How the men most obsessed with dominance are also the most comprehensively owned
Let me paint you a picture.
He’s the kind of man who will loudly, publicly, exhaustingly explain why he doesn’t take orders. Won’t be told, managed, and definitely won’t be “controlled.” His entire personality is structured around the performance of refusing submission; to his partner, to his female boss and colleagues, to any woman with opinions, to any man he’s decided isn’t sufficiently masculine, to anyone gay, anyone different, anyone who doesn’t perform the correct version of hardness in the correct way. He’ll spend forty-five minutes of his finite life on this earth typing about it in a Facebook comment thread. He has, at some point, used the word “emasculating.” He says things like “I’m the head of my household” with the energy of a man who has never once successfully located the spare toilet roll.
And yet.
He will follow his favourite podcaster off the edge of a cliff. He will defer completely to his political strongman du jour. He will comply without question in his workplace hierarchy, his gym hierarchy, his lads’ group chat hierarchy. He will financially, ideologically, and emotionally prostrate himself before whichever man has been designated alpha this week, and he will call it loyalty. Brotherhood. Strength.
He is, in other words, deeply, comprehensively, professionally submissive. He’s just very particular about whose boots he licks. And the selection criteria for those boots tells you absolutely everything.
But first, a word to this man directly. If you need a daddy figure to ride in and rescue you as a fully grown adult, newsflash: you’re not a fully grown adult. If you hate your life this much, change it. It is not women’s fault. It is not immigrants’ fault. It is not the fault of gay men, or trans people, or whoever’s been designated the problem this week. Your life is yours. The fact that you’d rather hand it to some odious fuckwit than take responsibility for it is, whatever makes you feel taller, I suppose.
The Pyramid Scheme of Dignity
The “alpha” framework, and I use that term as loosely as its adherents’ grip on reality, is essentially a franchise model. You get to feel dominant over anyone below you in exchange for total fealty to anyone above. It’s a pyramid scheme of dignity, and like all pyramid schemes, the only people who actually benefit are the ones who got there first and are now selling you the starter pack.
Andrew Tate is the canonical example, but he’s just the gaudiest one. The mechanism is everywhere. Men submit to him financially, which is the really funny bit, in order to feel dominant over women. The transaction is entirely explicit if you look at it plainly: pay this man to tell you that you’re better than women. Surrender your autonomy, your money, and your critical thinking to a man in a supercar, so you can feel superior to your girlfriend. The irony could strip paint.
But it’s not just Tate. It’s the boss you’d never challenge despite his decisions being obviously catastrophic. The political figure you defend past all reason and evidence. The influencer whose opinions you’ve adopted wholesale, and the group chat where you perform your toughness for an audience of men you’d describe, with no apparent self-awareness, as your brothers.
Psychologists call this authoritarian followership, and it has a very specific profile. High submission to in-group authority. High aggression toward out-groups. Which, if you’ve ever watched a man be completely compliant and deferential to his male superiors and then go home and be a nightmare to his partner, maps rather perfectly.
Who Gets To Be The Daddy
Here’s where it gets revealing, because the submission isn’t indiscriminate, it’s selective, and the selection criteria is its own diagnosis.
The figures these men will prostrate themselves before share a very specific set of characteristics. They perform a particular flavour of masculinity: loud, blunt, apparently unbothered, given to pub-speak and conspicuous swagger. They position themselves as anti-establishment whilst being entirely embedded in the most establishment power structures imaginable. They are, in short, theatrical. And the men who follow them are not following strength. They’re following a performance they wish they could give.
Nigel Farage is the perfect British specimen. The man failed to become an MP seven times, is bankrolled by American billionaires, and has spent his entire career performing the role of plain-speaking everyman whilst being nothing of the sort; privately educated, former City commodity broker, career politician who has never held a proper job in his adult life. He is, to use the technical term, a complete and utter charade. And yet men who would spit at the mention of being told what to do by their partner, their female manager, or their GP, will follow him with a fervour that would embarrass a golden retriever.
Is the balding making you testerical, gentlemen? Because the level of emotional investment on display – the rallies, the merch, the furious Facebook defences of a man who does not know you exist and would not care if he did – looks less like political conviction and more like a parasocial love affair in a flat cap.
Why? Because he performs the fantasy. Pint in hand, fag in gob, mock-outraged face deployed at anything deemed insufficiently blokey. He’s the lads’ lad cosplay that insecure men want permission to be, and they’ll submit entirely to whoever performs it most convincingly. Submit harder, maybe that’ll fix it.
Now consider who they won’t submit to. The most obvious candidate in the current political sphere would be Zack Polanski. But any political figure who’s openly gay, speaks in full sentences and uses words like “nuance”, will do. So will any woman in authority, obviously. Any man perceived as soft, as intellectual, as caring, as different. The submission is available only to men who match the performance, and everyone else is automatically suspect.
This tells you the submission isn’t about strength at all. It’s about recognising the costume. They’re not following power, they’re following the grift.
