Disclaimer:

I have what I consider to be a well-researched and documented theory about gender dynamics, see The Empress Is Naked. This post is not part of it. This is a tentative theory, and a very disturbing one at that. I believe it does capture a critical aspect of sexual dynamics, but at this stage you should treat it as a Request For Comments.*


What is "Alpha"?

I won't go into answering that. You can find many good attempts at approaching it in TRP. Tingle-inducing, dominant, exciting... referring to behaviors rather than individuals... etc

The fact remains that a concise definition of "Alpha" eludes us.

However difficult it may be to define "Alpha" generally, ("Beta" is easier), defining "Alpha sex" and "Beta sex" is quite straightforward. It is about spontaneous desire vs negotiated "desire". From the female perspective, Alpha sex is the result of spontaneous desire. Beta sex is a concession resulting from negotiation. For women, only Alpha sex counts as sex, so much so that there is a feminist campaign to define all sex that is not "enthusiastic consent", i.e. Beta sex, as "rape".

Now, the point I want to make is this:

In evolutionary terms, Beta sex was in-band sex. Alpha sex was predominantly inter-band sex.

As you all (should) know, humans evolved in bands of 20-150 people. The bulk of daily interactions between humans was in-band. Sex as well. Before the institution of marriage, relationships were mostly transaction based (meat for sex), of short-term (the 2-4 years of the infatuation period). Now, consider growing up with and living all your life around the same people. How much genuine desire can you have for them? Where is the mystery? On top of that: consider that with paternity being unknown, in-band sex had a high degree of incest.

Can you see why inter-band sex was so lucrative? Especially for women?

The discussion around incest and sexuality is as much complex as it is critical, in my opinion. I cannot make a full appraisal, but I can identify some crucial points:

  • Back when our basic sexual psychology was inscribed, we had no knowledge of the specifics of reproduction. Only the mother-child relationship was concrete (and mother-side siblings). The incest taboo was not yet instituted, it is a cultural thing that came later.

  • Incest does not necessarily lead to defective offspring. In fact, for a given population, a degree of incest can actually improve its genetic makeup, by eliminating defective genes. Simply put, children with a accumulated genetic defects die, those with accumulated good genes survive. Seen from the other side, eliminating incest actually leads to more defective genes surviving in the future generations, by coupling them with dominant ones. (Note, if you, at this point, feel that I'm arguing, even implicitly, in favor of incest, you are too idiot, stop reading here.)

  • In spite of the species benefiting genetically from a degree of incest, for most individuals of that species incest is better avoided, exactly because of the above: high degree of elimination of offspring due to their recessive genes.

and the most important point:

  • Incest avoidance is of much more importance for women, due to their limited reproductive capacity, than for men. For example, there are interesting studies that show that women (but not men) can smell how similar the immune system of a man is, relative to theirs, and this is a major turn off - or turn on, if dissimilar.

OK, now that we have the correct data, crunching it is quite straightforward.

Women used to get protection and resources (mainly meat) inside the band, exchanging it for sex. A drudgery, perhaps, but what can you do. When, however, there was a chance to grab some strange dick, especially if there were clear indications of fitness and dominance, as was the case with the leaders of other bands, this rung a lot of bells (tingles) regarding her reproductive advantages.

So Alpha sex (tingles) were for/with a stranger, Beta sex (transactional) was with the band members.

I first encountered a related narrative in Steve Moxon's The Woman Racket. He goes as far as suggesting that the (well-known) female rape-fantasy is much more than just a fantasy, and has much to do with the dynamic I described. I remember personally nauseating with the idea, at the time. I now find it revelatory:

...just as women today go out to an anonymous nightclub in a micro-skirt, ancestral woman could walk to places away from the village near the territorial boundary with neighboring communities, where she may encounter a lone male stranger. This raised a new scenario, of an encounter with a foreign male that did not result in capture, but just sex. The woman returned to her natal community, where she ran the risk that her adultery had been witnessed or is detected. What then? ... The woman therefore pretends, very plausibly, that she was not having extra-pair sex, but was being attacked by a man and managed to thwart abduction. Over evolutionary time, such a strategy could be selected for, and made more reliably evoked by being rendered non-conscious. This would be exactly what would have happened if a woman had a sexually-coercive encounter with a foreign male... So the coerced sex and/or abduction, and voluntary extra-pair sex situations are very similar; and an adaptation that was an integrated response to both is likely. The cognitive shut-down mode of dealing with forced sex would be an excellent tool for non-conscious deception, both of the self and of others – the most reliable way to deceive others being to deceive yourself, of course.

In that excerpt, the clandestine element of Alpha sex is taken to its extreme conclusion.

There are a lot of evidence that has accumulated in research, which are consistent with such a narrative of Alpha sex being precisely sex lacking intimacy. Those referring to rape are the most revealing - as well as being the hardest to stomach for all us in TRP that are vehemently opposed to rape. The all-powerful female xenophilia and the allure of the "mysterious" man, female orgasm during rape (estimated at around 50% of the cases), the disturbing 1982 "study of American students [which] found that girls who were exposed to an attempt at date rape were three times more likely to resume their relationship with the man concerned if his attempt succeeded than if it failed.... If the man succeeded in forcing intercourse, nearly half (40 per cent) later resumed their relationship with him... If he failed, then nearly nine out of every ten of the women (87 per cent) refused to have any more to do with him..." (from R. Baker's Sperm Wars)

Modern men's efforts to "fix things at home", reach a blissful state of harmony with their wife etc etc, all stumble on this evolutionary past of the female. If she gets too comfortable, it feels like being in-band. It feels... incestuous. Woman is an ancient being, running an outdated operating system. Social assertions for the avoidance of incest was a much later addition - one which woman is hard pressed to accommodate. She still goes about trying to avoid incest and improve the genetic makeup of her children by feeling that intimate, steady, long-term relationships are in-band, while sex with the mysterious stranger is truly desired, inter-band.

So, what's the takeaway in practical terms?

Good luck trying to be consistently perceived as "Alpha" in LTRs or marriages. It was never meant to work that way for females. It might be possible, with very specific prerequisites, but for all practical purposes, don't go about destroying your "Alphaness" by committing too much.