Alpha VS Beta: In which the authoress is pissed off and has Mormon flashbacks.

You know, I'm admittedly not a feminist. I am fond of saying that I love feminism, but hate feminists. The basic idea of women and men being equals is fine with me. It's how that idea gets corrupted that pisses me off. Case in point, the Alpha VS Beta philosophy.
Now, I gave this stuff a chance a while back. It was fine for a while, then it went bad. Live and learn.

While browsing Exmormon.org’s forum again, I found a link to this gem: LDS Alpha.
Now, I get it. Like I said, I have had this point of view explained to me. It’s very convincing when explained to you by someone who approaches it from the same point of view as a missionary: emphasize the good parts and leave out the horse pucky so you can stumble all over it yourself much later. It’s a good method, in a way; it allows you to feel like an idiot for believing it in the first place without having it pointed out to you.

There’s couple of things that I would, in all fairness, consider valid on this guy's blog. For instance, I totally agree that men will marry a hot woman regardless of her intelligence or personality. Of course, then they’ll whine that she’s dumb and has no personality later, and chicks like me will laugh. Hysterically. We will also make fun of these guys. Mercilessly. We’ll also never date them ourselves, because they’re morons--and who wants to be with a moron?
(The fact that the post I just linked to was written by some other Mormon guy and then posted on the LDS Alpha blog is intentional. I said it was on his blog. I never said it was content that he’d written himself that was valid.)

In this case, I ran across a recent post of LDSA’s that made me stop and re-read it. Then I laughed, a little hesitantly, and read it again. Then I sighed heavily and let the rage rise. So let’s examine this little gem, shall we?

So, you asked her out and she said, “Yes.” Now what? Most guys follow a set routine on a first date that marks them as total Beta chumps. On average girls go on more dates than guys so, they go on the same routine over and over and over. Guys who avoid these major mistakes are ahead of 95% of all other guys in the world.

...Really. I can understand the idea behind “Do something different,” but the “Beta chumps” bullcrap is ominous.

The first mistake is dinner. DO NOT TAKE HER TO A NICE DINNER! DO NOT PAY FOR IT! Guys think that they should show off their ability to choose some trendy place to eat. They then want to show off their ability to provide by paying. Guys remember: Beta Provider=Chump. Paying for girls and throwing money around only marks you as Beta.

DO NOT DATE THIS MAN! DO NOT PASS UP THE CHANCE TO KICK HIM IN THE BALLS!
Women think that men should show off their ability to not be assholes by actually paying for the food when they ask a woman out to dinner. Guys, remember: Not Being An Asshole = Second Date. Paying for the dinner marks you as someone that doesn’t have the intelligence of a particularly idiotic piece of cheese.
(And it doesn’t have to be trendy or expensive, but apparently no one told this guy. But if possible, it should not be any place that has a drive-thru. Ever.)

In the modern world younger women earn far more money than men. This means that she can afford to eat and does not need to rely on you for food.

Interesting. Because speaking as a younger woman, you can shove that theory right up your lying ass. I barely make more money than a 19 year old Mormon Missionary. I could have more of a cash flow if I hustled pool. How many “younger women” actually make more than their male counterparts? The answer is very, very few--on account of very few people in their 20s have high-level jobs. And where is this magical land of freakish weirdness where men in their 20s and 30s are only allowed to work minimum wage, no matter what?

This leads to the second mistake. DO NOT TALK ABOUT YOUR JOB! Guys want to show off about their great job and career ambitions. Many guys think that by showing that they can provide for a girl that this will make a girl attracted to them. Again, big mistake! Girls are not ATTRACTED to Betas! By trying to show how well you provide, you will just mark yourself as Beta and kill a girl’s attraction to you. This means that you will have failed in your purpose for a first date.

I can agree with this one, but only partly. I don’t want to hear about the guy’s job because it’s a freakin’ first date. If I am on a date with someone, I don’t care if he’s a CEO or a drives a garbage truck.
But if you’re in the mood to look for someone for a long-term relationship, you do want to have it at least rattling around in the back of your mind that this guy isn’t going to be asking to borrow money to pay off the very understanding but nonetheless menacing bookie waiting out in the alley amongst the many hard and pointy objects. That doesn’t make him a Beta. It makes him able to get and keep a job, which is--and I know this must be shocking--a good quality.

