Whether it be from the plethora or ‘business’ books, or shouted from the window of a Bugatti, the industry of helping men be more ‘Alpha Male’ is booming. These voices may claim to speak for the next generation of ‘high value’ men, but it’s a worldview I find as regressive and unhelpful as calling men ‘patriarchal’ or ‘oppressive’, or ‘toxic’, or ‘fragile’. Yes ‘Alpha Male’ is just another shallow term to appropriate maleness. To many, an Alpha Male is a rich and powerful man, who is able to dominate and assert himself financially. It is used as widely as it is wrongly, to basically describe obnoxious, arrogant and superficial men, as some kind of role model. But the reality of Alpha Males, at least in how they appear in the animal kingdom, tells a different story. In Chimpanzees, our closest relative, Alpha Males are actually extraordinarily generous. And whilst they are strong and show good health, the are also characterised by their acts of compassion, and gift giving. They are compassionate. Showing the highest amount of empathy of all chimpanzees, even higher than alpha females. Winning support and respect from peers through showing kindness to children, acting as both impartial peacekeepers of the group, and the ‘chief consolers’ within chimpanzee communities. They are not bullies, that post loud and annoying TikTok’s. So what can we learn about Alpha Males from Dr Frans de Waal, the primatologist whose book ‘Chimpanzee Politics’ was in part responsible for popularising the phrase forty years ago… ~ TED Talk  Images by Gradienta, Dan Cristian Padure, Matthew Feeney, Ray Zhou, and Clemente Cardenas from Unsplash #alphamale

2023-02-09