Ask a girl anything

[Trippin]

So, there is this guy Balton... He iz SOOO great looking. DId you see his pictures???

I think that you are mistaken. He is merely taking a picture in good lighting and in a good angle in order to look good for his only friends in which reside on the internet. In real life, he probably looks a lot like yourself; acne ridden, ~250lbs, extremely ugly. You get the picture. Attention whores these days, so silly broski.

[Quirian]

This!

visitors can't see pics , please register or login

I think that you are mistaken. He is merely taking a picture in good lighting and in a good angle in order to look good for his only friends in which reside on the internet. In real life, he probably looks a lot like yourself; acne ridden, ~250lbs, extremely ugly. You get the picture. Attention whores these days, so silly broski.

[Trippin]

this thread fails so hard.

We have a dude asking a bunch of other dudes to ask him questions as if he is a girl.

http://www.tineye.com/search/8b3623389c3470cbc5147060d1e4fe37c74ec812/

Wow, I had no idea that I was so famous.

[Balton]

I think that you are mistaken. He is merely taking a picture in good lighting and in a good angle in order to look good for his only friends in which reside on the internet. In real life, he probably looks a lot like yourself; acne ridden, ~250lbs, extremely ugly. You get the picture. Attention whores these days, so silly broski.

250lbs with abs, I'll take that.

[Xant]

snip

I've got other stuff to do, so not gonna answer to all the points now.

On climbing: That is true, bears and big cats are better climbers. But they're also very suspect to being poked in the eyes by sharp sticks while doing so. Being in a tree gives the humans a huge defensive advantage and even a single human could very successfully defend there if they had a sharp enough stick and enough will to survive.

What humans did or didn't do is very controversial and every now and then a "scientific study" pops out and says what we previously know is wrong. In "" because most scientific studies are nowhere near as reliable as people think, and just because there's science in there it doesn't mean the researches were intelligent or made the right conclusions.

So: I'm mostly basing this on my own reasoning and only drawing from certain theories/studies occasionally (evolution theory etc.)

There wasn't an alpha male in human tribes? Really? I'm genuinely interested, what's your source? That seems highly unlikely to me, and I find it extremely probable that if we (the modern humans) got thrown into a prehistoric setting now, the tribes would have an alpha male. It only makes sense - and why would the best fighter NOT assume control?

Since humans are relatively puny creatures compared to other things of our size, as you said, the alpha probably wasn't solely in charge of defending the tribe. As to infighting: you make it sound like the alpha position would be contested on a daily basis, many times. Not how it works and after the position is established, it would remain stable for a long time or unless some new adult male joins the tribe (and then it would more likely be something resembling a wrestling match until domination is gained and shown... so nothing lethal, (we've built in stuff to make it harder to kill humans as well) and nothing harming the tribe.)

In a hunter-gatherer society everyone had a role, yep. But losing a member also means there is one less mouth to feed and provide for, it's not such a huge loss. Depends on the original size of the tribe of course, though...

Also, I don't see how that assumes only one male in a group - it only assumes that the group has a dominant male.

About intelligence: yes and no, but both this subject (intelligence) and the one we're currently discussing are very, very wide and also related to eachother - to cover everything you'd have to write a few books.

I disagree with the latter points about alpha males and it being impossible - can you provide any sources/extra backing for that theory? Because otherwise it's just "no, ur rong" and "am not!"

After weapons such as crude spears were developed, humans became very competitive with other species, physically (kind of... the spear is a result of their intelligence).

But let's assume 50-50 ratio without an alpha male for a moment. That'd still support women sticking to as few partners as possible and men impregnating as many women as possible..

Also, this is longer than I intended it to be already.

[EponiCo]

There wasn't an alpha male in human tribes? Really? I'm genuinely interested, what's your source? That seems highly unlikely to me, and I find it extremely probable that if we (the modern humans) got thrown into a prehistoric setting now, the tribes would have an alpha male. It only makes sense - and why would the best fighter NOT assume control?

Because the best fighter might not be the smartest (they probably used wisest, though)?
Also ...

Sure, you can go around sleeping with betas and whoever you can find, but that's very unwise and you'll get left alone to die very, very fast. It just makes sense for survival to stick with one alpha male and his pack.

... it might be kind of better to have a "beta" who only has to feed you, than an "alpha" who has to feed 9 others. Kind of like it is today. Going back to Gorath, a woman becoming the third wife of a 10000$ earner will have less posh dinners than the sole wife of a 5000$ earner. Actually, this seems to be another aspect that hasn't been covered - is a girl that sleeps with many guys (for free, even worse) not unlike a foreigner who comes here to take our jobs?

