by Tim Dowling
When we speak, perennially, of alphas males feeling out of place in a feminized society, what we’re really talking about is the failure of men generally to adapt to a job market that increasingly prizes so-called soft skills—teamwork, dealing with the public, processing feedback—as well as women have. And it’s arguably the stereotypical beta male—a salaried worker who’s guaranteed a job as long as he does as what’s expected of him—who is really losing out. But the old corporate structures were never an unconscious replication of natural dominance hierarchies; we just made them up, and now they’re being supplanted by something else.
Most of us know it’s nonsense to divide the human male population into alphas and betas, but the concept is strangely embedded in popular culture. As society adjusts its priorities over time, our idea of what constitutes an alpha male has to be tweaked, lest the term become a mere synonym for “arsehole.” A trawl through men’s magazines and the sort of websites that feature pop-up ads for muscle supplements will turn up such revisionist alpha-male traits as “the ability to laugh at himself,” “being a good listener,” “apologizing for being wrong,” “developing new skills,” and “helping others.” None of these would put you in mind of an alpha male like, say, Pol Pot, but so persistent is the notion of a top dog that we’d rather shoehorn some belated sensitivity into the definition than give up on it.
Perhaps our misplaced fondness for this construct is harmless, or no worse than attributing certain quirks of personality to a specific star sign. To bundle up a few traits—“competitive and loud,” or “tall and promiscuous”—and give them a label may be nothing more than a convenient conversational shorthand. But the division of the male population into alphas and betas is part of the whole idea of masculinity as a zero-sum game, a competition where nice guys finish last. It reinforces a belief in a preordained system that allows your male boss to run a department and be a terrible cock at the same time. He’s an alpha male. That’s just the way the world works.
Above all this system comes packaged with an evolutionary imperative: women prefer alpha males, so either be one, or learn to fake it. This is the mantra of an unattractive subset of masculinity known as pickup artists (PUAs), who are always on the lookout for a pseudoscientific justification for a system they think gives them an advantage in “reproductive success,” i.e., helps them have sex with damaged people they meet in bars. It’s worth pointing out that genuine reproductive success—the creation of healthy progeny with three good A-levels—tends to occur only after you’ve stopped trying to pick up damaged people in bars.
Still, if women prefer alpha males, you as a man should definitely avoid giving out signals that you are anything else. Even at my age, I still feel a pang of shameful unmanliness whenever I am obliged to use one of those fake pound coins to liberate a shopping trolley from the stack. Our whole warped idea about what masculinity comprises hangs on such stupidities. Not all that long ago David Cameron accused Ed Miliband of being insufficiently “assertive and butch” because he occasionally got Ed Balls a coffee. Over the years innumerable other traits have been cited, seriously or jovially, as evidence of nonalpha status. They include:
being a vegetarian
not being able to drive
eating quiche
wearing glasses
displaying a chronic reluctance to commit assault
allowing a woman to buy you dinner
taking the bus
sitting down to pee
knowing the names of flowers
owning an apron
working in the public sector
As a relaxed, confident, twenty-first-century male, you would probably allow yourself a few nonalpha behaviors without worry; personally, I would happily cop to five of the above. But I probably wouldn’t dare to indulge all of them. To the extent that we are driven by the need to get and keep female companionship, we are risk averse, and the alpha-male myth still holds sway.
Of course, the world doesn’t really work this way at all, as is reinforced every time I discover—to my unending surprise—that a man who sports an elaborately waxed mustache also has a girlfriend. As silly as the concept of the human alpha male is, it exerts a certain tyranny over our thinking. We need to free ourselves from its shackles.
The alpha-male myth is a by-product of evolutionary psychology—the theory that holds that while natural selection has shaped our thinking and behavior over millennia, our brains haven’t evolved significantly since the Stone Age. We are effectively still cavemen, unsuited to the demands of modern society, slaves to our biology.
This premise, while not entirely suspect, is often questioned by evolutionary biologists. It may be plausible to suggest our brains haven’t changed that much, but we have very little evidence to show how our ancestors of ten thousand years ago thought or behaved, and none to support the belief that humans ever lived in groups with the sort of hierarchical dominance one sees in modern chimpanzees. Our closest common ancestor lived six million years ago; we’ve both evolved a lot since then, in decidedly different directions.
Such evidence as we have seems to suggest that early humans banded together in egalitarian groups where efforts to dominate were punished. The idea that our human brains are an inheritance from forebears who lived in tribes with an alpha male at the top of the pecking order is pretty well fraudulent. Stop worrying about whether or not you’re an alpha male. There is no such thing.
The morning after the phone conversation with the researcher I find myself in the Woman’s Hour green room, drinking coffee, perspiring heavily and chatting to a man from Royal Mail who is publicizing a new commemorative stamp featuring Quaker campaigner Joan Mary Fry.
