Finding the Hidden Alpha: Altered Carbon and the New Face of Dating

[Philosopher_Edge]

So I recently finished reading ‘Altered Carbon’ by Richard K. Morgan that was adapted by Netflix.

More precisely, I listened to the unabridged audiobook while working. There was a bit that had caught my attention in the audiobook, which had, before, caught my attention when watching the show when it premiered.

There’s a line (and I’m paraphrasing), ‘Women are the race. Men are just the fucking, fighting machines.’

My first thought on this was ‘but men and women are generally born in equal volume….’ The immediately in inner mind concluded, ‘but before the last hundred years or so, only a smaller percentage of males weren’t supposed to survive to adulthood.’ i.e. Daring accidents, work injury, combat and so on.’ Granted, women also died for various reasons, but probably not as much as men during times of large scale war.

At this point, I began a train of thought about mate selection. We, as a society have been exposed to the ‘Alpha / Beta’ male dichotomy in our mate and partnership selections. But the thought had occurred to me, that if my previous paragraph was true, then women would have smaller selection of desirable mates to choose from, as (presumably) only the strongest men would return from battle. I think this is where the situation gets sticky; If these were the survivors, then these would later become what is considered an ‘alpha’ prospect. They were, after all, the ones to survive. But that would create a mate vacuum as it could possibly be larger ratio of females to mate-worth males.

This should sound like a familiar paradigm. We’ll revisit this later.

Before we continue, we have to ask what the definition of ‘alpha.’ Society suggests that an ‘alpha male’ is the one with the resources and access to influence that other males do not have. It has also been equated to the amount of confidence a guy has. There’s lists and entire books written on how to be the ‘alpha male’ everyone wants. But here I began to question if we confuse what being an alpha really is. If we consider the alpha male to simply be the confident guy that has access to resources that everyone wants, then yeah. That’s an alpha. But here’s my problem with that, and it originates from ‘How to Train Your Dragons 2:’

The Alpha protects the others.

Many of the said sites and books hit on this, but it pulls some things into question; is the biggest and baddest dude really the one to protect the group? Can that individual be depended upon? How many ‘alphas’ are actually self-made and not had their access to resources handed to them? Why is this important?

Men are quickly becoming a rare thing on college campuses, with women graduates making between 51-57% of degrees with less men graduating annually. You can google it and find the stats. When we also look at dating sites, we can see that there are more women with degree in selections than without. And if the trend of more women with higher degrees continues to grow, and men graduates declining, again the mating / dating vacuum occurs as women seek men who make similar or more money, and have equal or better education. And the angle gets steeper with higher education to post-grad where there are more women vying for fewer desirable men who also have post-grad degrees.

These men are quickly becoming the new ‘alphas’ in the mating / dating game, and the face has quickly changed from ‘biggest and baddest’ to average looking but highly motivated and intelligent men. The appearance of the ‘nerd’ or ‘geek’ as an alpha has upended the dating scene as they are now typically the decision makers over the hyper masculine male of perceived alphas past. But the question remains, do these ‘new alphas’ have true alpha qualities of protecting the group? Are they the ones their friends come to for advice or help? Are they the one that will be there when the shit hits the fan?

Who knows? Maybe it doesn’t matter. Its my opinion that the ‘dominant’ male or female of a group is the one that looks out for the others. And I find that its often not the one that people expect to be the dominant one of the group. However, if you anyone pays attention a group, there is often a trend-setter that the others unconsciously follow in mannerism and in language / word usage. This is the person that people walk out of the way of on the sidewalks, not realizing they are. This is the person I would consider to be the hidden alpha, and may not be the ‘biggest and baddest, and had access to resources and everyone wants to be with them’ but its the one that would do what it takes to protect their family. Their pack, in whatever shape it may take.

[GloriaMc]

I watch the movie alpha such a good movie actually so about the definition of alpha thoug haven't read all the details I think it means a strong brave fighters regardless of the genders.

[Optymistyk]

That's a good point.