Here's an unique take on the whole alpha/beta dichotomy. In a documentary, Fran Liebowitz talks about how it was gay men that raised the culture standard for art in NYC and then what happened when AIDS hit:

That [male homosexual] audience was very important to me. That is part of what formed my voice. Everyone talks about the effect that AIDS had on the culture — well they don't talk about it anymore, but when they did talk about it — they talked about what artists were lost, but they never talk about this audience that was lost.

Why was NYC ballet so great... that audience was so... if Suzanne Farrel went like this instead of this — that was it. She might as well just kill herself. There would be like a billion people who knew exactly every single thing... There was such a high level of connoisseurship of everything that people like this were interested in... that made the culture better.

A very discerning audience, an audience with a high level of connoisseurship is as important to the culture as artists — it's exactly as important. Now, we don't have any discerning audience.

When that audience died — and that audience died in 5 mintues ... and it allowed, of course, the second, third, fourth tier to rise to the front.

Of course the first people who died of AIDS — I don't know how to put this — got laid a lot. Ok, now image who didn't get AIDS.

That was the [kind of] people who were then lauded as the great artists.

If all the people that died came back to life, I would say to them: "Guess who's a big star. Quess who has a show on Broadway. Guess who's a famous photographer."

They would fall on the floor. Are you kidding me?

Fran Leibowitz, Public Speaking, HBO Documentary

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pwPPmqbzA78

@ 18:37

Commentary

Two things are interesting to me about this:

  1. More evidence that even in the "female-centric" world of arts/ballet it was/is really men (gay though they were) that were/are driving the culture, both as artists and as audience. And that it's same with the modeling/fashion industry today. And it could even go so far as: "Feminism was created by men" as Gavin McInnes says.

  2. Makes me wonder if there was an Alpha Male extinction event in the heterosexual population what the results would be, and if it would be bad or good, and what are the examples in history of that actually happening.