The Dominance Hierarchy and me

I have a complex relationship with the dance scene. I have always loved to dance, ever since I was a little boy. My parents used to arrange these awesome dance-Fridays that made ecstatic for hours, dancing too my fathers favorite punk music from Great Britannia. It was a wild and fun thing. Now, I think I’m actually still pretty good at dancing. I got some rhythm, I have some moves. I just don’t have the confidence to let it out in full bloom, not in front of people. As soon as I get out there in the night my back tenses up, my shoulders turns to war axes and I my posture slopes. I turn into a shell of a body. My movements get robotic and I have this overwhelming feeling of not being a real human, that I’m something else pretending to be and that everybody knows it.

It’s does not feel like a natural feeling to me, a feeling to be sure but not a natural one. I have had a hard time talking about what exactly is making me feel this way, so frightened and plastic, even though this state of mind is so painfully common around my friends. One of the reasons why this is so hard to talk about is because you do not feel like you have control over it. The feeling feels illogical in it’s power. Something invisible just drains you of your spirit when you enter the club. Isn’t that totally insane from a biological evolutionary perspective? Nature counts success in how long a thing lasts. Isn’t the fact that we are still kicking proof enough that nature have weeded out all the quirks that hinder our procreation? And shouldn’t the clubs have all the triggers for making me go in estrus? It has opportunity, it has provocatively dressed people and it has alcohol to electrify our impulsiveness. But still the opposite happens. How come I, with my 24 years of life, am able to override the driving force of million years of evolution, the animal sex drive?
The answer is, of course, that I haven’t overridden anything at all. I had just misunderstood evolution psychology and the deep implications of sexual selection over time. But honestly nothing of this did cross my mind at all in the beginning. I just wanted to know how to get laid. So as a lot of young men in my age does I decided to turn to YouTube for answers. Which it gave, in loads.

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YouTube is completely brimming with advice for shy guys. It has it all, from how to position our hands on your first date to techniques to how you Kundalini your way to a bigger dick to what kind of Rick and Morty references you want to have in your Tinder bio. Some channels are more normal then other, Practical Psychology and Charisma on Command are good example for channels with some relatively standard and popular dating hacks. Then we have some more, uhm… let’s say niche subgroups.

One huge model that a lot of these dating coaches uses is the ideal of the Alpha male. Channels like Alpha M. (over 3 million subscribers!), FarFromAverage and Alpha Male Strategies uses this ideal as it’s bread and butter. In their view an Alpha Male is self-confident, self-dependent, the leader of the flock, full of integrity, nice only for the sake of being nice and, oh yes, he is jacked. The term is a controversial one though. It used to be more toxic just a few years ago, where brutal ego-boosting, weird dominant mind games, no room for self-doubt and even an ambivalent relationship to rape was the norm. Now the Alphas has started to soften up a little and some characteristics of genuine compassion and being congruent with your feelings has started to emerge. That isn’t enough for a lot of people and the debate is still heated. There is some people like Adam Conover that tries to debunk the whole term all together as a misunderstanding that got picked up by misogynists to rectify their aggressive and self-centered dominant behavior and there is some people that tries to argues for that Alpha males are the only true men, derived from mother of nature, and if you are not Alpha then you are a fucking weakass pathetic faggot and does from an evolutionary stand point not deserve to live. You can see why there is some tension here.

But besides how I now characterized the skeptic side as more academic then the other I have to give credit to where credit is do. A lot of what the Alpha Gurus says stands on valid ground as far as the evolutionary psychologists are concerned. Which does not to say much about the eventual ethical, moral or even political points that can be derived. In my opinion there is still a lot of overcompensating tough-guy attitude going on in these circles that are just downright ugly to witness. And there is a strong truism in personality psychology that males and females are much MUCH more alike then they are different which the alpha community never talk about. But really that discussion is way out of the depths for this article and something that I have to come back to if I want to give it it’s contextual justice.

The Dominance Hierarchy

The basic framework of Alpha male traits has been evolutionary winners though, and I believe there is a deeply rotted reason in all of us why. The basic theory has been laid out by the two Davids, David M. Buss and David Puts. Men have roughly speaking had to fight two wars to be sexually favored, first they have had to be the top dog in male-male competition and then they have had to be selected as an attractive mate choice by a woman. The male-male competition is in a huge part grounded in a fight for territory and resources that favored males that were strong and big. A winner was good at building and using weapons, never afraid of real conflict to hold his ground but were ironically at the same time able to establish dominance without any actual physical combat. Real combat was a loose-loose situation in Kalahari, even the winner would usually get wounded enough for nasty infections to take hold, if not worse. So more exhibit conspicuous sex-specific traits such as beards and deep voices where developed to secure a the Alpha male’s position.

