{"id":132,"date":"2007-10-11T12:25:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-11T18:25:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/11\/the-thinking-woman%e2%80%99s-alpha-hero\/"},"modified":"2012-02-18T08:24:16","modified_gmt":"2012-02-18T14:24:16","slug":"the-thinking-woman%e2%80%99s-alpha-hero","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/2007\/10\/11\/the-thinking-woman%e2%80%99s-alpha-hero\/","title":{"rendered":"The Thinking Woman\u2019s Alpha Hero"},"content":{"rendered":"

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There is something in romance that worships hyper-masculinity. It manifests itself in torrents of loving verbiage over the hero\u2019s physical supremacy: he towers over all other men (except those who would be heroes in subsequent books), his muscles make the Governator in his Mr. Olympic days look like a high school nerd, and his sperm can puncture three layers of latex to impregnate a post-menopausal woman.<\/p>\n

I roll my eyes a little at such freaks of nature, but not so much that I can see the inside of my cranium. Height, strength, and potency have been prized aspects for males of the species since time began, and I\u2019m certainly not insensible to the allure of a physically imposing man. What I find far more unsatisfying is that height, strength, and potency are often taken as sufficient onto themselves to define alpha maleness.<\/p>\n

Such heroes are everywhere to be found in romance, and they are spared my greatest wrath because one, they usually don\u2019t interest me enough to read very far, and two, they are more often than not paired with heroines whose thoughtlessness and folly make these men\u2019s imperiousness and immaturity look good in comparison. But that doesn\u2019t mean their sheer quantity and generic-ness don\u2019t exasperate me.<\/p>\n

There aren\u2019t enough real men in romance. Yes, you heard me right. Despite all the hot, all the testosterone, and all the claims to alpha-ness, there aren\u2019t enough real men, but too many overgrown, my-way-or-the-high-way boys.<\/p>\n

A pseudo-alpha says \u201cBecause I say so.\u201d It\u2019s his way or the high way. A real man does not presumes his authority, he earns it everyday and leads by example. Gandhi, anybody? (And don\u2019t tell me Mahatma wasn\u2019t hot in his homespun loincloth.)<\/p>\n

A pseudo-alpha is always shown to have the upper hand over the heroine: if she\u2019s strong, he\u2019s stronger; if she kicks ass nine-to-five, he kicks ass left, right, and upside down 24\/7. I sure wouldn\u2019t mind seeing a kick-ass heroine paired with a academic librarian hero, a hot, erudite man who kicks ass only in the sense that he\u2019s the best at connecting people with the knowledge they need, a secure man who\u2019s not at all threatened by a strong woman or another strong man because he does not define his worth by how many bow before him in deference.<\/p>\n

A pseudo-alpha is interested in power for its own sake. A real man understands that the flip side of authority is responsibility. When things go wrong, he doesn\u2019t find justifications, or pass the bucket. Eisenhower, before the D-Day, had composed an “in-case-of-defeat\u201d letter. He wrote:<\/p>\n

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Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troop, the air [force] and the navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt, it is mine alone.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ike, dead but still sexy, just for these words alone.<\/p>\n

My all-time favorite real-man hero is Ruck from Laura Kinsale\u2019s For My Lady\u2019s Heart<\/em>. There have been other romances featuring a spectacularly high-born lady and a not-so-high-born man, and in most of them, the hero is shown to act in an over-familiar and commandeering way, quickly putting the heroine under his thumb to compensate for his lower birth and emphasize his hero-ness.<\/p>\n

In For My Lady\u2019s Heart, however, Ruck, a renowned knight in his own right, is ever respectful and courteous to Princess Melanthe. He observes every last detail of etiquette, whether it requires him to kneel before her or to lay out and serve her meal. And none of it diminishes him. None of it renders him any less a leader of men. Quite the reverse, his innate dignity, his quiet competence, his unassuming yet solid understanding of who he is make him, in this reader\u2019s eyes, almost unbearably manly.<\/p>\n

A true alpha takes care of people without patronizing them. He leads without shoving his decision down everyone\u2019s throat. He is not necessarily humble, but he has an accurate understanding of his own pride, and doesn\u2019t let his ego stand in the way of learning from his mistake.<\/p>\n

And when he is in love, his lady is free to make up her own mind as to whether she loves him in return.<\/p>\n

So, in other words, keep the hot, by all means. Have the hero be impossibly fit and impossibly handsome, but don\u2019t stop there. And don\u2019t stop with giving him a traumatic adolescence. Give him some depth and maturity. Give him some strength of character that he understands the difference between what\u2019s easy and what\u2019s right. Give him the sort of true manliness that would make him remain impossibly charismatic and attractive even when he gains a paunch and loses his hair thirty years into his happily ever after.<\/p>\n

And give me a real alpha hero, instead of a pseudo-alpha.<\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is something in romance that worships hyper-masculinity. It manifests itself in torrents of loving verbiage over the hero\u2019s physical supremacy: he towers over all other men (except those who would be heroes in subsequent books), his muscles make the Governator in his Mr. Olympic days look like a high school nerd, and his sperm … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[55,16],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1354,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions\/1354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sherrythomas.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}