The dominant/controling/confident man – seems a common thread among some. Where the dominance and controling relate to women and presumably “less dominant” if not “submissive” males I see problems with feminism.

Where we get into confidence and perhaps even charismatic leadership in some ways there need not be a clash with feminism. Sometimes the “confidence” may of course be a mask.

Aggressiveness vs. assertiveness seems a key factor for me. Being assertive whether alpha or beta is helpful. Obviously, many alpha males as well as non-alpha males may take any confronting of their behavior as being “aggressive”

Confronting sexism for men is different than confronting sexism for women. When we as men ignore sexism or tacitly support it with other men we perpetrate the continuation of sexist behaviors both within ourselves and with other men. Where women try to ignore sexism, they get unfriendly reminders of their denial.

Men also are threatened more by and more affected by actions to confront and stop sexism from other men. It’s different when a women talks of the sexist behavior of a man. Many men can deny it much more easily. We are in a sense “betraying our gender” when we confront sexism with other men.

In the 1960’s – the Black Power Movement largely told White Americans to work on racism in the White Commmunity and to move away from trying to work with Blacks.

We similarly need to work on our “Men’s Community”. It’s much harder! We need to confront our homophobia as well as take responsibilities we may not have faced before.

Thanks!

I agree with you the term is vague. Though vagueness doesn’t seem to stop us from using some other terms which have widely disparate meanings. I think there are a lot of definitions of “racism” floating around, for example, which probably range from “nothing short of outright slavery” to “anything whites do” and everywhere in between. But it’s still a reasonably useful term in context.

I personally detest the communication errors that result from overbroad terms and multiple definitions, so I’m with you on this one in general. Even for useful terms. (Just think of all the comment wars which could be avoided if everyone’s blog had a sidebar saying “the definitions of racism, sexism, and feminism which shall apply on this blog are:_______”) I don’t think that “alpha male” is an especially egregious example, and I don’t really use the term much myself. So I apologize for the side track.

I don’t think I’ve expanded the definition all that much; I’ve simply listed a bunch of the concepts that “alpha male” describes in various contexts. It’s true that they don’t usually all appear at once. But yes, part of my point is that the usage of the term is so vague as to be almost meaningless.

That’s interesting: I don’t know if it’s deliberate, but you seem to have expanded the definition so much it is pointless. Which may be an issue of semantics, or may not…

I’d personally pare down your definition a bit:
Alpha males, in an essentialist definition, are powerful, confident, extroverted, aggressive, people who desire to be leaders.

“Beta males,” by inference, lack these qualities.
Not necessarily lack ALL of them. Just SOME of them.

You can be rich, confident, and popular without being an alpha male, for example. IMO.

I’m sure there are myriad reasons for this– women arguably risk more by speaking up in these situations than men do, and feminist men may have more authority and opportunity to call other men on sexism than women do, so maybe it does make sense to expect more “active” feminism from men than women. Still, I wonder how much of the discrepancy comes from the idea that men naturally are/should be more assertive than women, so we can expect assertive feminism from them in ways we don’t expect it from women. It seems odd that these expectations for male feminists just happen to coincide with the traditional male gender role (albeit the more positive aspects), and odder still that with the wide spectrum of different feminisms and feminist issues out there, so many can only conceive of effective male feminism if it involves fighting with other men.

I hope what I was saying wasn’t taken to mean something like “because people use the term that the term holds true” or some such, Jeff. What I meant was that, when people on what I see as a feminist/feminist-leaning blog like Pandagon (i.e. jedmunds and Amanda, in this case) bandy about the term, that it needs to be examined in more detail–not just chalked up to ‘well, that term doesn’t mean anything. I think that, to the extent that jedmunds and Amanda used the term ‘alpha male’, that it means somthing to them, and that whatever they meant by it was worth critiquing and examining.

Aside from that, I much appreciate your comments in this post. Very much more good food for thought.

I would ask you this though: What would be an example of a man calling another man on sexism that doesn’t also fall into the problem of domination hierarchies–if, indeed, we (men, women and those of other genders) find ourselves steeped in them like fish swim in water?