Life, Writing, Weirdness

I came across this recently on Blue Sky and enjoyed a chuckle over how much time has been spent on this concept since I first laughed at the Alpha/Beta male designations a decade or so back.

It’s disturbingly common to hear reference to Alpha and Beta Males at this point, so that most people probably have some idea of the type of masculinity being catered to, but I’m deliberately not going to give even one-sentence summaries of the rest. I do understand that further research into incel astrology (a term I wished I’d been the first to come up with, but I’ve seen it twice now since I started writing this post and delved into the hilarious threads the above image was attached to) is ongoing and while I’m curious to see what they come up with next, I’m not curious enough to actually engage with someone who believes in these designations. I was barely curious enough to look up what each sign apparently represents.

(Side note: I hope I’ll always be curious about the lenses people look at the world through, but I’m grateful to live in a time where there’s a go-to two-word response for anyone who thinks they get to tell me how to be a man, or a human in general.)

None of this should necessarily be read as what I think of the individual signs, but you can certainly figure out what I think about the supposed intellects coming up with stuff like this.

Walking around the underlying misogyny, I have what might be an odd take on the terminology, though. As a middle-aged guy who’s gone back to school to study physics with fourth year looming ahead, the various Greek letters all have specific associations for me, making the whole thing even funnier. Since there are a lot of things that need designations or constants and we run out of letters fast, there’s a lot of duplication, so there are others I could pick for most of the letters, but there’s typically one that immediately jumps into my head for each letter.

Alpha brings me mentally straight to an alpha particle, i.e. a Helium nucleus stripped of its electrons. Lots of mass. Low penetration power. Draw your own conclusions.

Beta. Beta decay. Something breaks down into something else. As a result of the transformation, there’s generally a beta particle (an electron or positron) emission. Sometimes more than one and sometimes other stuff, too.

Gamma = the Lorentz factor. A relativity thing, this is an expression of how time slows down, length contracts, and mass increases. I infer that many incels are moving closer to the speed of light than I am.

Delta is usually a difference. Delta-L is the difference in length, Delta-m the difference in math, and so on. Make it a very small difference and we use a lower-case delta but we’re lazy so that gets changed to a d pretty quickly (so we can use the lower-case delta for other stuff) and at that point we’re referring to an infinitesimally small difference. So, Delta-Male is a difference in maleness, maybe? But is it a true difference? A unit difference? An infinitesimal one?

Omega most frequently brings frequency to mind. So, the frequency of maleness?

Sigma implies summation notation. Putting a sigma in front of an expression adds up all the values of that expression So, the sum of all males? (Alternately, if it’s a lower-case sigma, standard deviation springs to mind. In either case, there are weird inferences to be drawn.)

There’s apparently also a Zeta designation, not pictured here. Zeta for me is a fun to draw stand-in constant that you can define to be whatever expression you need that helps you write out what you’re doing faster.

Oh, and someone should let whoever is in charge over there know that Greek alphabetical order is a bit different than English.

Be well, everyone.