The Fear Dressed Up as Hatred
And here’s where the out-group aggression becomes impossible to separate from the submission. Because the same insecurity that makes them follow Farage and Tate and Trump – always note: men who are themselves deeply, catastrophically insecure – also makes them frightened of anyone who falls outside the approved performance of masculinity and identity.
The hatred directed at immigrants, at gay men, at trans people, at any minority group is not strength. It is terror. It is the behaviour of a person whose entire sense of self is so fragile, so contingent on a very specific world order remaining intact, that the mere existence of someone different is experienced as an existential threat. When a man who’s never met a trans person spends significant emotional energy being furious about trans people, he is not demonstrating conviction. He is demonstrating that his psychological foundations are held together with string, and that he knows it.
And then there’s the particularly exquisite irony, the one that doesn’t get discussed nearly enough, that the men most consumed by this homoromantic devotion to their strongman daddy figures are often the same ones most loudly hostile to gay men. The intensity of feeling for Farage, for Tate, for Trump, is not political. It’s personal. It is the yearning of a man who wants to be chosen, seen, validated, rescued by a more powerful man, which is, and I say this with my entire academic training (and eyes) behind me, a deeply homoerotic structure dressed up in nationalism. The self-hatred that gets projected outward onto gay men may have rather more to do with what’s going on internally than they’d care to examine. The irony, as they say, simply will not stop giving.
Research on authoritarian followership bears this out with depressing consistency: the same men who show the highest deference to dominant in-group authority show the highest hostility toward out-groups, and the size of the out-group doesn’t matter. It can be women, it can be gay men, it can be immigrants, it can be men who went to university or men who don’t drink or men who do yoga. Anyone who doesn’t perform the correct identity in the correct way becomes a target, because their existence implicitly challenges the idea that there is only one acceptable way to be.
Which there isn’t. Obviously. But acknowledging that would require a self-assurance these men simply do not have.
The daddy figure, Farage, Tate, Trump, whatever iteration is currently trending, gives them permission to turn that private terror into public performance. He says: your fear is valid, your hatred is justified, the people you’re frightened of are the problem. And they follow, gratefully, because the alternative is sitting with the fear itself and working out where it actually comes from.
That would require therapy. And therapy, I’m reliably informed, is for women. Much easier to donate to a man’s election campaign and call it conviction.
The Obedience They Call Honour
There’s a long, tedious history of repackaging male submission to other men as nobility. Loyalty. Duty. Brotherhood. Dying for a king was the ultimate masculine act, the greatest honour was to obey unto death. We’ve updated the branding but the mechanism hasn’t changed; the king has been replaced by the CEO, the strongman, the podcaster, the charismatic twat in a group chat, but the ask is the same: surrender your individual judgment, your critical faculties, your selfhood, and call it strength.
Stanley Milgram figured this out in 1961, which means we’ve had over sixty years to sit with how deeply, structurally, relentlessly men comply with male authority. In his obedience experiments, ordinary people administered what they believed were dangerous electric shocks to strangers simply because a man in a white coat told them to. Two thirds went all the way to the maximum level. What Milgram found, and what the many replications since have confirmed, is that framing matters enormously. When the authority figure was male and the framing was about duty and order rather than care and relationship, compliance went through the roof.
The very psychology being sold to men as strength – toughness, compliance, hierarchy – is the one that produces atrocities. It’s not a design flaw. It’s the feature.
What’s Actually Being Surrendered
Here’s the thing about genuine dominance, genuine self-determination, genuine independence: it requires actually knowing what you think. Having your own opinions that you arrived at yourself, through your own reasoning, that you’re prepared to defend even when the group chat disagrees.
The “alpha” framework requires the precise opposite. It requires you to outsource your inner life to a hierarchy, adopt the values of whoever sits above you, perform those values aggressively, and punish anyone who doesn’t comply. This is not independence; this is a different master with better marketing.
The research on authoritarian personality, going back to Adorno in the 1950s and refined extensively since, finds that high authoritarianism correlates with both high submission to authority figures AND high aggression toward out-groups. The aggression doesn’t come despite the submission. It comes because of it. When you’ve surrendered your own selfhood to a hierarchy, the only thing left is compliance upward and cruelty downward. The submission and the aggression are the same mechanism, pointing in opposite directions.
Which is why the men who put us down the hardest are almost always the ones nose-deepest in the next man. They’re not showing you their strength. They’re showing you their accounting. They’ve submitted entirely upward and they’re spending the remainder on you.
The Performance and the Performer
Testosterone, and we’ve been over this before, doesn’t make men aggressive. It makes them status-seeking. It amplifies whatever behaviours earn respect within their particular tribe, and this is crucial. The men performing dominance for an audience of other men aren’t expressing their authentic selves, they’re doing what earns points in their specific status economy; they’re complying.
There’s a study I particularly enjoy, because it’s so bleak it’s almost elegant. Researchers looked at men’s responses to being outperformed or challenged and found that men with fragile, contingent self-esteem, the kind built on external validation rather than internal security, showed the most extreme dominant behaviours, not least. The performances of dominance were loudest in the men with the most precarious sense of themselves. Actual confidence doesn’t need the show, only insecurity does.
