarah: We all need cuddles from wolf mommies.

Mike: That would be a much better alpha situation. 

Sarah: Yeah. One loving alpha wolf mom at a time, that's how we heal this great nation.