What Do Romance Readers and Pick-Up Artists Both Obsess About? Alphas.

NVC: I think alpha men exist, as in they are natural leaders of men and often charismatic to both sexes, but typically the reason they are that way and what makes them compelling is that they are unstudied. It’s a natural occurrence, like humor. The great irony about PUAs is the notion that more time they study the characteristics of an alpha, the more they will be able to mimic them deftly enough to entice a woman. But it’s the very studying that it makes it impossible for them. Here’s a fact: forced and affected confidence is the leading cause of vaginal dryness.

KF: That idea of the appeal of unstudied confidence makes a great deal of sense, now that I think about it, because that easy assuredness is part of the foundation of an alpha character. Heterosexual women spend so much time acting as the keeper of men’s feelings. There’s this entire category of emotional labor around their insecurities. Maybe part of the appeal of alphas in romance specifically is that those plots replace those day-to-day duties with some grand, high-stakes conflict that’s resolved over the course of the novel.

But, also important: Often an alpha character is paired with a female character who is, in her own way, very strong. The idea is not that he comes in and handles the little woman’s life. It’s that she’s tough and she needs and in fact deserves someone who can be an equal partner.

NVC: See this is the element that I like in romance and in !! SHAKESPEARE!! (Kate and Pertrucio, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, Cleopatra and Mark Antony, Gertrude and Hamlet if you’re into ‘cest play): that men and women engage in kind of sexual gladiator play, whipping and goading each other (figuratively, literally). And when you watch equally-matched opponents jockey for an advantage, it’s hot!!

KF: Totally! I think that’s the bedrock of the modern paranormal sub-genre in particular.

NVC: Interesting, because I always associate paranormal with innocent victim and shape shift SWAT team Werebear.

KF: Oh no, so many girls with KNIVES. Though of course the innocent-sweet-virgin-leering-aristocratic-vampire DNA is still floating around.

I think that in some ways, “alpha” characters are an attempt to reckon with the fact that society bestows all this power and all these privileges on men. It’s grappling with that. And it values men who live up to their privileges, rather than turning gender relations into some big horrible game where men are constantly trying to sneak past the goalkeeper (your emotions) to score (your vagina).

NVC: And alpha characters are also a way for women to (literally, spiritually, sexually) grapple with the P-word. P A T R I A R C H Y?

KF: Yeah, rather than saying, “Imagine a world where we’ve hit the restart button,” it’s saying, “Well, here we are; the fuck are we gonna do now?” Although, again, I think that it’s important to note that it’s a fantasy, and readers aren’t necessarily seeking out guys like this in their real personal lives. It’s a mental exercise. And sometimes of course you’re imagining a world where we have hit the reset button and sufficiently rearranged gender relations that you can be attracted to beefy bossy dudes without buying the extra societal baggage. (This is the fun of apocalyptic romance, in part.)

NVC: I feel like the alpha character is an unvarnished, unfussy way to say “there are some sexy and appealing things about patriarchy.” There are elements of patriarchy that inspire deep ambivalence. Say, like, a man’s power, which leads to his arrogance, but a powerful man is also seeeexxxxxy. So alphas hold a a lot of the frustrating and titillating contradictions that come with patriarchy and sex roles.

KF: Well, the other thing that’s important to note is that a lot of times over the course of the story, the alpha-ness/assholeness is subverted in some way. This is a common argument on behalf of old-school romance in particular, which is that you start out with heroes very locked in their “male” worlds and behaviors and over the course of the novel, and then the heroine brings them around to seeing the importance of “feminine” feelings and values.

In modern romances, alpha characters often have some deep-seated dramatic emotional shit they need to work through, and the heroine helps. Oftentimes he’s brought low somehow. Sometimes there’s groveling involved. In the panel the moderator provided as her example of an “alpha hole” Sebastian from Lord of Scoundrels, and I do agree with that characterization. But here’s the thing—at one point, the heroine turns to him and basically says, “It’s okay, my darling, you’re just very high-strung.”

NVC: “YOU’RE BEING HYSTERICAL.”

KF: Like in Lord of Scoundrels, the heroine says to the alpha-hole:

“You’re overwrought,” she said. “I should have realized. We’ve both been under a strain. And it’s harder on you because you are so sensitive and emotional.”

And it’s so funny because it takes all his big tough arrogant guy bullshit and turns it into an emotional issue of the sort that’s generally associated with women. So you get the hotness of the big swaggering alpha—the proverbial big swinging dick—but that dick ain’t going anywhere other than the heroine’s bed.

NVC Why do think the concept of an alpha is so tantalizing to romance readers AND pick up artists?

KF: Well I think it’s this powerful archetype. It’s just that nobody can agree on what it means or what it should mean. It’s a trope that allows us to have conversations about power and sex roles and that’s why it’s so perennially popular in romance.

NVC: EVERYBODY WANTS A DADDY.

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