Beware of the alpha males! They are promoting stereotypes closer than you think. A recent genre of social media influencers that call themselves alpha males are taking the internet by storm but not in a good way. 

According to the Guardian, an alpha male is defined as someone who ‘takes charge’, everybody wants to either be him or be with him. This label promotes toxic masculinity, misogyny, sexism and harmful stereotypes that bring people down. It’s no secret that social media has shaped our perspectives.

Toxic masculinity is cultural pressure for men to behave in a certain way.

According to verywelmind, it “refers to the notion that some people’s idea of ‘manliness’ perpetuates domination, and aggression.”

In the many podcasts and tiktoks from these “alpha” males, they give out some questionable advice. Some of this advice includes treating women like objects (basing their value off of physical attractiveness), avoiding self care, and treating relationships as transactional rather than consensual.

According to these self proclaimed “alpha males”, men are divided into sort of a hierarchy with there being two types of men: alphas and betas. The use of the terms alpha and beta promote toxic masculinity as well as misogyny by associating specific characteristics with each term. For example alphas are supposedly associated with dominance, masculinity, aggressiveness, and intimidation. 

On the other hand the term beta is associated with submissiveness, femininity, weakness, lack of confidence. It insinuates that femininity is not only  automatically inferior but undesirable in men. 

These “alpha males” have received plenty of backlash on the internet from both women and men but this time women are clapping back on social media in a very interesting way.

“Some popular male podcast hosts, who call themselves “alpha males,” often use their shows to encourage treating women as objects. Now, those hosts are being parodied by TikTokers,”says an article from NBC News.

The aim was to show how absurd these original male podcasters sounded when making such extremely sexist statements, commenters even went as far as saying that nobody has ever said such those things when in reality these were things that these podcasters have said verbatim.

Elsa Lakew was one of the first people to mock them on tiktok and went viral.  She has received a lot of support from other women who feel the same way about these people.

“It feels like a new video clip was going viral every other week of some guy spewing some garbage take on women,” Lakew told NBC News. “I got pretty sick of it. And so when I saw that filter on TikTok and used it, I immediately thought of these podcasts guys. … Since we couldn’t fight logic with illogical takes, parodying them was the next best thing.”