So manosphere dudes have a theory of sorts about young women that they frequently boil down to the handy catchphrase “alpha fucks, beta bucks.” The idea is that women — oh, you evil women! — have an insatiable desire to mate with and capture the sperm of hot but unreliable alpha males, and an equally innate tendency to try to con some hard-working beta schlub into paying the bills, with his beta bucks, for the resulting alpha spawn.
There are a few problems with this theory. First of all, this DOESN’T HAPPEN. Ands second,it makes no fucking sense. Why would the invisible hand of evolution want to reward the genes of Alpha men with no interest in caring for their kids and punish the betas who (at least in the manosphere version of the world) actually keep those kids alive?
But I digress. Because one clever Manospherian commenter — recently featured in a post on Rollo Tomassi’s Rational Male blog — has discovered yet more proof of the evil alpha fucks-beta bucks theory in action: Sperm banks.
Let’s let him explain, because I sure can’t:
Let’s look at this abstractly. Man and woman marry, find that she isn’t getting pregnant, determine from medical testing that his swimmers aren’t winning the race. So they pay for another man to impregnate her, although via a medical go-between. The original sperm banks screened donors and pretty much limited them to med students and other college men.
This is “Alpha Sperm, Beta Provisioning”, and nothing less. Putting a tech or a doctor in the middle wearing gloves and a lab coat, and injecting semen with a syringe rather than the usual method doesn’t change that.
Uh, aren’t sperm banks a way for couples who want babies and can’t have babies themselves to have babies? The guy in this scenario has no way to pass on his genes. That’s not an option. He wants a baby, too.
Sperm banks are therefore a clinical version of AF-BB, and as such clearly serve the Female Imperative in the same manner as a married woman having an affair while she’s ovulating … .
Uh, BUT THE MAN WANTS THE BABY TOO. Men can love children who are not biologically theirs. Families adopt children. They love them too.
[T]he whole idea of a sperm bank is a clear, medicalized, fully legal example of the Female Imperative of AF-BB … today we all accept it because teh wimmenz deserve their own bay-bee if they want one (or more), no matter the cost to anyone else.
What cost? WHAT COST? THE MAN WANTS THE BABY TOO.
“Rollo Tomassi” adds some conspiracy theorizing to the mix:
On virtually any post I’ve made about feminism … one or more commenters invariably post the youtube video about how feminism was conceived to destabilize western society (by the Rockefellers?). …. the fact that sperm banks were an unheard of development prior to the sexual revolution does give me pause to think that they were a need anticipated to better facilitate and perpetuate a future feminine-primary society.
Yes, that’s right. Feminism + Sperm Banks x Rockefellers = MALE ENSLAVEMENT
Indeed, he points out, some of the women who go to sperm banks DON’T EVEN HAVE HUSBANDS.
Almost as if in anticipation for the unfettering of women’s hypergamy, the facility of insuring a woman’s best optimized hypergamy was institutionalized and normalized. This may sound like conjecture (since the socially proposed purpose was to facilitate pregnancy for an infertile man), but the utility of sperm banks quickly shifted to facilitating the pregnancy of women who wouldn’t be married or had no intention of marrying to start a family.
Unmarried women having sperm bank babies. Human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria!
This was the first institution, legalized and normalized that laid bare feminism latent purpose – strong independent women® could remove the man from the equation of effecting an optimal hypergamy, while at the same time effecting future legislation and social engineering to enlist men (either publicly or privately) in the provisioning of this new breed of motherhood. And with every guy dutifully jerking off into a petrie dish, they effectually contribute one more element to institutionalized Alpha Fucks / Beta Bucks.
And so a dude getting paid to masturbate into a cup — they don’t use petri dishes, dude — becomes yet another brick to the wall of the manosphere’s imagined oppression of men.
@cassandra
XD So glad I wasn’t drinking anything when I read that.
Married women having babies: terrible! Single women having babies: terrible! Women doing things that they want: UNQUESTIONABLY TERRIBLE.
I gather it’s just their fancy word for sl*t now, which was already their fancy word for “she fucks s/he but not me!”
I don’t know if this guy actually knows what’s involved in donating sperm. I investigated it a bit at a particularly cash-strapped point in my youth, then decided against it because it would have put a strain on the relationship I was in at the time: to make it worth their while, you have to provide several “samples” a week, and you couldn’t ejaculate for a day or two before you gave a sample, so you had sufficient volume and sperm count.