[Quirian]

When I read this thread I get horny 

[Toffi]

cool discussion I started on page 2:D

[BD_Guard_Bane]

(click to show/hide)

I've got other stuff to do, so not gonna answer to all the points now.

On climbing: That is true, bears and big cats are better climbers. But they're also very suspect to being poked in the eyes by sharp sticks while doing so. Being in a tree gives the humans a huge defensive advantage and even a single human could very successfully defend there if they had a sharp enough stick and enough will to survive.

What humans did or didn't do is very controversial and every now and then a "scientific study" pops out and says what we previously know is wrong. In "" because most scientific studies are nowhere near as reliable as people think, and just because there's science in there it doesn't mean the researches were intelligent or made the right conclusions.

So: I'm mostly basing this on my own reasoning and only drawing from certain theories/studies occasionally (evolution theory etc.)

There wasn't an alpha male in human tribes? Really? I'm genuinely interested, what's your source? That seems highly unlikely to me, and I find it extremely probable that if we (the modern humans) got thrown into a prehistoric setting now, the tribes would have an alpha male. It only makes sense - and why would the best fighter NOT assume control?

Since humans are relatively puny creatures compared to other things of our size, as you said, the alpha probably wasn't solely in charge of defending the tribe. As to infighting: you make it sound like the alpha position would be contested on a daily basis, many times. Not how it works and after the position is established, it would remain stable for a long time or unless some new adult male joins the tribe (and then it would more likely be something resembling a wrestling match until domination is gained and shown... so nothing lethal, (we've built in stuff to make it harder to kill humans as well) and nothing harming the tribe.)

In a hunter-gatherer society everyone had a role, yep. But losing a member also means there is one less mouth to feed and provide for, it's not such a huge loss. Depends on the original size of the tribe of course, though...

Also, I don't see how that assumes only one male in a group - it only assumes that the group has a dominant male.

About intelligence: yes and no, but both this subject (intelligence) and the one we're currently discussing are very, very wide and also related to eachother - to cover everything you'd have to write a few books.

I disagree with the latter points about alpha males and it being impossible - can you provide any sources/extra backing for that theory? Because otherwise it's just "no, ur rong" and "am not!"

After weapons such as crude spears were developed, humans became very competitive with other species, physically (kind of... the spear is a result of their intelligence).

But let's assume 50-50 ratio without an alpha male for a moment. That'd still support women sticking to as few partners as possible and men impregnating as many women as possible..

Also, this is longer than I intended it to be already.

Well, again, interesting points. Again, a very very long post. I put it in spoilers for less wall of text effect -  for those deeply bored by it, its the spam section, so tough shit.

Just as a brief history of the idea we're discussing:

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The idea:
1) It is in a male's best interests to sleep with lots of females because doing so increases the chance of his offspring surviving
2) It is in a woman's best interests to carefully choose a mate, and invest the survival of their children in that one male
3) In human societies this is expressed in the existence of an 'alpha male' who sleeps with lots of women. All the women attempt to (and want to) sleep with the alpha male, because he has the best genetics.
4) Our arguments for and against this claim have so far mostly been supported by examples from the animal kingdom (other mammals, specifically).

This idea is one of many formulated in the late nineteenth century and early 20th (and reproduced and re-worded many times since, most notably in the 60s to support a paper that tried to argue that rape shouldn't be seen as morally wrong and that it was part of some kind of 'natural human instinct' and social mechanism, and therefore should be socially accepted). I'm not comparing your ideas to that by the way.

The ideas come from an interpretation of evolutionary theory (Darwinist), specifically from the idea of natural selection, or what is misnamed survival of the fittest, together with observation (this was the time of exploration and interest in the animal kingdom, the studies began in the 16th century by people like Hobbes were being fully explored by the intellectuals of Imperial era Europe due to greater access to the world's flora and fauna and better scientific equipment) of the animal kingdom.

The activities of animals (and its important to note that only certain animals were used in this way - either large, dangerous predators such as lions, particularly those that lived in a pack society, or animals that closely resembled us such as chimpanzees or other apes and monkeys) were observed, and then those activities and behaviours were applied to human society.

Its also important to note that this was a time of backlash against the rationalism of the 1600s and 1700s, as well as a time where Darwin had seemed to show that animals and plants weren't so very different from us, and a time when the idea of divine mandate (that we were set above the animal kingdom, in this context) was being challenged.
Also, we had the ideas of people like Freud and Marx lending weight to very deterministic, mechanical and monist perceptions about the way humans work (for example Freud's introduction of the concept of the subconscious, and Marx's idea that the economic caused the social).

