NOT ONE WORD about religion???!!! OK. I get it. Religion is a third rail, especially for an academic. But honestly, garbage in, garbage out. One cannot write about toxic masculinity, machismo and abusive patriarchy without admitting the most of this BS came from Western religion.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam all preach utterly depraved notions of sexuality, repression and pathological aggression. AND, they plainly platform the most destructive messages to women as well. Both sexes lap it up to their detriment, and we see the results; we have a society and culture of pervasive sexism, cruelty and sociopathy.

The only new issue here is how the religionists misused the findings of science the same way that Christians adopted eugenics, scientific creationism, etc. for their own perverse purposes.

"If you have ask you can't afford it" if you have to constantly remind people you're alpha you shouldn't bother.

Disappointingly the article hinted at the alpha male mythology but didn’t go far enough in exploding it with : “I read an article recently that said that there’s no real concept of an alpha wolf in the wild, but it exists in captivity. What does it mean that men have totally taken on this identity, as being the ‘alpha’ or the ‘alpha wolf’ or ‘alpha male’ when it doesn’t even really exist in nature? That that’s the gold standard of being a human man — being an ‘alpha’?” They even attribute it instead to females or extol the virtues of being so-called “beta”. Pop ethology gone wild.

The alpha terminology has largely fallen out of favor. The person who coined it in the first place has regretted it:

“Mech, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms such as alpha and beta to describe the pecking order in wolf packs. But now they are decades out of date, he says. This terminology arose from research done on captive wolf packs in the mid-20th century—but captive packs are nothing like wild ones, Mech says. When keeping wolves in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals with no shared kinship. In these cases, a dominance hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but it’s the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison, not the way wolves behave when they are left to their own devices.”

[scientificamerican.com]

And see also: [businessinsider.com]

Humans are using an obsolete concept and projecting it as a social construct to not only explain, but condone such things as natural hence good. This is wrong on so many levels, not just factual, but employs the “appeal to nature” fallacy.