Wouldn’t that run contrary to all the fucking alphas are supposed to be doing? Or have we redefined “alpha” yet again to mean “someone whose sperm ends up in a vaginal canal by whatever means”?
sparky, they’ve come up with a new meaning for “hypergamy,” which they now use to mean “evil wimminz will desert you in a second as soon as some alpha cad comes walking by because they’re all evil golddigging whores but the cads don’t have money so they then have to find a beta dude once they hit the wallllllllllll.”
I want to see all the PUA gurus have to do this and fail.
Does anybody here know of/remember that guy Richard Hatch who won the first American Survivor? He played the “fat, naked gay man” who caught all the fish. He went to jail for income tax evasion.
I heard he did what seraph4377 was looking into and donated a great deal of sperm when he was in college and it turns out he has offspring in the double digits and they found each other on some website where you can look for your sperm donor.
Would that make him an alpha fuck or a beta buck?
sereph, no, it’s in that first block quote, they’re all alphas because once upon a time, allegedly, the sperm banks only took, er, deposits from med students and “college men.” Who are all alphas, apparently. (Or at least they are for the purposes of this argument. The manosphere does not otherwise seem terribly enamored of people who’ve spend a lot of time in academia.)
But, but, but, Dr Pell! He teaches at Harvard and Princeton at the same time! He is ProfessorDoctor of Everything!
So “alpha” essentially means “anyone we perceive as greater in status than ourselves by whatever measure is being used at the moment,
unlessespecially if we’re PUA’s trying to imagine what ‘alphas’ are really like so we can make up stories of our own alpha-ness”.@seraph
Could be. Or they don’t know what’s invovled in donating sperm. Or both.
Not terribly surprised :/ I’ve got a hypothetical for mras: Does my brother count as an alpha or a betta? He’s very smart, and good at math and computer programming, but he’s not very physically active/ into sports. I must inform him of his alpha-ness, or lack thereof. He’s tall, if that matters.
You don’t seem to know how evolution works. If more “alpha” sperm created more offspring than “beta” sperm, the system would be evolutionary advantageous.
Isn’t “college men” basically half or more of the male population in the US? Not that I’m expecting anything to come out of the PUA/MRA crowd to make sense. “Alpha” is basically just code for “any man who women seem to be more interested in than me”.
@Vaiyt,
Nail + head
According to wikipedia, almost 60% of the population has had some college education, although 45% of college students are male. If I’m mathing right that means 1/3 of adult men in the US have attended college at some point.
I can’t wait until my Spermatic arrives so I can beta test it.
@ignotussomnium: is your cat plotting to kill you? Inquiring minds need to know!
@hellkell LOL, I hope they cleaned it thoroughly after the alpha testing then. 🙂
This makes “beta reader” take on a whole new meaning.
Ninja’d by kitteh!
@kiwi girl: I would say no because he was being snuggly earlier, but he is eying my dinner pretty intently.
LOL, Mr Kiwi’s cat, who departed this world about 5 years ago, would eye up my (vegetarian) dinners. One night I was eating a plain, undressed salad on the sofa and he kept bugging me. I told him he wouldn’t like what I was eating and gave him a small piece of sliced carrot so he would stop it. He ate the carrot. He also ate the small piece of lettuce I then tried with him. I conceded the point to the cat.
Fribs is always convinced she’s being cheated when I’m drinking tea or eating a banana. When I let her sniff them, she’s all OMG YOU’RE TRYING TO POISON ME. Happens every single time. It’s not goldfish with crappy memories! 😀
Sperm banks violate the deeply cherished MRA notion that women should have to work hard and endure a shit ton of abuse to get access to that precious baby nectar. It deprives them of their leverage and disrupts the sexual “free market”, in that any woman can mate with the high school quarterback without any strings attached. MRAs get pissed off because once again, they’re locked out from participating.
I have years of personal experience with sperm banks, and the donor pools are very, very selective. Any candidate who so much as breathed a whiff of misogyny would be shown the door. It’s a business. Sperm banks want donors with maximum appeal to women. Clients want traits that they’d be glad to pass on to their kids, such as intelligence, kindness, empathy, a good sense of humor, and good health. Abusive alpha gaslighters don’t sell. It doesn’t matter how fertile their liquid gold is, they’re disqualified right out of the gate.
Interestingly, sperm banks are probably as close to a pure form of the sexual marketplace as there is. MRAs aren’t as in demand as they think they are.
Oh, I think they know they’re not in demand. If they didn’t they wouldn’t spend so much time waffling about hypergamy. Why worry about that if you’re an “alpha”?