Mark Manson
Butchering the Alpha Male
FEBRUARY 11 2011
Jack is a 40-something insurance exec. Jack hates his job. And although he would never openly admit it, he loathes his wife of 22 years, Holly. They haven’t had sex more than a few times in the last three years and have been emotionally estranged far longer than that. Jack takes out his mid-life frustrations on his insurance underlings each day. He subjects them to monotonous staff-meetings that drag on forever and expects individual briefings from employees that are mundane to the point of lobotomizing a person. The culture of fear he’s bred in his division grants him the only sense of empowerment he regularly feels anymore.
Jay is the hottest DJ in the city. He’s booked three to four nights a week and has traveled all over the Eastern seaboard doing shows. He’s partied with B-list celebrities and could suffer an aneurysm trying to recall every girl he’s slept with. He loves to surf. He’s always tan and his tattooed biceps practically tear through his tight shirts. Jay isn’t so much confident in the club scene as much as he has an emotional vice-grip on it. He owns it. He traverses Sinful Wednesdays at Hype and Sexy Lyfe Thursdays at Passion with a worldly and super-hip ennui cultivated across thousands of hedonistic nights and hundreds of VIP tables. It’s his playground. Everyone knows him and everyone loves him. Naturally, women flock to him. The shorter the skirts, the quicker.
Marissa is Jay’s girlfriend of one year. She’s arguably one of the hottest club regulars in Jay’s town. She used to model part-time, and still picks up a go-go dancing gig now and again, especially if Jay is spinning. She lavishes Jay with attention and praise and is always the first one on the dance floor and last one off during his sets. She secretly brags to other girls about him and lets him **** her anywhere and any time he wants… which is often… and usually doesn’t last very long.
Ben is a construction worker. With only a high school education, he makes up for his lack of intelligence with his charming smile and heart of gold. He works summers for a company which builds swimming pools. Women are always attracted to his strong, stoic persona, although he rarely pursues them, they pursue him. He’s had girlfriends, but they come and go as they please, Ben remaining mostly indifferent.
In June, Jack and Holly hire Ben’s crew to construct a swimming pool behind their home. Holly conspicuously comes out on the deck and watches the men work during the day, particularly Ben. She gives the men trite rationalizations for her presence, you know, bland statements that involve phrases like “monitoring your progress” and “keeping an eye on things.” But it doesn’t take Freud to see something simmering beneath the surface. An aura of tension surrounds her. And there’s a faint scent of a caged sexuality crying to be let out, a woman who obviously hasn’t been ****ed in years. She sips a drink that looks like lemonade as she watches. By noon her breath smells of vodka and she stumbles.
When Ben ****s Holly, it’s mostly to impress the other men on his construction crew — an act he purposely does about once a summer. It provides enough storytelling and banter among the boys to help get them through the hottest three months of the year. Acceptance from the guys has always been important to Ben, far more important than the haggard house wives he lets seduce him. A week later, Holly concocts an excuse for Ben to come into her bedroom again. But Ben has already lost interest and can’t get it hard. Instead he spends an hour holding Holly and listening to her sob about how she doesn’t love her husband anymore. He reassures her and counsels her the best he can, which is not very well. When he returns to the crew, he still tells them that he ****ed her. They laugh and joke and smile. Ben smiles too. But he smiles only because they smile.
Marissa has a day job as Jack’s secretary. She isn’t very good at her job and Jack is uninhibited when he chastises her on her basic bureaucratic failures. Although she only admits it to herself late at night when Jay’s out playing a gig, she sometimes wishes he would yell at her more and with more force. She fantasizes about Jack getting so mad at her one day that he bends her over her desk and spanks her for ****ing up the TPS reports. Sometimes she wants to purposely mess up the TPS reports so that Jack will yell at her more, maybe even call her into his office to do it alone. There’s something in his angry authority that turns her on. When she keeps notes of his meetings, she savors the way he talks down to the other men in the room — grown men, with degrees and houses and BMW’s. Though he’s old and has a gut and is balding, there’s a fire inside him that she’s seen in few men in her life. Months later she will find an excuse to stay late on a Thursday and Jack will **** her on his desk. It will be the most exciting moment Jack will have had in the last 10 years. Then on the way home, he’ll cry.