This environment led to the progression of ideas that can loosely be called Social Darwinism. They can be described as generally supporting a view that humans are determined by their environments, and that the best genes are passed down to their children through 'survival of the fittest'. Essentially that there is some mechanism (social, biological, environmental) whereby the best genes are passed down.

One of the ideas that was put forward as one of these mechanisms was the idea of the alpha male (and the associated ideas that go along with it) . It was transposed directly from observations of the animal kingdom, onto humans.
It has since been used in a variety of ways - sometimes as a support for other theories of social evolution, sometimes to justify horrific practices (slavery and rape, racism and sexism, homophobia, among other things), and most commonly (and strangely) it has been used in business and sport (they are seen as competitive, high pressure environments, and of course mainly male dominated, and so sportsmen and businessmen like to compare themselves to some sort of primal, animalistic nature).

Anyway, I have two major problems, firstly that the transposition from the animal kingdom to humans doesn't make any sense, and secondly that the theory's internal logic doesn't stand up.
(I have a third problem with it too, but that is an issue with the suppositions of determinism, monism, and mechanism behind the idea, and it'd take too long to go into - its a different argument).

First, the animal kingdom (where this idea was taken from):

(click to show/hide)

If we look at animals where an alpha male exists, and a social structure includes an alpha male, we can see that they are radically different to human societies:
1) Lions. In a pride of lions, there is one alpha male. Any other males are too young to mate, or too weak to fend for themselves or challenge the alpha, and they don't try to. Once a male lion reaches an age where it can mate, it either leaves or is driven out of the pride by the alpha male. It then spends some time alone, and later tries to find a pride to take over (after challenging and removing the alpha male of that pride). The alpha male breeds with whichever females are in season. The females either agree to this, sometimes one won't, and sometimes the male is driven out if the females decide he isn't good enough.
2) Wolves. There is an alpha male, and an alpha female. In this case, there are other male wolves in the pack, but they aren't allowed to breed. Nor are the other females. The alpha male and female breed, usually no other wolf does. When the female is pregnant she leaves and gives birth, then rejoins the pack. (there is some debate as to whether wolves actually have an alpha male who maintains by fighting, but instead a breeder wolf who breeds with the alpha female most often)
3) Elephants. Very similar to lions, the bull elephants are driven out by the dominant female once old enough to mate, and then spend their lives as lonely nomads, returning to mate and then leaving again. The herd has one dominant (old and big) female, and children are raised by the group.
4) Gorillas. In this case, females and males usually leave the group when old enough to mate. Females find another group (the female adults in one group tend to be unrelated), and if they become pregnant, stick with the group. Males often return to their 'family group' and act as subordinate, or 'beta' males, sometimes inheriting control of the group.

5) Humans. For this to be applied to humans, firstly there would have to be no instances where it wasn't the case (we can say there is an alpha male in gorilla communities because there always is). However, historically and now we can find examples of matriarchies or gender equal societies (including modern day tribal societies).
Conversely there are no examples, historical or modern, of a human society where one male has exclusive breeding rights with the females of the group.
Also, humans do not select based on strength (fighting with other males). While its true that in some cases it does occur that a mate is selected for physical strength, there are many other variables that are considered in human society.
The males of human society do not leave the group and live alone, returning to mate. Instead they generally (though not always) form a partnership with one other human for a period of time, and raise their children together.
None of the aspects of behaviour or sexual behaviour which apply to an animal species with an alpha male society are true in human societies.

Of course, I am basing this on observation of the animal kingdom and humans now (though also including historical and modern day tribal societies). Which is exactly what the people who came up with the idea of the alpha male did (though with no actual observation of human societies, just animal and then assuming that humans worked the same way). So I guess the best either of us can say is that we have no idea how pre-historical humans worked, but we can say how they work now. And how they work now (and historically) is that there is no such thing as an alpha male. (Unless you can find me an example of a current day society with an alpha male set up).

Secondly, the theory of the alpha male in a human society doesn't have any internal logical sense:

(click to show/hide)

Imagine a group of humans. I think the current research suggests the optimal number for a good gene pool, survival, and enough resources (assuming contact with other tribes, even if infrequent) is around 250.

So if we imagine a group of humans of around 250 members. Maybe a third, or maybe a quarter are sexually immature, and another 1/5th are beyond reproductive age. So we'll put a guestimate of about 150 sexually functioning, adult humans (the maths probably doesn't work, I'm shit at maths).
Of those 150, half are women, half are men.

