My father wasn’t really an alpha but he thought he was like so many other men. He also wasn’t that extroverted but he thought he was once again like so many other introverts. He had problems speaking on the phone for Chrissake, often collapsing into pathetically amusing stutters. I’m not sure I ever saw him speak to a group. I doubt if he would do well.
He was a teacher though, and I once saw him teach a class. A very good female friend of mine was a student in one of his classes at the college I attended in the day and he taught at night. One night I attended one of his classes. There he was, swimming freely in his own element, quite at home and very pleasant and even stunning to behold. As is so often the case, he was a completely different person roaming about at the head of his class than he was away from the blackboard. He was actually charming up there. He was nothing like that at home. You would have thought they had switched him out.
He was a beta introvert, an intellectual who even at the end of his life was inhaling a book a day. He wore glasses. He taught school. He was a prig with Obsessive Compulsive Personality Disorder. You get the picture.
Yet my father very much valued masculinity as a concept. I once asked my mother why she didn’t call him on some particular aspect of his behavior.
“Oh…” she whispered. “I’m afraid he would see it as an attack on his masculinity and I would never do that to him.”
She would never attack his masculinity. Incredible. Can you imagine a woman of my generation (Baby boomers) ever saying she would not dare attacking her man’s masculinity? What ever happened to later generations of women? Didn’t they get the memo? Actually, I am afraid that what happened was a brain toxin called feminism.
My father despised gay men and mostly saw them as incomprehensible freaks if not mentally ill unfortunates to be pitied at best.
He hated his long hair more than anything else. My father felt that long hair on men was effeminate. As a boy, his mother had grown his hair long and even dressed him up in dresses around the house. At some point as a young boy, he rebelled against this nonsense and demanded to be treated like a man.
He later demanded that his formal first name be reduced to the more macho sounding nickname. He was quite proud of this form of rebellion against the strictures of imposed familial culture.
He took macho jobs in the summer working at Yosemite National Park, where he met my mother, or even working in supermarkets. I remember once visiting a supermarket and there was my bespectacled schoolteacher father, tossing and catching watermelons like they were tennis balls.
When my mother first went to work in 1980, my father objected. He was raised that a good man should not allow his wife to work. If your wife worked, that meant you were a failure as a man because you were failing to earn enough money to support your family. Your wife taking a job was a form of emasculation.
As you can see, my father took great importance in masculinity, as did many men of his generation. However, the Cultural Left seems to deny that things like masculinity and femininity even exist, God forbid that they may be essentialized by Nature.
