So, I've been thinking about this Alpha Male thing. I'm a die hard fan of the "Sopranos." I'm prime demographic for this stuff. I blame my taste for brooding, dark men on the '80s film industry and SE Hinton novels. It's not my fault! I mean, seriously, I had no chance to have a thing for well-adjusted men between Judd Nelson as the Stoner in "Breakfast Club" and Matt Dillon in, well, anything, but especially "The Outsiders." The first biography I ever read was "No One Here Gets Out Alive." It was after that when I began listening to The Doors. I was a goner.
So what makes an alpha male an alpha male? First and foremost, there is no alpha male unless there's a pack for him to alpha over. Alpha males and Lone-Wolf types should not be confused. An alpha male isn't a bully. The point of an alpha male is to be a leader, but a leader that makes wise and smart decisions for the survival of the pack, not just himself.
So how does this translate into humans? I'm not sure, exactly. Life by example -- so, back to where I started this commentary, to "The Sopranos." There's no doubt that Anthony Soprano is an alpha-male. Captain of his crew, next in line to be the Boss. This becomes most apparent to me after watching last week's (8/4/99) episode when Tony finds out the coach of his daughter's soccer team is guilty of repeated statutory rape of one of the team members who has tried to committ suidice because the coach won't leave his wife. Tony, along with several other of the connected fathers, become enraged and plot to kill the coach. Personally, I have no problem with this. I'm tired of women having to take a stand for what is, essentially, a male problem: men not knowing when to keep their penis in check. This is a simple lesson that should be taught to little boys, but is more often than not forgotten. When communities were small and everyone knew everyone else, if a man pulled something like this, he found himself alone in some back-forty somewhere or out-of-the-way highway with crap beat out of him, and it sure as hell wasn't the mother of the girl. It was a girl's brother, father, uncle, cousin. It was men standing up and saying, "What you've done is wrong and now you're going to remember not to ever do it again."
Some may argue that it's a women-as-property issue, that men got upset when one of their women was "ruined" and made the offending man pay for his actions. The way I see it, is the men are just teaching the offending man the lesson he didn't learn earlier.
Can you imagine if all men did this? Can you imagine that the next time your local news warns you about a rapist in your neighborhood, you saw a bunch of neighborhood men standing watch on the street corners 24/7 until he was found or it seemed he went some where else. A male sexual predator should be a man's problem, not a woman's. In the community of men, somewhere along the line this guy didn't learn how he was supposed to behave and some other man needs to set him straight.
But an alpha male is more than a man who is willing to beat up sexual predators in their neighborhood.