Thursday, November 3, 2011

Go ahead and be a beta male

Update: Steve Deace, quoted below, seems to be a bit of a fraud. His idea of sexual harassment corresponds to what most people call being pleasant. I still think there is a point to be made here but he is the wrong peg to hang it on. I'll leave the post here if only to encourage my own humility.

Another update: Fourth Checkraise has kindly linked to this post and contrasted it with an interesting post called The Young Male Underclass. Reading that other post, I find I largely agree with what he has to say. It also has helped me focus my thoughts a bit better. The other blogger, Dali Zheng writes:
The steady decline of the West seems more likely to me. the energy of the youth is watered down with widespread, questionable prescriptions, ADHD drugs for boys and anti-depressants for girls. Instead of learning how to play a guitar or shoot a rifle, there's video games to replace the actual activities.  
That's absolutely correct. And that is also what is wrong with alpha male posing. It's what guys whose lives are "watered down with widespread, questionable prescriptions" do instead of growing up and becoming men. The point is not to establish your alpha identity through a bunch of dominance gestures, it's to actually become someone worth being and a man who is worth being is a man who can actually get things done.

What's wrong with being a beta male?

Having spent my teen years and early twenties growing up in a mill town I think about that a lot. The guys who were the alpha guys at my high school didn't amount to much. And the guys who were alpha guys in my early twenties didn't either.

One of most prominent ended up sitting in a wheelchair downtown. He used to beat people up all the time. He had this very disarming trick. He'd come at you and accuse you of having done something disrespectful and then watch you sweat and squirm while you tried to talk him out of it. After you did this a little while, he'd suddenly smile. He had this beatific smile. And you'd relax when you saw it. That was when he'd hit you.

One day he picked on a guy—quite a wimpy little guy—and this guy panicked and hit first. Caught the alpha guy off balance and knocked him down. And then he panicked even more and stomped on his head and broke his neck in the process.

Sometimes in life you will be alpha. You'll be appointed manager or you'll be an older brother. And it can happen without your intending to. I was deeply ashamed when I took a job as bouncer when I was in university. I dreaded the thought of anyone from school seeing me. When it inevitably came out I suddenly found that I had alpha status for the year. I didn't even have to prove it.

But trying to be alpha is like buying lottery tickets.There is only one alpha in any group and there will be many more losers than winners in that category. And the price for losing can be very steep.

You can see something like that in the plight of Herman Cain who decided to challenge for the biggest alpha of them all and looks about to pay a huge price. He isn't a sexual harasser for reasons I explained yesterday. But he is a guy who is always on the make, always trying to establish his alpha status with others including women. That leads him to make inappropriate comments.

Here, on the other hand, is what a beta male looks like. This is conservative talk show host Steve Deace who backed up the charges against Cain explaining how he governs himself:
"Many a man has been done in by the inability to control his urges," Deace wrote. "I am no different and just as vulnerable as any other man, which is why I put safeguards around me and hold myself accountable to my wife and other men in my life.
Notice that he doesn't think he is better than Cain. Quite the contrary. And it is precisely because he sees himself in Cain that he puts limits on himself and holds himself accountable to others. The formulation here is telling he holds himself accountable to his "wife and other men" in that order and not that he holds himself accountable to his wife and other women". Guys who talk about being alpha would sneer at that as classic beta behaviour. What it really is is civilization. It's because we can do that that we live in houses instead of caves.

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