DO NOT ASK HER TO TALK ABOUT HERSELF! Girls get asked the same questions on first dates over and over and over. Do not ask, “So, where did you go to school?” She gets asked this constantly. Do not ask her about her paper pushing job. Either, she will not want to talk about it and then you will have made her close up. Or even worse she will talk a ton about it and make herself seem of really high status, which will lower you in her eyes. Do not ask her to talk about her family. Do not try to build a real deep connection. She will just see that you are trying to build an artificial connection with her. This will mark you as Beta and kill attraction.

You’re right. Don’t ask me where I went to school. Ask me what books I like. Hell, you probably met me in a library anyway. This will lead to movies, and if you’re really looking to score points, it will lead to a potentially humorous discussion of why we’re all here.
(Answer: because God has a phenomenally bad sense of humor/hates us and wanted to see how we’d all treat each other if he made a world full of Alpha males and made normal people deal with them.)
I partly agree with the idea about trying to build a deep connection first off. Artificial connections do come off as desperate and clingy. But a real connection, well. Nothing wrong with having a little meaningful conversation.

DO NOT TAKE HER TO THE MOVIES! Lots of guys do the dinner and a movie thing. Girls go on this date all the time. Going to the movies will just mark you as another boring first date just like all of the other first dates that she has ever been on. At the movies you can’t interact and Demonstrate Higher Value (DHV). All you do is sit there and put your arm around her. Maybe you can get a little kino going, but that is it.

Unless I actually wanted to see that movie, but hey, be inconsiderate. Here’s a thought, get a DVD of something you know I want to see and sit through it with me after helping me cook something. Hint: I dig Rambo movies, love Practical Magic, and seriously liked Lethal Weapon.
And as for “kino,” I’m going to assume he meant “kink.” Yeah baby, nothing like getting pawed in a movie theater to make me all hot. And by hot, I mean steamed. Steamed and violent. It’s not like you were using that eye, so don’t be upset when I decide that it looks better as my new keychain.

DO NOT LET THE DATE BECOME NON SEXUAL! If you get bogged down in conversation about a girl’s life or her family, the date can become non sexual. This will set you up for the path to the friend zone. The friend zone is a place that no guys ever escape. Keep sexual tension in the date. Sexual tension is good, comfort is bad.

I can make almost anything sexual in my head. We can talk about my life. Seriously. And if the friend zone was something that no guys ever escaped, women would never end up being interested in their male friends--which has happened to me three times--at least with the unmarried ones.
And a guy who is obsessed with keeping the sexual tension in the date is a guy that I will find creepy and avoid. Look, maybe I’m in the minority here, but a guy that I find sexy is generally a guy that I find sexy no matter what. So...shut up. I want to be comfortable. I want to know that the guy I’m on a date with is someone that I can relax around. Someone who isn’t obsessed with keeping up the sexual tension because he thinks that a date is some kind of psychotic competition.

DO NOT DRAG THE DATE OUT! Some guys will use a first date to keep the girl with him for a long time. Especially, if the date is not going too well guys will want to keep it going in the hopes of redeeming himself. If the date is not going well, end it! All that you will do is to dig a greater hole for yourself and make it impossible that she will ever consider going out with you again.

Actually, I agree with this one. But WHY is this not just common sense? Who thinks that a date going badly means that they should try harder? Apparently, crazy people.

It's strange to me to read that blog. When I describe an "Alpha male," I'm thinking of well-spoken, intelligent men who are very capable. They may fix their own cars, etc, as opposed to constant (as in, really unhealthy fixation with) videogames and mental mind-games. They know who they are and they don't lie to themselves or others about this. They tell the truth, know the difference between right and wrong, stay loyal, are mature, kind, and dependable--basically, the type of guy that you look at and go, "That's a durn good man." That type of "manliness" just sort of rolls off of them like fog. This of course varies from man to man, but is unmistakable.

When this guy describes his version of an Alpha male, he's describing what I would refer to as a Beta. The need for constant stroking of the ego is something I associate with a person who is actually quite self-loathing and riddled with anxiety.

Here's an example:
I remember befriending a guy slightly younger than me who demonstrated Beta (my definition) qualities. If someone disagreed with him, he would actively attack them, ripping away at their self esteem in any way he could. Everything was about him trying to convince himself that he was better than everyone else in every way. To him, every woman out there (that he felt he could easily bully) was his inferior, and he treated me accordingly. I found out much later that a mutual friend had been made subject to his abuse, and that she had actually told him that he was going to lose not only her friendship, but also mine if he didn’t change.
This friendship did indeed come to an abrupt end when I realized how just much he was willing to blatantly lie to me in order to hide that he was basically the total opposite of the person I thought he was. That, my friends, is a Beta. But by LDS-A’s standards, he would be an Alpha--and I would be some weak-minded little shrew who passed up on a “real man.”
What is fascinating in terms of my ex-friend is that I sincerely do not think that he is actually capable of change, and probably doesn’t think that he did anything wrong by being untrustworthy and hateful. But that’s a Beta for you.

