Its usage is inconsistent media studies scholar Debbie Ging has described the communities' theories about "alpha, beta, omega, and zeta masculinity" as "confused and contradictory". The term beta is also often used among manosphere communities. This misconception about "alpha males" is common within the manosphere (a collection of websites, blogs, and online forums promoting masculinity, strong opposition to feminism, and misogyny which includes movements such as the men's rights movement, incels (involuntary celibates), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), pick-up artists (PUA), and fathers' rights groups). Evolutionary psychologists who study human mating behaviour instead believe humans use two distinct dominance and prestige strategies for climbing social hierarchies, with the dominance or prestige of a man playing a significant role in his attractiveness to women. Claims about women being "hard-wired" to desire "alpha males" are seen by experts as misogynistic and stereotypical, and are not supported by research. The view that there is a dominance hierarchy among humans consisting of "alpha males" and "beta males" is sometimes reported in the mainstream media. However, dominating behaviour alone is rarely seen as a positive trait for either an ideal date or a romantic partner. The term alpha male is often incorrectly applied to any dominating man, especially bullies. Journalist Jesse Singal, writing in New York magazine, attributes the popular awareness of the terms to a 1999 Time magazine article, which described an opinion held by Naomi Wolf, who was at the time an advisor to then-presidential candidate Al Gore: "Wolf has argued internally that Gore is a 'Beta male' who needs to take on the 'Alpha male' in the Oval Office before the public will see him as the top dog." Singal also credits Neil Strauss's bestselling 2005 book on pickup artistry, titled The Game, for popularizing alpha male as an aspirational ideal. In the early 1990s, some media outlets began to use the term alpha to refer to humans, specifically to "manly" men who excelled in business. Some commentary on the book, including in the Chicago Tribune, discussed its parallels to human power hierarchies. In the 1982 book of Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, primatologist and ethologist Frans de Waal suggested that his observations of a chimpanzee colony could possibly be applied to human interactions. In animal ethology, beta refers to an animal who is subordinate to a higher-ranking members in the social hierarchy, thus having to wait to eat and having negligible or no opportunities for copulation. The terms were used almost solely in animal ethology prior to the 1990s' particularly in regard to mating privileges with females, ability to hold territory, and hierarchy in terms of food consumption within their herd or flock.
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