Jay will never find out about Marissa ****ing her boss. But if he ever found it, it would in a way relieve him. He’s been talking to his high school sweetheart, Jane, every afternoon on the phone for months now. He feels guilty about it viz. Marissa. He misses Jane and thinks about her constantly. Always has. He tells her this. But Jane’s married to Steve now… a US marine fighting in Iraq. Steve is deeply religious and saved his virginity until he married Jane. Jay tries to convince Jane to see him again, but she refuses. She’s religious as well and would never betray Steve’s trust in her, especially while he’s in Iraq. And even though she misses Jay a little bit, she really only savors his daily phone calls for the attention and affection she’s been missing since Steve’s been away. Later, after Steve returns home from duty, Jane will stop picking up Jay’s phone calls.
Question: Out of the four men described above, which one is the most Alpha? Are none of them Alpha? All of them?
This is not a simple question to answer… I would argue that the intertwined lives above are realistic portrayals of men and women in our society. Strong men and women, and also weak men and women… people that some would point to and call successful, if they didn’t know the secrets each harbored.
I want to talk about reality today… not the idealism or avatar that most of us conjure up in dating advice: you know, the steroidal sunglasses-clad broski, with brass balls and ice cold blood, macking on chicks left and right, because he simply DGAF (Doesn’t Give A ****). Forget that guy a minute, and let’s focus on realism. Which of the men above is most Alpha to you? None of them? All of them?
You could argue it’s Jack for banging his super hot secretary. But Jack is miserable, is chained to an unhappy marriage with a wife he hates and who is cheating on him as well. He’s a miserable man whose only thrill in life is inspiring fear throughout his tiny insurance fiefdom.
You could argue it’s Jay, the player, the bad ass DJ. He’s got the party lifestyle and the super hot girlfriend. But his girlfriend is cheating on him, chasing a “fire” that he doesn’t have anymore, probably because it’s still with the high school sweetheart he can’t stop calling. His unrequited love has affected most of his adult life, and his only real inspiration for the dozens of women he slept with was to seek reprieve from the quiet torture of what he’s afraid he’ll never get back.
You could argue it’s Ben. He’s a stud. Girls pick him up, and he still doesn’t give a ****. He bangs disgruntled housewives for laughs and his co-workers revere him as a hero for it. But he seems more interested in the guys’ approval than any particular woman’s. He’s fixated on positive male attention. He may even be gay and not know it.
Or is it Steve? He’s loved one woman his entire life, and he has her 100% love and dedication, despite the fact that Jane is pursued by a former lover who is extremely attractive in his own right.
So I ask again, who is the Alpha Male out of the men above? There’s a strong argument for all of them and none of them. Which, to be honest, is how real life usually pans out.
In the last year, I estimate that at least half of my major disagreements and arguments with men on the subject of attractiveness — on this site, on forums, in person — have been incited by what I see as the blind worship of the The Alpha Male ideal. Over the course of this (extra long) article, I aim to accomplish three points: 1) explain what the term Alpha Male actually means and how it became horribly misappropriated and butchered by the Pick Up Artist (PUA) community and men’s dating advice (MDA) niche at large; 2) analyze the current PUA/MDA interpretations of The Alpha Male and show that they’re not only inaccurate, but actually counter-productive for men in the long-run; and finally 3) offer an alternative theory on Alphaness that avoids the disadvantageous generalizing, stereotyping, alienating (and all sorts of other disgusting -ings) traits of The Alpha Male’s emotional baggage. Hopefully you won’t fall asleep on your keyboard or drool on yourself between now and then.
Now, I realize the concept of Being Alpha is not only intellectually celebrated by just about every guy who’s improved with women in PUA/MDA, but most of said guys also have deep personal and emotional attachments to Alphaness and its effect on their own lives. I expect their reaction to be vitriolic. As a result, I will be more thorough and conscientious in this article than most. My goal is that those who begin this article as multi-year Alpha Male devotees will come out the other end converted. It won’t be easy. But hear me out…
SOURCE --- >
http://markmanson.net/butchering-the-alpha-male
