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.
The MRA logic goes like this.
1) MRA thinks about something. Anything.
2) “How can we spin this into women being horrible?”
3) Profit!
So, this is a pretty backward view of the selection going on in this sort of situation. It’s not about rewards and punishment, it’s about who’s genes make it into the next generation. Evolution doesn’t care why the offspring survive; the individuals who provided the gametes are the winners, not the caregivers.
The best illustration of this situation is brood parasitism, where animals like cowbirds and cuckoos will get other birds to raise their chicks at the expense of the hosts’ own offspring. The genes getting passed on are the cuckoos’ and the cowbirds’, not the poor sapsucker tricked into raising the murderous little imposter.
However, brood ‘parasitism’ can pretty much only work when you get another species to raise your offspring. Let’s say, just for the purposes of reasoning this through, that the “alpha” and “beta” strategies are inherited. Then the “alpha” strategy of having a lot of offspring raised by others is most successful, given a population of “betas” who will raise those offspring, probably a lot more successful. Then “beta” behavior is being strongly selected against; there will be very few “beta” males in the next generation. And in a species like humans, your offspring have a much better chance of being successful if they’re being cared for. If “beta”s disappear, the “alpha” strategy is terrible; you may have a lot of offspring, but they aren’t likely to survive. I don’t know how exactly the math works out, but in this case you’d probably get to an equilibrium of relatively rare “alphas” being brood parasites and a lot of “betas” raising their own offspring.
Of course, “alpha” and “beta” traits are almost certainly not simply genetically inherited, so evolution really doesn’t have much to say on the matter.
Exactly. Sperm donors are required to provide their ethnicity, and this information is shared with the recipients. That’s one of the search criteria on the form – if you want, you can look for a donor who’s Italian, Norwegian, Filipino, whatever you’re trying to match. He’s not gonna be surprising anybody with an unexpected “brown baby” (lovely bit of racism on his part).
Aside from that, one of the required questions is “Why do you want to donate sperm?” (Sperm banks use that question to weed out jerks and frat boys looking for beer money).
Acceptable answer: “To help people who want to start a family.”
Unacceptable answer: “To get revenge on all those chicks who won’t fuck me.”
I’m pretty sure MRAs are unable to say the word the word “help” without choking.
I know…they’re so gullible, and have so little real-world experience, they’ll believe just about anything. Their stories are so preposterous, so self-serving, and so blatantly untrue to anyone with even the tiniest BS detector.
It makes them ripe targets for scammers, grifters, and schlocky PUA ebook peddlers promising to make their lives better. All these “gurus” ever do is encourage them to keep blaming all their problems on other people. Hate sells.
Betas seem to be the poor hapless people who women leech money from to raise children.
But money and worldly success seem to be an essential component of alpha-ness.
Except when it isn’t, and women prefer to marry up to Betas.
Except when it is, and money allows an Alpha to “get” as many women as they want.
And so on.
Pointing out holes in MRAgic is like shooting fish in a barrel.
I suspect the One True Sign of being a beta is that you see women as people.
Did they stop with beta because learning the other 22 letters is too difficult? I wonder how many of them can identify the lower-case examples of the letters.
No wonder they can’t do maths, statistics, or economics.
Well, they also recognize the so-called Phi Male.
(Ok, Wikipedia implies that only pedants pronounce the Phi that way.)
I read Phi as in “fie, for shame!”
@Arctic Ape, pedants and mathematicians.
@Kiwi Girl I’ve seen MRAs use Gamma and Delta before, and more than one blogger lamenting his Omega status (or, in one case, his Zeta* status, because learning another alphabet is hard)
*PS, David, the “Rise of the Zeta Male” link from the Boob Roll isn’t working. The blog seems to have vanished.
Heh, maybe if the Zeta guy was Scandinavian, he would have assumed that the last letter of the Greek alphabet was the Ömega.
…there’s another way to pronounce it?
I’d guess “fee” from Arctic Ape’s joke about phi-males.
Ömega, I like that. 🙂
No, I meant besides that.
A teeny-tiny barrel. And the fish is a killer whale.
I’m not even sure; I’m really a novice in spoken English and I can’t read the fancy phonetic symbols they show on Wikipedia. In Finnish we certainly do pronounce the Phi as “fee”.
Ömega would be pronounced kinda like “eh-mega”.
@Argenti, the way Kittehs said it above (“fie”) is how I’ve heard it pronounced by non-math, non-classics people.
“Fie” is how I’ve always thought of it (actually saying it isn’t something I do, lol).
I thought of Ömega sounding like er-mega, but without an actual R sound in that first bit (dim and distant memories of German lessons in high school emerging here).
Yeah, that’s actually a better approximation. Now I should really stop discussing this because English sound to spelling conversion seems challenging to even native speakers 🙂
You’re not wrong! 😀 And that’s before we get to the matter of accents.
“Uh, aren’t sperm banks a way for couples who want babies and can’t have babies themselves to have babies? ”
Not solely. A LOT of women these days prefers having the baby on their own. Kind of unfair for for the man who wants a child..and there’s no women available because they all went to the baby wending machine. Of course he could wife up one of them..and pay for someone else genetics.
Behold! The most perfectly ironic sentence in history. How dare the baby vending machines refuse to produce babies for men who want children? BTW sperm banks just hand you a fully formed baby, no gestation or birth involved on the part of the client.
Citation needed!
How dare women treat men so unfairly as to not produce babies on demands for them! The poor menz have no other options – like adoption or surrogacy via, you know, those egg donation clinics that we were talking about up-thread. Oh, no, the only solution is to stop women using sperm banks & make them bear children at the command of men.
Yep, cos every man is hetero, women are interchangable and all want marriage & babies and every husband is cuckolded. /sarcasm
I’m seriously in love with the sentence about baby vending (well, “wending”) machines. The best part is that the dude who wrote it will have no idea why all the women (and men who aren’t idiots) reading it are pissing themselves laughing.
That’s some serious “how is babby formed” shit right there.
I think baby vending machines needs to be included in the bumper book of knowledge (or whatever it’s called).