“So,” he says, “what are you here to talk about?”
“Not being an alpha male,” I say.
“Oh,” he says. “I guess I’m not an alpha male either.” I shrug. It seems unlikely, I think, with your diffident manner and your framed stamps. I have to remind myself that I’ve already decided there’s no such thing as an alpha male.
When my time arrives I am conducted into the softly lit confines of the studio and seated behind a microphone, next to another male journalist, whom I imagine is there to offer an opinion that runs counter to mine. I try to remember what my opinion is. The presenter, Jenni Murray, addresses him first. As he speaks I desperately attempt to organize my revised thinking on the alpha-male myth and the need to resist its simplistic tyranny into a coherent philosophy, one that begins with a sentence that I can say right now. Finally Jenni Murray turns to me and asks where I would rank myself on the alpha/beta-male spectrum.
“Somewhere around lambda,” I say.
13.
Coming to Grief
Three weeks after my mother-in-law’s funeral, the phone rings. People are still calling every day to see how my wife is coping. It has been a long and terrible year of ambulances in the middle of the night, of hospitals, of bad news and worse news, of repeated, frightening dress rehearsals for mourning, brief reprieves, and finally, the grim business of day-to-day existence in grief’s long shadow. Through all this I am repeatedly surprised by how little I have to offer. I had always imagined reserves of strength and maturity that I could dredge up for genuine emergencies. They’re not there.
My wife is more than bereaved; she is posttraumatic. We have life-changing decisions to make—about the house, about the future—that we both seem incapable of thinking clearly about. The demands of a two-year-old are a welcome distraction, but child care takes everything out of us. Without quite saying so, we’ve more or less agreed to wait out this part of our lives, until such time as the knack for looking forward to things returns.
My wife has stopped talking on the phone; she is holding it out to me. “It’s your sister,” she says.
There is a faint hiss with a rackety pulse to it on the line, which I first mistake for the hollow whoosh of long
distance. Only when I press my ear closer to the receiver do I realize that it’s the breathing of someone who has been—who still is—crying.
“Mom’s sick,” says my sister.
Our mother, she tells me, has been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I listen, waiting for the good news at the end, but there is no good news. Although she’s scheduled for surgery, the long-term treatment she’s been offered is largely palliative. She’s been given between a year and eighteen months to live.
I ring my mother, who is being unbearably upbeat for my sake. Or maybe she really is upbeat; I can’t tell. The conversation is unprecedented.
A couple of weeks later I learn that despite the bad news my family is pressing ahead with a trip to the US Senior Olympics in Arizona, where my father has qualified to compete. I make plans to join them; it’s about the soonest I can get away anyway. It’s not a good time to leave my wife, bereaved and in charge of a small child and, as she keeps mentioning, pregnant again. It’s not a good time for anything.
I have to check that old passport—the index to my life—to remember how I actually spent that year. Apart from the trip to Arizona at the end of May, when I flew out to LA and drove to Tucson with my brother, it’s clear that I visited home for two weeks in July and—that’s it. My mother also came to London once some time before the middle one was born in January.
On all these occasions she seemed impossibly well to me. This impression probably contributed to my decision not to make any decisions. My brother left California to move closer to home, but packing up was not an option for me. I had a wife and two small children. A decade before, when I was twenty-seven, it didn’t seem to matter where on the planet I chose to pitch my tent. I wasn’t abandoning anyone, or giving anything up. I was just getting on with it. I didn’t think about any eventualities that might make having two families—each with its own, competing priorities—on two continents awkward.
Just a year after the trip to Arizona, I am called back to Connecticut. My mother has taken a turn for the worse, and is at home recovering from a second operation. Only she’s not really recovering. Come now, everyone is saying. I know what it means.
I fly over immediately, feeling like the Angel of Death. I imagine my mother taking one look at me and thinking, If he’s here, I must really be in trouble.
This moment, in fact, happens twice. The second morning after my arrival I am unable to wake my mother, and we have to ring an ambulance. She’s in hypoglycemic shock—an injection brings her round immediately—but when I see her in hospital later on that day she has no memory of my previous arrival. I show her the pictures of the baby—already five months old—all over again.
In the drifting days that follow, a halting routine develops: visiting times divided into overlapping chunks, arranged rendezvous outside the hospital to pass all-day parking permits through car windows, swapping crossword clues in the long hours when my mother is asleep. When she’s awake she’s chatty and perfectly lucid, but seems only dimly aware of the passage of time. Every day might be the same day. And why not? Everything looks the same, and nobody’s going anywhere.
Off the schedule there are appointments with nuns about church services, and grim trips to view available cemetery plots. In between, I work, getting up before dawn to file to British deadlines. Everything is last-minute and rushed, and yet this period has in my memory a languorous, dreamlike quality, as if it went on for months.