Lets assume that there is an alpha male. He has sex with all the women (75!). The other 74 men are scared of him, because he is the strongest. They are even too scared to have sex with a woman, because the alpha male will fight them and kill or hurt them. The women don't exercise any choice in the matter in this scenario. If any of them don't want to sleep with him for whatever reason, he scares them into submission as well.
When his children grow up, the males are scared into submission too. He also must either sleep with his daughters, or maybe send them off to live in another tribe?
So, you eventually have a tribe with a very small gene pool (only one male, though we can assume I guess that there is some new genetics coming in from other tribes?), one male beating 74 other men into submission, 74 males all scared of one man, 75 women all scared of one man or mad with lust for one man, total of nearly 150 people all physically intimidated by one man.

Maybe I made this a little ridiculous, but personally I can't imagine a way that this would work as a scenario. It seems entirely absurd to me. I can see how it works for other animals (males are exiled by a group of females or by the alpha male, breeding occurs in seasons not all the time, the males have physical features such as manes, tusks, silver backs etc designed for male combat competition/intimidation, etc etc), but I just can't see how it would work with a group of people.

And if we remove the idea of the alpha male, and just have the idea that its beneficial for males to sleep with as many women as possible, and beneficial for women to sleep with as few partners as possible?

We have then 75 men, all trying to sleep with as many of the 75 women as possible. 75 women are trying to sleep with one man (each, not just one man), and make him stay with her to help her raise their children.

So what would happen? Say one man visits every woman and sleeps with her (75!!! that is impressive stamina). But at the same time, the other men are doing the same (there would probably have to be a rota, and a queue). So then children are born. The men have no clue which child belongs to which father. How does he choose which ones to help raise? He has no idea if he's raising his child or someone else's. And how do the women persuade a man whom they choose as a good father to stay with them? He doesn't know if they are his kids... what does she say to him? These are definitely yours, though I did sleep with 74 other guys, I'm completely sure that they're yours, so you should help look after them?

Surely its in the women's interest (as you said) to stick with one guy? So instead of sleeping with all those 75 men, she thinks: I'll just sleep with one, and then he'll know the kids are his, and he'll help me look after them.
So the men are running around trying to sleep with all the women (according to your version of the way men behave), but the women aren't letting them (because they want one partner, not many).
Then maybe the men think: Ok, this might not be such a bad idea. I sleep with one woman, I know the kids are mine, and I don't have to worry about all the other men passing their genes on instead, I don't have to beat up every guy in the queue to make sure my genes are the ones being passed on - it's much less effort!

So what happens now? Either the men can force all the women to have sex with them, and maybe lock all the other men in a cage (raping 75 women and fighting 74 men sounds like an exhausting day), or they can adhere to the idea of sticking with one partner.

Again, maybe I've made it sound a little ridiculous, but to me that's what it is. It's absurd. It doesn't make any sense as a scenario.

What you have in reality (because the above systems are so much effort, and would cause a lot of chaos and probably exterminate your tribe), is a social sexual system where generally humans choose a partner, have children with that partner, and raise them together (usually with the help of the rest of the tribe). Obviously there are exceptions - some men want to have sex with a lot of women, some women want to have sex with a lot of men, there are people that don't fit into this system, 3-10% of the population is gay/lesbian anyway, some people don't want children, some people can't have children etc etc, but basically this is how it works because its the easiest way, expends a lot less effort, maintains group social harmony, and the man has more of a chance of ensuring the children are his.
This is why all cultures have created a network of social rituals to enforce and maintain this system (like marriage), in order to maintain social harmony and group survival.

Essentially, its the way it is now (a generally monogamous culture) because it works best, for both men and women.

Now, I don't agree with most of what I just wrote (though I don't agree with your idea either), but I think its more or less the argument that someone who supports the theory of evolution would use to argue that humans don't have an alpha male system, and can't be compared to animal societies to support a social Darwinism theory of sexual behaviour. 

As for sources, there are many. For a really good place to start (and an excellent criticism of the application of animal biology and behaviour to human societies), read the first few chapters of Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex.

 
 

[Xant]

Jesus Christ.

[Quirian]

I am serious now, stop it, this posts are too long. This is spam section, keep it short and stupid!

[Rogue_Eagle]

do they have internet in the kitchen?

[Noctivagant]

(click to show/hide)

I am a feminist

But it's ok, I wasn't insulted.

Thanks for your arguments, they were interesting. However, I do have a few things to say about them:

As women get pregnant, their ability to provide for themselves greatly decreases for 40 weeks.

Greatly is an exaggeration. While pregnant, you can do what you did before you were pregnant. There is a period of about one month or a little less where certain things become more difficult (depending on the person and the size of the baby), but the only thing likely to result in miscarriage is something that would generally be bad for you if you weren't pregnant as well (such as falling down stairs).

They also have harder time running from predators and doing other physical work.