The men selling you the alpha framework know this. The performance of dominance requires an audience, a hierarchy to submit within, and a sufficient supply of people below you to dominate. Without those three things, the whole construction collapses. Which is why the framework is so furiously defended, why any challenge to it is met with aggression, and why women who refuse to be at the bottom of the hierarchy are experienced as an existential threat rather than merely an inconvenience.
We’re not just annoying, we’re structurally destabilising. The whole pyramid needs us at the base.
What It’s Actually Doing to Everyone
In countries where precarious manhood beliefs are most strongly endorsed, where manhood is understood as something that must be constantly proven, performed, and defended, men die over six years earlier than in cultures where those beliefs are least endorsed. Six years. The patriarchy is eating them, and they’re calling it masculinity.
The submission upward combined with aggression downward produces something specific and measurable in intimate relationships, in workplaces, in politics. Men conditioned to comply completely with authority and dominate laterally or downward are extraordinarily useful to power structures. They do what they’re told, they police their own communities, and they redirect aggression away from those actually responsible for their circumstances and toward whoever the hierarchy designates as the appropriate target. Women. Immigrants. Other men who won’t perform correctly.
And meanwhile the men at the top of the hierarchy, the ones being loyally, faithfully, expensively submitted to, are doing quite well out of the arrangement. Funny, that.
The Woman Who Simply Does Not Care
Here’s the specific category of woman these men hate most. Not the one who argues back, she’s still engaging with the hierarchy, still playing the game, still locating herself in relation to their opinion of her. No. The one who drives them to a genuinely spectacular level of unhinged is the woman who doesn’t submit, doesn’t fight back, and, most unforgivably, doesn’t appear to give the faintest shit what they think.
She’s not performing defiance, or staging a protest, she’s just operating entirely outside the hierarchy as though it doesn’t apply to her. Because it doesn’t, and she knows that.
This is experienced not as indifference but as an act of aggression, and the research on this is fascinating. Studies on male responses to female non-compliance find that women who simply disengage, who neither submit nor confront, but simply proceed on their own terms, provoke significantly higher hostility than women who argue or push back. Arguing still validates the framework. It says: your opinion matters enough to contest. Indifference says something far more destabilising: your opinion is not a variable I’m accounting for.
For a man whose entire psychological architecture depends on the hierarchy being real and universal, on everyone being located within it, above or below, dominant or submissive, a woman who exits the structure entirely is not just annoying. She is proof that the whole thing is a choice. That it’s constructed, that it only works if everyone agrees to play, and if she’s not playing, then the question he cannot afford to ask himself starts getting very loud: why am I?
Women are also, statistically and consistently, less likely to defer to authority for its own sake. Research on gender differences in authoritarian followership finds that women show lower submission to hierarchy and higher willingness to challenge authority across cultures. Not because women are inherently rebellious, but because the hierarchy was never designed to benefit them, and on some level, most women know it. You are less likely to venerate a structure that has spent several centuries trying to keep you in a specific place within it.
This makes women, collectively, the most visible ongoing evidence that the emperor has no clothes. Every woman who leads without the performance, speaks without permission, takes up space without apology, and moves through the world without checking how she’s being received by men she doesn’t know or care about is a walking demonstration that the whole performance is optional. That it is, in fact, theatre.
And theatre only works if the audience stays in their seats.
The fury directed at outspoken women, at women in leadership, at women who are blunt or funny or sexual on their own terms or simply unbothered, it isn’t about those women being threatening in any practical sense. It’s about what their existence implies. It implies the game could end. It implies it was always a game, and the men most invested in it, the ones who have submitted upward and downward and outward in every direction in service of it, cannot afford for that to be true.
So no, it’s not about us women, it never was. It’s about what happens to their carefully constructed sense of self when a woman wanders past and doesn’t bother to acknowledge it exists.
Actual security, the psychological kind, the kind that would be genuinely useful, looks like being able to tolerate someone else’s competence without experiencing it as a threat. Being able to hold your own opinion in a room full of disagreement. Being able to say “I don’t know” or “I was wrong” without your entire sense of self disintegrating. Being capable of care and tenderness and vulnerability without needing to immediately dominate something smaller to restore your equilibrium.
It also looks like taking responsibility for your own life. If you hate it, change it. That’s an uncomfortable sentence because it removes the cast of villains -the women, the immigrants, the gay men, the establishment, the shadowy forces your particular strongman has identified as the cause of all your problems – and puts the agency back where it actually sits. With you. In your hands. Today.
None of this requires submission to a man in a supercar. None of it requires a political daddy to validate your grievances. And none of it requires deciding whole categories of people are responsible for your circumstances. Which is, of course, exactly why it’s not what’s being sold. An actually secure man is useless to the framework, because he can’t be monetised , he won’t buy the starter pack, and he has no need for the pyramid.
The most alpha thing a man can do, apparently, is precisely what makes him easiest to exploit: submit completely, perform loudly, hate outwardly, and mistake all of it for strength.
The rest of us can see the strings. We’ve been watching them dance for quite some time. Turns out the apex predator was a hand puppet all along.
References are available on request. There are rather a lot of them.
Mistress Mind 
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