The parish priest drops in on his round of hospital visits, and offers to perform the last rites while he’s at hand. It seems an awkward proposition to put to my mother: “We didn’t call in a priest, honestly; he just happened to be in the area.”
Fortunately, she is asleep. Under the circumstances none of us can offer any objection, although that’s before we realize our participation will be required. I’d always assumed that everybody else left the room when extreme unction was administered, like when you have an X-ray done.
In spite of our reluctance the priest soon has us all joining hands around the bed with him. He begins with some informal opening remarks. Although I’m trying not to, I eventually catch my sister’s eye, and I know we are both thinking the same thing: come on, Father—let’s get it done.
Finally the priest starts intoning some actual prayer words. This is the moment my mother chooses to wake up—while her children are staring down at her, heads lowered, hand in hand, with a priest up the far end. I have a strong desire to pretend we’re doing something else—playing a fun parlor game, or rehearsing a scene from Godspell—but alas, my mother has never been stupid.
“Thank you for the last rites, Father,” she says.
I tell my wife the story when I call her later, although I don’t think she finds it as morbidly amusing as I’m trying to make it sound. I guess you had to be there, I say. Then I take her through the latest round of difficulties. My mother isn’t dying fast enough, as far as the hospital is concerned—either their admissions policy or my mother’s insurance won’t cover an open-ended leave-taking in an expensive hospital room. They’re talking about putting her in a hospice two hours’ drive from home, I say, possibly in a matter of days.
There is a silence on the other end of the line. My wife faced a similar dilemma when her mother refused to expire in accordance with the NHS’s timetable. I imagine she’s thinking about that.
“They’re being very nice about it,” I say. “But still.”
“I need you to come back,” my wife says.
It’s one of those occasions when a correct response does not immediately present itself. She’s right in one sense—she’s on her own with two tiny children—but I am not in a position to get on a plane. I’m not even in a position to predict when I might be in a position to get on a plane. There is no right thing to do, just events, decisions, and their attendant consequences. If there is a delicate way to summarize the complex tangle of priorities I’m facing, I can’t think of it.
“It’s not like I’m on vacation here,” I say. I have just been for a swim, though, which suddenly feels a bit disloyal.
“I know,” my wife says. “I just need to be able to say it.”
It was not, in the end, nearly as drawn out as I remember. My mother died on June 9, just four days after my birthday, when I modeled her present—a dark blue suit I would wear to her funeral—for her in her hospital room.
It’s too late to ring home that night, so I call the next day.
“I’m sorry,” my wife says. I look out the window; it’s bright, almost cloudless—a reminder that the worst things happen on the nicest of summer days. Somewhere nearby, a lawn is being professionally cut. It’s a Wednesday. You have to take tragedy as it comes—as part of the weft of the world’s business—or not at all.
I don’t remember much of the rest of our conversation. When I think about it now I usually recall another morning, a little over a year before—the morning my mother-in-law died. I was casting about for some way to offer comfort to my shell-shocked wife, and getting nowhere. After a long silence, she spoke up from the depths of her grief.
“You might as well go and get the car inspected,” she said.
“Really?”
“Go on. We’ll never get another appointment.”
Sometimes, as a husband, you can offer no better help than to do as you are asked.
To my unending surprise, my passport shows I landed at Heathrow on the morning of June 19, my mother’s funeral already behind me, less than three weeks after I’d left. Like the June nine years before, when I turned up with my bags having quit my job in New York, I arrive with a nagging sense that I am running away from something. This time, at least, that feeling is accompanied by the hope of coming home.
14.
Staying Together—for Better and Worse
You may have recited traditional marriage vows, or slightly reformed ones with the most blatantly sexist
language removed. You may have written your own from scratch or, like me, you might have done little more than state your full name and admit no lawful impediment. In any case there will probably come a point in your marriage when you’ll wish you’d made your requirements a bit clearer and your demands a bit more specific.
People often speak of unconditional love—the kind your dog has for you—as the very height of emotional experience, but marriage is meant to be the biggest relationship of your life, and it has nothing do with unconditional love. “For better, for worse” isn’t something you feel; it’s something you promise. Marital love is, in fact, bounded on all sides by conditions: pull your weight, understand me, be faithful, bear in mind that you said you liked cats, tolerate my character flaws, agree with me about the state of this carpet, school our children in accordance with my principles, allow me to keep mustard in the fridge once it’s been opened. Often these conditions are unspoken, but it doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
Unconditional love is something you can’t help—ask your dog. Conditional love, on the other hand, is maintained only with effort, patience, kindness, and unstinting compromise. Am I saying that my wife’s love for me wanes a tiny bit every time I am slow to take out the recycling? Yes, that is what I am saying.
Staying together has got very little to do with the vague promises you made on your wedding day, and a lot to do with adapting to conditions on the ground.
FOR POORER