The weight of male rivalry on sexual selection was lowered when strong pair bonding had become sophisticated enough to enable long time investments with a large subset of people. Intelligence, genuine interest of invest and the ability to work together in a group for a higher goal became characteristics that molded booth male and women dating choices and started to look like something that we civilized people would think of as more proper. This is also where the Alpha man ideal breaks apart as we suddenly could have a lot more people on the top, and for multiple different reasons. An organized group where more effective then a disorganized one.

But the longstanding ancestral dominance hierarchy of male-male competition over scarce territory would still on a deeply subconscious and primordial way continually overwhelm us, and just precisely when we are in the fragile state of choosing who to be intimate with. A recent study at a fraternity and sorority shows how it echos still to this very day. They interviewed a bunch of 19 to 22 year old’s on how many they had slept with, how many they think they think their friends have slept with and what characteristic they found most attractive in a partner, long term and short term. The most common denominator of attractiveness for girls in men was height. But the actual trait that was the best predictor in how many short term or long term sexual partner a man would have was physical strength. Their conclusion was that the tendency to interfere with other males flirting and therefor open up to a headstrong rivalry was so much higher in a physically strong man, and executed with greater success. Us dudes are in other words still on a subconscious level ranking us after how able we would be in taking the other in a fist fight and letting that nominator decide if we shall back down or keep flirting. It’s like we are acting on something close to a biological right. Which off course can be booth terrible and misleading and it’s a great thing that we have developed a multitude of other, less explosive, things that also can make us compete on the mating scene. But this calculator is still in us, encoded in our ancient past.

Exactly how anciently encoded gets pinpointed by Jordan Peterson in his first chapter of 12 rules for Life. He uses the example of lobsters as a creature that has lived in over 350 million years but still possess the instinctive machinery that dictate the dominance hierarchy. To but it in context, Homo Sapiens have just arrived at the scene 50 000 years ago, we have been apes for roughly 12 million years. 65 million years ago there where still dinosaurs mucking about. 350 million year ago is from a time before trees, when neurons and brains where relative simple things, but still nature had prioritized this complex function over all the things to come. Essentially nature has programmed in us a merciless infrastructure that never stops calculate our status in society and gives us neurotransmitters to match. Why? For our own selfish survival. If you are at the bottom of the dominance hierarchy then everything can kill you and you better be prepared for it. This is dictated with less serotonin, hyper awareness and posture that mimics the fetal position. Nature makes you feel like shit, it’s a horrible and shallow living, the shades of life gets beyond you as you get hardwired to only categories your surrounding as threats or non threats. When you are at the top your serotonin levels are high, you are confident and what some people would call your higher self. Serotonin in turn opens up for a bunch of outer healthy releases of neurotransmitters like dopamine and the hormone Testosterone, which seem to regulate the features characterized as features of the Alpha male.

But where does this leave me? The little shaky kid in the smoking room. Scared of being alone. It leaves me completely normal doesn’t it? Normal in the sense that my reaction is a natural consequence of evolutionary protection. I just answer to my spot in the dominance hierarchy. But I that also I mean that I am not doomed for this spot. I have just been a loser in a game that I can be better at. I can work on this and I can probably became damn good. There is nothing biologically wrong with me. The dominance hierarchy, by the way, seems to be in a flux and socially bounded as I can be really dominant in other places where I’m comfortable, like at home with my family, but I still have this drain of energy at other places. Which in turn means that I do not have to jump all in in the Alpha male pickup artist scene. I believe that I just have to find the dominance in me, test it out, fail a lot as it's so undeveloped and then I can climb this fucking thing. In my Alpha way.

Hypothetically, there, even a pudding hatch like me can Brazilian wax poetically and stop beating around the bush. Or what do you say Jimmy? https://open.spotify.com/track/6eMTTW2IakI12NUOBjNaPV

The Dominance Hierarchy and me

Me

The screen

The Dominance Hierarchy

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