How to be a Husband (13 page)

With no seeming knack for child care, I begin to take pride in the sheer stamina required to do it badly. I revel in the stoic, manly patience required to feed a mouth that is dodging the spoon for sport, or to secure a nappy round flailing legs. One day, I think, you'll be all grown up and changing my nappy. And oh, how I will kick. During the difficult times I picture myself as a tough but avuncular drill sergeant, the sort who leans close to your ear and says, “I'm not here to be liked, son.”

But I
am
here to be liked. My life's mission is to trick people into liking me. If I can't make my own baby like me, what's the point?

His first word is “daddy,” by which he means “mummy.” His first complete sentence, coined for my benefit, is “Go away.”

We rub along better when we're outside together, where preferring his mother is not an immediate option. I enjoy driving around with him strapped in behind me. Here he serves a valuable purpose: if he's in the car, then technically I'm not talking to myself.

By the end of the first year, I've learned a lot. I've learned how to prepare four bottles of formula in assembly-line fashion. I've learned to change a nappy in under a minute. I've learned to make a one-year-old laugh by pretending to cause myself harm. I've learned that in the event of a supermarket meltdown, the last thing you want to do is remove a wailing child from the trolley seat. You'll never get him back in.

Somewhere toward the end of this period I quit my day job.
I figure now is the perfect moment to become a full-time freelance writer, as oxymoronic as that job title turns out to be. It also means I can be around to wage my campaign to trick a baby into liking me. What I do not provide in money, I will make up for in sheer, unadulterated presence.

In the most technical sense, I become a stay-at-home dad, although I think of myself more as a layabout-with-child. I'm not sure people even spoke of stay-at-home dads back then—“househusband” was the more common term for the less common thing.

By quitting my day job I come to fulfill the letter, if not the spirit, of the distinction. My wife is not ashamed of my new at-home status, although she is at pains to point out to people that there's a big difference between a househusband and a shut-in. During business hours I'm more like a helpful upstairs neighbor whose job happens to be staring out the window all day.

I look like a stay-at-home dad, though, especially if you see me at the zoo with two toddlers at three p.m. on a Wednesday, when it happens that I have nothing better to do. If it's a Saturday, I look like a divorced dad. If it's the supermarket and it's Saturday, I just look incompetent.

The vast of bulk of my parenting is done as half of a tag team—lurching from crisis to crisis, making up policy on the fly, and presenting a united front despite marked differences in approach. My wife and I share the more tedious aspects of infant-rearing equally, at least in the sense that neither of us ever does anything without having a crack at getting the other to do it first.

“He's crying again,” says my wife, gently punching me awake.

“Oh God—why are my eyes so dry? I must have been sleeping with them open.”

“Deal with him,” says my wife.

“But I went half an hour ago,” I say.

“He's your child, and he's crying,” she says. “It's not about whose turn it is.”

“You're saying that,” I say, “because it's your turn.”

“Go.”

“I think he's stopped now,” I say.

“He hasn't.”

“So what, shall I bring him back here for you?”

“No.”

It's not ideal, but it's the system. Coparenting, I think they call it.

Alpha Male, Omega Man

A
few years ago I wrote a novel. For our purposes there are only four things you need to know about this book:

1. It failed to set the world alight, and then, eight months later, it failed to set the world alight again, in paperback.

2. Despite this double failure, it's actually not bad at all.

3. It is now available on Kindle.

4. It contains a brief scene in which the main character, a freelance journalist, is rung up by a newspaper commissioning editor, and asked the following question:

“Would you describe yourself as an alpha male?”

Not understanding the purpose of the question, the writer refuses to give a straight answer. The commissioning editor goes on to say that a recent study has suggested that alpha males are evolutionarily unsuited to our modern, feminized society, that the aggression and dominant posturing that once gave
them an advantage is now counterproductive. He wishes to commission fifteen hundred words about the lesser male types—the beta males, the gammas, the deltas—in a particularly base form of journalism known as an alphabet piece.

“So what we want from you,” he says, “is the whole Greek alphabet, all the males from alpha to omega, but funny.”

