Alpha males ... vanity and strange habits are often part of the package. Photo: iStockLashings of money, power and sex may be bloody wonderful but it's also bloody stressful to keep up; much more relaxing to be a weedy beta who works in accounts and only enjoys conjugal relations on weekends and alternate Wednesdays.
Research into the general well-being of the alpha - carried out by Princeton University and published this week - confirms my long-held suspicions, suspicions developed during a period of dating one.
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He wooed me by beating his mighty fists against his broad chest (plied me with wine and carried me home from the pub on his back), but after a while it became clear that he used fake tan, worried endlessly about his weight and spent half an hour every morning preening himself in front of the mirror.''Do you fancy me?'' he would ask, as he returned from yet another two-hour workout. The question was irritating and the more he asked it, the less I did.
Anyway, this study goes some way to explaining the increasingly strange behaviour of alpha alpha alpha male Bear Grylls. Mr Grylls, who was born plain Edward, got his name not because he wrestled grizzlies to the death, but because he used to carry a teddy around with him (so a good friend of his informs me).
The former SAS reservist, whose skills as a self-proclaimed ''born survivor'' have been tested to the very limit as he toughs it out in hotels around the globe, has a new television programme that has just started on the Discovery Channel.
In one episode, he finds himself - as if by magic - stranded on an island off the coast of Scotland. How will he get out of this one? The rest of us mere mortals would simply lie down and die, or alternatively not ask a production company to drop us off in the freezing cold in the middle of nowhere in the first place.
But brave Bear, stumbling across a seal that just happens to have died nearby, slits the mammal in half and proceeds to wear it as a wetsuit. He has outwitted the Grim Reaper yet again!
This is not his first such display of ingenuity. He has used a sheep's carcass as a sleeping bag, and crawled inside a dead camel for shelter in the past. It is quite the party trick. But were you ever stuck on a desert island with Bear, you would have to sleep with one eye open to make sure he didn't kill you and wear you as a frock.
Yet, despite his undoubted survival skills, I worry about Bear Grylls. I worry about him in a way that I don't about, say, Ray Mears, because I think Ray Mears couldn't give a camel's carcass about being an alpha male. But Bear seems so obsessed with proving his toughness, that he only ends up emasculating himself.
When I watch his desperate battles for survival in some of the least hospitable terrain on the planet, I don't think ''What an amazingly brave man''. I just think: ''WHY?''
I fret that Bear might one day fall victim to the Boy Who Cried Wolf Syndrome. He'll be in real danger, and the crew will just think he's doing his usual macho posturing, and off they will go, thinking ''you've made your bed in a sheep's skin - now you must lie in it''.
Nah. I'd rather take an under-achieving beta boy or a grateful gamma guy over an alpha male any day.
The Daily Telegraph
Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/lifestyle/lifematters/alpha-males-make-beta-boyfriends-20110718-1hkv1.html#ixzz1SQigZmbN
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