The fact that LDS-A is a Mormon just makes it more irritating to me. It's like he took the Mormon tendency to be pompous and treat women as lesser, then deliberately sought out a set of ideals that revolve around being pompous. He then, as so many men who fall prey to this kind of thinking do, tries to justify it by claiming that this ideal is not only extremely attractive, but masculine. Sorry, dude. Couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Someone needs a ClueBrick©.

Generation Y We Suck

There’s really a lot of factors to go into when examining a group, but youth culture can essentially be broken up into facets of pop culture. Because let’s face it, pop culture pretty much is youth culture.

However, for simplicity’s sake we’ll be looking at 3 factors in this post that exhibit what effects youth culture: Fashion, Music, and Ideology. Since most Generation Y’ers came of age in the 00s, that’s the decade I will be comparing to the 90s and the 80s.

The argument that Generation Y is just not as good as Generation X is one that I’ve debated for a good amount of time. Gen X has drawbacks, notably among a percentage of the 40-somethings that share the Boomers’ utter disregard for political sanity, but the Me Generation had something nearly approaching originality. Generation Y is by comparison a bland, reheated leftover, the difference between eating paste and chowing down on a brownie.

• Fashion

If I said I thought the styles of the1980s and the 1990s were tasteless compared to today, I would only be partly lying. Sure, I owned the platform sneakers--everyone did--and you pretty much had no choice but to wear mom-jeans because that was what they sold most of the time. The pocket chains remain en vogue today; also, I’m pretty sure the beanie hat ain’t going anywhere. And girl, you know I had jelly shoes.
The 00’s brought us a slew of WTF-ery with basically the philosophy that defines Generation Y: the less taste, the better. The scatter-brained, more-is-better attitude was marketed like so many ridiculously expensive sweatsuits (why would you buy a sweatsuit that you can’t really sweat in?) and Generation Y lapped it right up. Why? Because it was there. Because it was soooo edgy. How do we know it’s edgy? Because we were told it was!
Generation Y is pretty notable for blindly following trends (though every generation can say this). In addition, Generation Y closely associates the purchase of a trendy (and probably expensive) look with, or in many cases replacing, organic satisfaction. In essence, the message that if you just get the perfect pair of shoes, make yourself up just right, lose the right amount of weight, wear all the right clothes, get perfect cosmetic surgery, or wear the precise perfume/cologne advertised, everything in your life will suddenly fall together like a perfect game of Tetris©...well, that message is blaring loud and clear. Buy all the right things and you’ll become a fey, marvelous creature, envied by all, romantically tragic, and therefore marvelously appealing.
As stated on Love Your Style.com:

One escape for a sick soul is materialism, in buying nice clothes and houses and so on, in becoming enviable in your loneliness. [source]

Sure, the message of “Love yourself the way you are” is loud and proud, but often gets misconstrued. The person eating their way to obesity will shout down their detractors with the justifying battle cry of “I love myself the way I am! Don’t judge me,” while the person who spends spends spends on hair dye, a monumental amount of piercings, funky clothing and god knows what else will also shout down their detractors with the same battle cry, yet neither of these examples are openly facing the world as themselves. That is, one is hiding behind massive amounts of food, and the other is also remaking themselves in a new form. In either case, it could be argued that neither new shape is the “real person,” ergo neither of these examples are genuinely accepting of themselves.
This is not to say that all people of a generous build are self-medicating with food. Some are merely endomorphs no matter what. Nor are all people who coat themselves with dye and lacquer attempting to chisel a new persona out of an original that they are unhappy with.

Another side of the “remake yourself in this ideal” is the pro-ana and pro-mia subcultures, composed of young women (and an increasing number of young men) who have forums, LJ communities, etc, to network and enable each other. They also use the “Don’t judge me” battle cry, though in this case it might be the wail of the suicidal. The lure of proclaiming that one loves themselves “just the way they are” runs contrary to nearly everything that’s trendy in Generation Y. Why? Because it’s fashionable.