I made up this little scene, fiction-style, not to illustrate some point about the quiet rise—or not—of nonalpha men, but simply to furnish my main character with the worst journalistic assignment imaginable. An alphabet piece is a horrible prospect on its own—it's a hackneyed, spent format, with the intolerable burden of having to come up with twenty-six separate gags, and the inevitable need to fudge the entries for
Q
and
X
. For all the work required, they're never as funny as they should be. I ought to know—I've written a fair few in my time. What, I thought, could possibly inspire more dread in a weary freelance hack than another pointless alphabet piece? Then I thought: What if you had to use Greek letters instead?

In the novel the main character tries, and fails, to turn the assignment down. He displays a marked lack of enthusiasm for the idea, and insists its successful execution lies beyond his limited capabilities. He demurs from several angles, to no avail.

“You're definitely not an alpha male, by the way,” says the editor. “I'd put you somewhere around tau.”

“I don't even know where that comes,” says the writer.

Writing this scene was, as I recall, a pleasantly cruel morning's work. In the end, however, the joke was on me: a few days later I realized the narrative would be best served by reproducing
the fictional article in full, so I had to sit down and write the whole fucking thing myself. It took me a week and a half, and I only managed twelve hundred words. I was as glad to have it behind me as any assignment I have ever accepted.

Six years later I am sitting in my office minding my own business when my phone rings. The person on the other end is a researcher from the radio program
Woman's Hour.
She says she wants to speak to me about alpha males.

Alpha males are on the wane, she tells me. A recent magazine article has claimed that their hypercompetitive, domineering personalities put them at a distinct disadvantage in our modern, feminized society. According to somebody somewhere, beta males are taking over the world. A sense of déjà vu begins to steal over me as she speaks.

“So,” she says finally. “Would you describe yourself as an alpha male or a beta male?”

“I think I come somewhere around tau,” I say. There is a pause.

“I don't know the Greek alphabet that well,” she says.

There follows a brief discussion in which I characterize myself as a meek and inconsequential man. It is a sort of pre-interview, at the end of which I am invited to appear on
Woman's Hour.
I display a calculated lack of enthusiasm for the idea and suggest that it may lie beyond my limited broadcast capabilities. There is something about my low self-esteem that delights her.

That was the first time I ever felt the need to sit down and consider the whole concept of the alpha male in human society, and my first thought was: It's basically bollocks, isn't it? An
alpha male is something you find in charge of a wolf pack. As a sociological term it doesn't mean much when applied to a species that shops at Uniqlo.

It turns out I was wrong: the term doesn't apply to wolves either. In the wild a typical wolf pack is dominated by what used to be known an alpha male and an alpha female—an alpha couple—but biologists don't call them that anymore, because their elevated status within the pack is not due to size, aggression, or a keen sense of competition. It's because all the other wolves in the pack are their pups. A wolf pack is a family, and the alpha male is the daddy.

Chimps also produce alpha males, as do many primate groupings. But then bonobos, from the same genus as chimps, live in a society where females are dominant. In any case, the alpha male isn't a type—it's an office, and in a strictly linear dominance hierarchy, there's just one. Whether an alpha male's status is by dint of size, strength, age, aggression, or the assiduous grooming of others (much of the work of being an alpha chimp is tiresomely political), it's not really analogous to anything in human society. If chimps could get ahead by lying on their CVs, they would probably do it our way.

When we speak, perennially, of alphas males feeling out of place in a feminized society, what we're really talking about is the failure of men generally to adapt to a job market that increasingly prizes so-called soft skills—teamwork, dealing with the public, processing feedback—as well as women have. And it's arguably the stereotypical beta male—a salaried worker who's guaranteed a job as long as he does as what's expected of him—who is really losing out. But the old corporate structures
were never an unconscious replication of natural dominance hierarchies; we just made them up, and now they're being supplanted by something else.

Most of us know it's nonsense to divide the human male population into alphas and betas, but the concept is strangely embedded in popular culture. As society adjusts its priorities over time, our idea of what constitutes an alpha male has to be tweaked, lest the term become a mere synonym for “arsehole.” A trawl through men's magazines and the sort of websites that feature pop-up ads for muscle supplements will turn up such revisionist alpha-male traits as “the ability to laugh at himself,” “being a good listener,” “apologizing for being wrong,” “developing new skills,” and “helping others.” None of these would put you in mind of an alpha male like, say, Pol Pot, but so persistent is the notion of a top dog that we'd rather shoehorn some belated sensitivity into the definition than give up on it.