I'm pretty certain that any animal that can hunt and eat humans can't be outrun by a human. I don't think that running is one of the strong points of human evolution - most animals that are dangerous to us can outrun us.

After that, they have a child to look after for a long, long time before the child grows enough to be self-sufficient to some extent

I thought we weren't talking about modern times? This is a modern bias imposed on our ancestors. I very much doubt that the woman alone would have to look after the child. In fact, it was far more likely that the whole tribe (including of course, but not limited to, the sexual partner) helped with raising and looking after the child.
The idea of the family unit is a very modern one, and certainly came about after the invention/development of agriculture. If you think about it, it's strange that we split up into pairs and the responsibility of looking after offspring is the couple's responsibility alone (and of course, more seen as the woman's responsibility). If we're talking species survival as a motive (wanting children to survive), the best way is for everybody to help.

Because every time women have sex, they have a good chance of getting pregnant, and because every pregnancy is a huge commitment from the woman, they'd want to find the best possible partner. I.e, one with the best genetics, one who can provide and protect for them and their child. I'm not aware of how the early Homo Sapiens/Homo Erectus reacted to the children of other males of their desired/current female partner, but some species have been known to kill all offspring that isn't theirs when they find a new female for themselves.

I completely agree that the woman would want to look for the best possible partner (if we're assuming evolutionary theory here), but isn't your argument also one that can be used for men looking for the best possible partner?
As you say the male will be providing and protecting them and their child, so wouldn't he want a partner who is 'worth' (in terms of evolutionary theory) providing for and protecting?
Why is it just women who are doing the selection? And how is what they are selecting for (someone strong, healthy, fit, smart, knowledgeable, sociable etc etc) different from what the male is selecting for? Surely they're both doing it?

While its true that in some species the male kills offspring (when he isn't sure they're his - sometimes they accidentally kill their own), for example in lions, I'm not sure that the behaviour of a pack carnivore can be applied to that of a social omnivore.

For men, sex is a matter of minutes at most. After that, they can move on; the more females they can impregnate, the better. There was no alimony back when our genetics were written. The more impregnations, the better chances for males to get offspring that pass on their genes.

This would be true if we were monkeys or apes. But we aren't. Do you really think that human social interaction (ideas about fidelity and jealousy for example) were any different back then? I imagine people have always had more or less the same social constructs, the same ideas about love etc. I think its a little simplistic to assume we had the same social sexual behaviour as apes. My point is that I don't think it's true that men could just move on - the same as now, there were probably social conventions and rules that prevented that to an extent.

Anyway, so the goal here is to pass on the genetics? Why isn't that a goal for women too? I don't understand why the male is so eager to do this, and the female isn't? Surely they both want to? In which case, the woman should sleep around as well, in order to get as many different children by different parents as possible, so that the chances of good genetics are higher?

And, don't you think that (as you stated earlier - the male is apparently providing and protecting) humans are smart enough to figure out that expending energy looking after one set of children has more gain in the end (more chance of their survival) than running around and impregnating everybody, then having to just hope that some of them survive?


There are many, many species where an alpha male has the monopoly on all the women; for the reasons mentioned before. Competition is bad news for everyone. The alpha, statistically, is the strongest and finest specimen around. When a stronger one appears, they become the alpha and voilá, the circle begins anew.

Comparison with other species is a little dubious, since there are species where the female eats the male after sex, and others where the society is matriarchal.
The biggest difference between humans and other species in this area is that human males don't compete for mates. In all the species where this does happen, males (once they reach adolescence) leave the tribe or group and live alone, growing, then return and compete for control over the group, or another group. For this reason, males die a lot (they have to live on their own). So the male to female ratio is very different. All the males in the group will be too young to have sex, or will be the alpha male, or are too weak to leave the tribe so they accept the dominance of the alpha male.

Humans don't work like this. Humans don't compete in the same way - when it comes to survival, they co-operate. The male to female ratio in any group is roughly 50/50. There isn't much competition for mates, for females or for males. So the whole social dynamic that you're infering from other species - that men try to dominate a group and impregnate many women, while women have to be selective and worry that pregnancy/raising a child will be hard, just doesn't work for humans. Women have the whole group to help them out with raising the child (and obviously not all the women are pregnant all the time, so there are many people to help with hunting etc while that one person is resting for a few weeks), and men don't have to compete for mates.

But anyway, some interesting arguments.

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I'm not impressed.

[Kalam]

Evolutionary sociology is an outdated method of thinking that hasn't done much except encourage idiots to pursue ridiculous conclusions in the name of 'science'. This thread stinks of it.

[Gorath]

This thread stinks. 

'Nuff said.