The alpha male is the man who other men want to be, who women want to be with and who gets what he wants – usually women. It could seem like a quaint concept these days if it wasn’t so radioactively toxic. But despite the revelations that precipitated the fall of disgraced movie producer Harvey Weinstein, knuckle-draggers like Donald Trump continue to seize power and grab pussy with apparent impunity, not to mention impoliteness.

The term “alpha male” comes, like much of the primitive behaviour that it wrongly legitimises, from the animal kingdom. It was largely restricted to primatology until the publication of Frans de Waal’s 1982 book Chimpanzee Politics, which compared monkey interactions to human, just as Nigel Farage defended Trump by likening him to a silverback gorilla. In the nineties, aptly named consultant Naomi Wolf was reported as telling Al Gore, then VP to Bill ‘Slick Willie’ Clinton, that he needed to be more ‘alpha’ to become the big dog. Thus the term could be responsible for more damage than we’ll ever know.

The other bible of the alpha male movement was 2005’s The Game, which brought pick-up ‘artistry’ and peacocking (shudder) to the masses. In fairness to author Neil Strauss, the book was at least partly intended to illustrate the limitations of such an approach: a boost in false confidence and transitory hook-ups, but a barrier to real connection or long-term relationships. Instead, like more literary portrayals of less-than-aspirational figures from The Great Gatsby to American Psycho, it was interpreted as a how-to manual by a generation of dysfunctional men who can’t talk to women without canned material.

Rethinking The Alpha Male

There are all kinds of problems with the notion of the alpha male. Like some pseudo evolutionary psychology and fundamental misunderstanding of biology. Or that animal hierarchies, where there’s only one alpha, aren’t a great analogue for human ones, where that’s clearly not the case. (We’ve thrived precisely because we’re social, collaborative creatures.) Or the wildly different contexts that we inhabit: you might be an alpha in the boardroom but not the weights room, Elon Musk and not The Rock. Or to paraphrase Sylvia Plath, that girls are not machines that you put negging coins in until sex falls out.