Eating disorders are by no means new, but they’ve skyrocketed in this generation. Appearance is considered important to the point of obsession. More important is the pursuit of “perfection.” And what is perfection? Why, whatever they tell us it is.

In the fashion world of Generation Y, the follower instinct is strongly at work. Fashion has ingrained itself into what I can only describe as a philosophy, stressing the importance of looking sleek and perfect at all times (according to the approved trends, of course). Essentially, Generation Y places more weight on packaging than content.

• Music

In the 80s, hair bands ruled almost all that was before them--and quite frankly, I worship at that altar. And yeah, Luke Goss drummed in a band with his brother, apparently hell-bent on setting a new standard for being part of the movement of MJ-style pop bands with singers that sound eerily like women. Fortunately, Goss has mostly seen the error of his ways and proceeded to give us a rather sexy Frankenstein Monster.

In the 90s, straight up dark rock held their own in the scene, with renowned and still-revered bands like moody, soul-baringly poignant, witty and highly-skilled Type O Negative, love-them-or-hate-them Nirvana, and grunge-soaked Soundgarden delivering a pure and glorious antidote to the sugary-sweet pop of both the current decade and the too-cute-for-words pop of the 80s. These groups, especially the first two, had an impressively large impact and occasionally overlooked influence in the music scene and pop culture from the very day they came to light.

Today, however...we have Lady Gaga, Justin Beiber, and a plethora of rap musicians who are mostly notable for their ability to sound like each other. And the key word in most of their music is not talent, but auto-tuning.
Enjoy Your Style.com notes:

Jihan Forbes, a contributor at Starpulse.com, stated that "Lady Gaga is in some ways a reincarnation of Elvis Presley: She takes cues from other truly forward-thinking and innovative artists of color, and repackages it so that white America can comfortably digest it." At Racialicious, a website on "the intersection of race and pop culture," one reader commented:

“To combat the lack of message in her music is really Gaga’s ultimate weapon: the way she panders to her fans, her “little monsters”. She includes them in on [sic] her charade in a way that no one does, overly praising them on Twitter while penning vague platitudes about living life to the fullest and never giving up. However strong and subversive she may appear in public, she plays coy and victimized to her fans who then feel it is their duty to love and defend her. It’s basic and people fall for it like hotcakes.” [source]

Lady Gaga beautifully exemplifies the Generation Y attitude in music: nothing new, nothing original, but extremely faddish. Essentially, it’s a stylized caricature of itself, a sort of black hole that compels the viewer with a strange fascination with how unbelievably dull and self-destructive it is. Why is this kind of music popular? It features synthesizer hooks and dull, throbbing beats that stick in the mind. The lyrics are pretty much empty shlock, with almost nothing penned to mean something personal. Britney Spears asks in her trademark little-girl nasal purr “If I said I want your body now, Would you hold it against me,” essentially taking a ridiculous pickup line that was sad and tired at first use and making it worse by putting it to music. Rihanna’s “S&M” fares no better, repeating what has been plastered on messenger icons and forum signatures for years: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, But chains and whips excite me.”

These are examples of songs and artists that are given radio play almost to the point of inducing madness, overlooking more talented artists that produce better quality songs. But the talented artists are often much less popular. Lady Gaga is showy and a palatable amount of outrageous; Sinead O’Connor lacks the willingness to make a (large) spectacle of herself and rarely flaunts her sexuality to market her music. Again, Generation Y is far more eager to plunk down cash on packaging than content.

• Ideology

Whether it’s protesting fur with the calculatedly hip PETA2 crowd, jeering conservatives based on (badly or un-researched) rumors, or trying to save the polar bears with the global warming groups, Generation Y launches itself at the always-on-sale self-righteousness inherent in all the rabid, frenzied buzzwords of the day that give the consumer a feeling of really knowing what’s going on in the world. The Generation Y’er who finds themselves sucked into yet another black hole of devout faith in pretty much anything, often blindly following their chosen leaders with the kind of devotion approaching or straight up fanatical. I would include links for this section, but it’s so damned depressing. Do your own googling.
Point is, Generation Y cares more for buzzwords and the sense that they’re “really doing something” than actually doing something. It’s easier to rant and rave about whomever the leaders have chosen as the enemy of the day than to do one’s own research. It’s easier to rant about the evils of capitalism while wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt that cost you $10 to $20. Again, packaging is preferred over content. Generation Y cares more about the appearance than anything else.

In short, you can tell a lot about any given group of people by what they produce. And the main thing my generation has produced is what looks like a compelling argument in favor of eugenics.