They generally don’t prefer to, anyhow. And when they do, it seldom seems to work out well:
In my circle, there are legions of them: clever, confident, capable women who – given half the chance – could run the entire FTSE 100 companies single-handedly, but whose troubles start the moment they leave the office desk.
Their men, they moan, are useless. Their men, they sigh, can’t handle a woman’s success. Their men, they grumble, are to blame for being so pathetic that you daren’t risk a future and a family with them. But blame their men as they might, the Alpha women should know this: In the end, they really only have themselves to blame.
They, after all, picked them. I have lost count of the times I have seen this syndrome play out: an attractive, achieving, successful woman who appears almost to go out of her way to choose a disastrous mate.
First of all, there’s no such thing as an alpha female. I have known female CEOs, I have known the female leaders of national organizations, and not even the head of one of the more important national feminist groups – who I quite liked, surprisingly enough – was the least bit dominant. Women just aren’t capable of radiating that strange combination of physical and mental power that gives people the urge to metaphorically go belly-up in their presence.
This isn’t to say they can’t take leadership positions or wield genuine power, they’re just not capable of commanding the same kind of instantaneous respect and mindless obedience. There are just some men around whom other men simply fall in line and to whom women automatically respond based on this social dominance.
The problem is that not only are there very few alphas – I’m not one and you’re almost surely not either – but that there aren’t even many beta males around these days. That means that these beta females end up settling for a gamma male and then trying to challenge him as if he’s dominant, or worse, trying to forcibly remake him into the relationship alpha. In either case, it is mystifying and confusing for the gamma male and frustrating for the female. Whether it’s evolution, centuries of socialization or the Curse of Eve, women will always challenge their men and they won’t be happy if they are allowed to do so successfully. There is nothing a woman despises as much as a humble “yes, dear”.
So this is the continuing conundrum of the successful modern woman. It’s a pity more parents don’t explain this all to their daughters before the girls make the decision to commit their lives to their career ambitions. It’s one thing if career over family is a woman’s informed choice, but too many women have been deceived into making a choice without realizing it.