Alpha (??) Male (???)

Author: Maya Lopez (Blog Chief Editor)

When I was video calling my parents recently, I noticed that a wildlife documentary was playing in the background. The documentary was on some pack of wolves and followed the tale of a dominant leader who got injured and left the pack, so the next oldest sister stepped up and led the pack. “Leader”. I was actually impressed by the up-to-date wording, reminded me of the story I saw a few years back on the term: “alpha wolves” – and how such outdated remains ingrained in our society.  But also, did the documentary just say sister stepping up as a leader? This led me straight back to the memory hole and some reading in between my deadlines, where I rediscovered the tale of science finding that was embraced by a culture, but culture/society refused to evolve with the scientific updates. Given the modern (and possibly unsustainable) rise of “manosphere” and loneliness epidemic, especially amongst young men (of course, while not uniquely exclusive to men) are believed to be linked to the current political climate and radicalization, we’ll explore where we got this “alpha male” myth often dubbed to be backed by “evolutionary science”. And this turned out to be an emblematic case where culture arguably sought after the label of “scientific” to affirm and add prestige to the social construct that some people wanted to desperately believe, and how this is much more difficult to falsify and update than actual scientific facts.  

“Alpha wolves” finding and its correction status

So, where did this all begin? It is no coincidence that alpha-male to this day is often represented as a wolf emoji, as seen on Wikipedia. 1971, L. David Mech , a zoologist specializing in wolves, observed that a strong dominant wolf seems to be leading a pack. And he published his findings in a book called “The Wolf: The Ecology and Behavior of an Endangered Species”. I couldn’t find the exact record of how many copies were sold, but it had numerous reprints and digital releases until it got taken out of print in 2022.  This is perhaps a testament to its influence in all these years in the competitive world of publishing, and essentially popularized the terms alpha wolves, so I think it is fair to say that the book was super well-received in public. Personally, I think this level of success with science communication in itself is indeed remarkable. Perhaps, being the 1970s when eco-consciousness was on the rise and even “Earth Day” was born from a public movement, the conversation about ecology and endangered species was at the right time. However, the cultural impact (unfortunately?) lies well beyond the realm of ecology, leading to the connotation of this term to characterise a specific imagery of wild, dominant, aggressive (?), masculinity throughout the upcoming years.

The book outlines various facets of studies in wolves across different chapters- from their wild life distribution to the pack structure. The term alpha was introduced in a context to describe an apparent leader in a pack that seemed to have achieved its status by dominating others in the pack. Interestingly, this term was used in a similar sense in a report published in 1947, Germany, so Mech’s book arguably stemmed from a long lineage of academic writing that held this prevailing theory of a wolf pack hierarchy. Also fascinatingly, “beta wolves” in this context is de facto #2 in the group (quite a different nuance from modern internet slang, but I’ll get back to this in a sec). But there was a big caveat to all of these studies: they were based on wolves under captivity – an artificial setting, often with individuals of non-blood relatives boxed in the same environment. So while “alpha wolves (and corresponding female pair)” emerged in captivity, when researchers expanded their search and saw if this is also applicable to their natural state, things went awry.

Like in many natural science findings, the alpha wolf finding was actually corrected and updated in a later decade. In fact, the interesting thing is that this falsification came from Prof. Mech himself (in what I call a true scientist fashion)! Upon his further investigation of wolves, he discovered in the 90s that the natural wolf hierarchy is, in fact, just a family. In this context of kinship, bloodshed and battle for the dominant position were rare. In an interview piece from New Yorker, an associate research scientist with a National Park Service research program in Yellowstone,  Kira Cassidy sums up the current notion of the “wolf hierarchy”:

“It’s not some battle to get to the top position. They’re just the oldest, or the parents. Or, in the case of same-sex siblings, it’s a matter of personality.” 

It’s easy to imagine how parents, naturally older and more experienced, lead the pack, and their offspring follow their lead. Mech himself was one of the most vocal proponents to refrain from using the term alpha wolves because “it implies that they fought to get to the top of a group, when in most natural packs they just reproduced and automatically became dominant.” In ‘99, he tried to describe these parents as having “alpha status”, and eventually the field stopped using the term altogether. If you check the International Wolf Center webpage today, you’ll see it being described as “outdated terminology”. Modern research also finds that in natural reserves where pacts occasionally fight for territories, they can observe rather extensive pacts, including aunts and uncles, and multiple “breeding pairs,” making the structure more flexible and less hierarchical. Furthermore, even these leader positions are essentially not about aggression but rather more about responsibility, and submission is more of a chain reaction mannerism rather than an all-hail-and-serve-the-dictator attitude. To quote the Scientific American’s article, “The youngest pups also submit to their older siblings, though when food is scarce, parents feed the young first, much as human parents might tend to a fragile infant.”

