Thread by @AlexandraErin

It's kind of amazing, the range of utterly fake body language stuff that supposed "alpha men" will make up in their quest to invent an objective way of measuring personal winning-ness in a way that demands no actual accomplishments, achievements, charisma, or skills of them.

"You can tell from the way this man stands that he's a winner. You can tell from the way the woman stands that she loves him. My experience is that when you're an alpha, like I am, no woman ever tells you that she loves you, out of fear and respect. You have to read her stance."

I mis-swiped on a Twitter thread and wound up on one of those accounts and he was analyzing a picture of a celebrity couple holding hands to determine who had "thumb control". What a weird little dweeb.

Obviously "thumb control" isn't a thing because if it was a thing we were consciously doing, as a species or culture, we'd talk about it. And for it to be subconscious, we have to imagine human beings have been holding hands as part of coupling on an evolutionary timescale.

And within that timescale there would have to have been evolutionary pressure towards vying for control within a monogamous coupling by establishing dominance via opposable digit layering.

For couples that don't hate each other, there are two basic ways they can hold hands: whichever way's comfortable at the moment (the ideal way) or oh god there's no natural way to do this how and why are we doing this why did I think about my thumb placement (less ideal).

Of course, no man who thinks of himself as an "alpha male" has ever been in a loving relationship. That's part of what reinforces their idea that relationships are about establishing dominance: they're passive aggressively fighting with their partners literally the whole time.

"You have to establish your sexual market value and then do what you can to diminish hers. That's how you become alpha."

You're describing a passive aggressive snit fest, my dude. You're "redpilling" young men into how to be a whiny little twerp.

Alpha, beta... if you wait for the game of the year edition you get all of patches and the DLC.

https://twitter.com/6502_ftw/status/1416217852718235651

"In this picture the woman is showing her vagina to the world."

We call that "facing forward" and every woman is doing it, relative to one frame of reference, in every instant of her existence. It's impressive you manage to feel personally threatened by it. Artisanal weakness.

At the lowest point in my life I could not have imagined a way to be as fragile and insecure as the men who have branded themselves as "alpha males" on the internet. As a closeted trans girl literally trying to be a dude and failing, I could not have contrived this buffoonery.

Honestly, that's what "alpha male" woo nonsense is, when you get right down to it: make yourself as fragile and brittle and insecure as you can and then make it everybody else's problem.

It's the making it everybody else's problem that's supposed to be badass, I guess?

I feel like this comparison is unfair to pretzels, which are tasty, useful, and almost took out George Bush.

https://twitter.com/kristenmchugh22/status/1416221949664112641

Pretzels are comrades.

latimes.com/archives/la-xp…

https://twitter.com/KaylinEvergreen/status/1416222450514227200