No such animal

In which an amusing link is brought to our attention:

Sarah believes one of the emotional flaws of Alpha women is that beneath their corporate armour, they are riddled with low self-esteem, which makes them more vulnerable when the gamma man turns on them.

‘Many successful women have low self-worth which they are always trying to over-compensate for in their career,’ she says. ‘They strive to be successful because deep down they never feel quite good enough, so they are easy to undermine, especially in a domestic situation.

That’s a concise explanation of why Alpha women simply don’t exist. The Alpha Male isn’t Alpha because he’s successful, he’s simply dominant by nature. This may make him successful in some environments or it may create problems that cause him to fail completely in others. Success can certainly be related to social dominance but they are two entirely different concepts that are not necessarily connected.

This story is particularly amusing because of the circuitous manner in which it reveals the obvious – “Alpha” women, like all women, want Alpha males. This demonstrates their fundamental lack of dominance, or else they would not eventually find themselves craving domination and the abdication of responsibility it entails. It is interesting, however, that a few people are beginning to recognize that the friction between high-income women and low-income men is not primarily the insecurity of the men, but rather, the refusal of these Beta women to accept the Gamma males as they are and have always been.

On a tangential note, one silly thing about these social dynamic discussions is that everyone tends to discuss Alpha status as if it is something that can be sought, or even should be sought. (I still remember somebody’s amusing fantasy of the “stealth Alpha”, that’s about as credible as the Alpha Woman.) But fundamentally, social dominance can no more be synthesized than intelligence or musical ability; the military probably does the best job of creating a functional facsimile, but as anyone who has ever hired a military officer knows, that facsimile doesn’t hold up very well outside the environment for which it was developed.