Alpha males are strong, good looking high achievers. So is there a female counterpart and who is she?
Alexandra Shulman, editor of Vogue, wrote in a recent column that the alpha female would never get lost in traffic, and would look good in a miniskirt. Is she, like Shirley Conran's Superwoman, all things to all people? Is she someone we like, or admire? Does she even exist? If we base the alpha female on the male model, we will find her in the boardroom, impersonating his bullying and overriding ambition. Sexuality plays a big part in an alpha male's success, and alpha female Margaret Thatcher was a tremendous flirt, who spent a lot of effort on her appearance.
Anna Wintour, editor of US Vogue, is a classic example of alpha female, driven by insecurity and ruling by fear. She is aloof, inscrutable behind those dark glasses. "Alpha female is pretty exceptional," says columnist Polly Toynbee. "There are not a whole lot of people trying to be like her, whereas there are a lot of men behaving in the same way, clambering over each other to reach the top of the tree. Those women who do get to the top are mavericks, hybrids and deny that they are like other women. Women do not like alpha female very much, nor do they want to be like them. Women want to be liked, which holds them back.
"Mrs Thatcher refused to have anything to do with the sisters. She always said, 'Don't ask me about being a woman.' Hers was the only cabinet with no other women in it." In Hollywood films, any female character with alpha-male attributes is a monster. In The Last Seduction, Linda Fiorentino was clever, sexually voracious and heartless, a villainess for our time. In Fatal Attraction, Glenn Close refused to take abandonment in a submissive way. These were alpha anti-heroines, while in Alien, Sigourney Weaver combined courage with nurturing.
As film producer Lizzie Francke points out, we have not seen alpha female in Hollywood for some years: today's action heroines, Lara Croft and the Terminatrix, are comic-book figures. Beyond Hollywood, Sarah Dunant, writer and author of The Birth of Venus, sees the alpha female as inhuman rather than superhuman. "I envisage the mind of Mary Warnock, the body of Kate Moss and the humanity of Leni Riefenstahl."
Achievement is the focus of alpha female's life; anything else is secondary. She despises alpha males and they are terrified of her.
"Nicole Kidman might be more like alpha woman than anyone else: physically perfect, shrewd, intelligent, good at making money."
Historian Professor Joanna Bourke puts it; "I think there is a difference between alpha female and alpha male. The women I would nominate have changed the world by their philosophy and writings, and they have made an impact by the way they live, or lived, their lives: Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf and Germaine Greer. In their sexual identity, in the way they constructed their domestic lives, they strove to be true to themselves."
Clare Longrigg, September 28, 2003 - Guardian