Perhaps our misplaced fondness for this construct is harmless, or no worse than attributing certain quirks of personality to a specific star sign. To bundle up a few traits—“competitive and loud,” or “tall and promiscuous”—and give them a label may be nothing more than a convenient conversational shorthand. But the division of the male population into alphas and betas is part of the whole idea of masculinity as a zero-sum game, a competition where nice guys finish last. It reinforces a belief in a preordained system that allows your male boss to run a department and be a terrible cock at the same time. He's an alpha male. That's just the way the world works.

Above all this system comes packaged with an evolutionary imperative: women prefer alpha males, so either be one, or learn
to fake it. This is the mantra of an unattractive subset of masculinity known as pickup artists (PUAs), who are always on the lookout for a pseudoscientific justification for a system they think gives them an advantage in “reproductive success,” i.e., helps them have sex with damaged people they meet in bars. It's worth pointing out that genuine reproductive success—the creation of healthy progeny with three good A-levels—tends to occur only after you've stopped trying to pick up damaged people in bars.

Still, if women prefer alpha males, you as a man should definitely avoid giving out signals that you are anything else. Even at my age, I still feel a pang of shameful unmanliness whenever I am obliged to use one of those fake pound coins to liberate a shopping trolley from the stack. Our whole warped idea about what masculinity comprises hangs on such stupidities. Not all that long ago David Cameron accused Ed Miliband of being insufficiently “assertive and butch” because he occasionally got Ed Balls a coffee. Over the years innumerable other traits have been cited, seriously or jovially, as evidence of nonalpha status. They include:

being a vegetarian

not being able to drive

eating quiche

wearing glasses

displaying a chronic reluctance to commit assault

allowing a woman to buy you dinner

taking the bus

sitting down to pee

knowing the names of flowers

owning an apron

working in the public sector

As a relaxed, confident, twenty-first-century male, you would probably allow yourself a few nonalpha behaviors without worry; personally, I would happily cop to five of the above. But I probably wouldn't dare to indulge all of them. To the extent that we are driven by the need to get and keep female companionship, we are risk averse, and the alpha-male myth still holds sway.

Of course, the world doesn't really work this way at all, as is reinforced every time I discover—to my unending surprise—that a man who sports an elaborately waxed mustache also has a girlfriend. As silly as the concept of the human alpha male is, it exerts a certain tyranny over our thinking. We need to free ourselves from its shackles.

The alpha-male myth is a by-product of evolutionary psychology—the theory that holds that while natural selection has shaped our thinking and behavior over millennia, our brains haven't evolved significantly since the Stone Age. We are effectively still cavemen, unsuited to the demands of modern society, slaves to our biology.

This premise, while not entirely suspect, is often questioned by evolutionary biologists. It may be plausible to suggest our brains haven't changed that much, but we have very little evidence to show how our ancestors of ten thousand years ago thought or behaved, and none to support the belief that humans ever lived in groups with the sort of hierarchical dominance one sees in modern chimpanzees. Our closest common ancestor lived six million years ago; we've both evolved a lot since then, in decidedly different directions.

Such evidence as we have seems to suggest that early humans banded together in egalitarian groups where efforts to dominate were punished. The idea that our human brains are an inheritance from forebears who lived in tribes with an alpha male at the top of the pecking order is pretty well fraudulent. Stop worrying about whether or not you're an alpha male. There is no such thing.

The morning after the phone conversation with the researcher I find myself in the
Woman's Hour
green room, drinking coffee, perspiring heavily and chatting to a man from Royal Mail who is publicizing a new commemorative stamp featuring Quaker campaigner Joan Mary Fry.

“So,” he says, “what are you here to talk about?”

“Not being an alpha male,” I say.

“Oh,” he says. “I guess I'm not an alpha male either.” I shrug. It seems unlikely, I think, with your diffident manner and your framed stamps. I have to remind myself that I've already decided there's no such thing as an alpha male.

When my time arrives I am conducted into the softly lit confines of the studio and seated behind a microphone, next to
another male journalist, whom I imagine is there to offer an opinion that runs counter to mine. I try to remember what my opinion is. The presenter, Jenni Murray, addresses him first. As he speaks I desperately attempt to organize my revised thinking on the alpha-male myth and the need to resist its simplistic tyranny into a coherent philosophy, one that begins with a sentence that I can say right now. Finally Jenni Murray turns to me and asks where I would rank myself on the alpha/beta-male spectrum.

“Somewhere around lambda,” I
say.