When culture decides not to update based on new findings

So okay, alpha wolves weren’t really a thing unless you split up families and smush them into the same room, and natural leaders aren’t really about aggression and bloodshed. If this tale were as famous as the concept of the alpha male, then it would’ve been a great example of scientific falsification updating the societal norm, but that was not the case. What starts the application of the concept/term of alpha to humans is arguably NOT the wolf book I mentioned earlier, but the book published in 1982 called Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, where the author implies that his observations of a chimpanzee colony could possibly be applied to human interactions. But the thing is this term was still mostly in ecological contex (and not applied to discuss human interaction) till around late ‘90s where on top of the wolf example described above (which gives the pack leadership imagery), it also applied in other non-social animals, particularly to refer to male’s mating privileges due to their ability to hold territory, win food consumption, etc.

Then, who popularized this chimp/wolf term to describe a human male? I couldn’t access the actual source article that did this, but it was mentioned in Wikipedia that around the early 90s is when alpha referred to humans, specifically to “manly” men who excelled in business. But the recorded most pivotal moment in (pop?) culture is perhaps the ’99 American Presidential election campaigns, incidentally the same year Mech denounced the alpha wolves concept.  According to journalist Jesse Singal, from New York magazine, the word entered the public consciousness on a mass scale that year when a Time magazine article published an opinion held by Naomi Wolf, who was an advisor to then-presidential candidate Al Gore.  The article describes Wolf as having “argued internally that Gore is a ‘Beta male’ who needs to take on the ‘Alpha male’ in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog.” Naomi Wolf herself, for context, was a prominent figure in the third wave of the feminist movement, with publications like The Beauty Myth in 1991.  But from around 2014, journalists started to describe her reporting on ISIS beheadings, the Western African Ebola virus epidemic, and Edward Snowden as containing misinformation and conspiratorial, and in 2021, her Twitter (… okay, “formerly-known-as-Twitter”) account was suspended for posting anti-vaccine misinformation. Her Wikipedia page now includes a title: conspiracy theorist.

Singal also credits Neil Strauss’s 2005 book on pickup artistry for popularizing alpha male which sedimented the aspirational tone of the alpha male as a status, but I think the pattern is clear: a frankenstein mish-mash of an outdated scientific-concept (literally, revived from death if you think about how the term was dying out in wolves research) and some vague sense of aspirational male figure that encaptulated the “cool” of the era has entered the lexicon, carrying the prestige of “science word” (not entirely untrue but leaving out the many big caveats mentioned above). And once things become a culture, it is hard to change, despite culture, if you think about it, is inheretaly in constant flux in the history of homo Sapiens. I’m not saying all cultures are bad; certainly not: it’s collective behaviors that have adapted throughout history. However, we often use “well, that’s the culture” as a reason to defend practices even after we, as a society, gained the means and the knowledge on how wrong or even harmful some things could be.

The correction status of alpha males (?) in other species

But wait, did you notice how this conversation of dominant status eventually became specifically about dominant “male” status? Where in the world did our social image of the alpha male even come from? Ultimately, it seems that we didn’t want to dismiss this idea of the almighty dominant male. Even to this day, if you Google “myth of alpha male,” you can find Reddit threads with comments that “acknowledge” that it is outdated and untrue in wolves, but people often ignore the male dominance found in Great Apes. Sure, male dominance CAN be a thing in great ape like Gorilla silver backs I guess (but note they get their own fancy title), but the implication made here seems to be that “wolves don’t matter because wild life closer to humans shows alpha males so we human males should also have alpha nature too errrr”. But what if the underlying assumption about the domineering male in relative species… does not hold as well as you think?

So let’s go back to our assumption about relative specie chimps and see if the assertion from the 80s holds true. Long story short, once again, like in the context of wolves, it turned out the scientific reality is more complex than the earlier rendition of it. Chimps are social creatures, like wolves and humans, and, indeed, there is often an alpha male in a group with mating privileges. But dominating other males with power and bloodshed turned out to be not the only way to achieve the top status – one can groom their way to the top. 2009 research found an interesting correlation with different males and their “styles” to achieve their status. Essentially, they saw that smaller chimps with perhaps less intimidation power compensated for this by grooming other members more frequently and equally. This also speaks to the complex nature of the alpha status too: they’re also judged by the other members of the group – in effect, being a popularity contest rather than a pure dictatorship. So while alpha male is a thing, it does not have to be the pure aggressive type that we typically imagine, and the stereotypically “beta-moves” might totally be his strategic winning move.

Let’s also interrogate the other half of the phrase: does it even have to be alpha “males”? Our other equally close relatives, Bonobos, will tell you otherwise. They, in fact, are often termed a matriarchal society for often being led by an experienced female senior(s) as a leader in the wild. In such enviornment, a routy and aggressive male that gets too excited by a presence of fertile female in fact can get his butt kicked – or more like toe bitten off in the extreme case by the experienced females who might gaurd such young female. This was the case for the group of bonobos in Wamba forest in the Democratic Republic of Congo, and his social position in the group plummeted. While the toe-bitten level of fight back is unusual, Dr. Tokuyama describes that “Being hated by females … is a big matter for male bonobos,” as the alpha male attitude here giving unwanted & violent sexual provocation is often met with a strong resistance by the females who woud band together to fend off such behavior.  As a homo Sapiens, I can’t say that this an-eye-for-an-eye tactics lending itself to violence is ideal, but, it is interesting to see an entire specie dynamic where aggression of male that evokes alphaness is arguably seen as reckless, meeting a stong resounding: NO.