Author: Lydia Bugg

It’s 2022, a time to improve yourself or pretend that you want to improve yourself, or finally announce this is as good as it gets and you’re giving up. So many options! When I was considering how to kick off 2022, the universe sent me inspiration in the form of a photo of a bunch of men who look like their contract has a line item that says no one is allowed to be taller than them. 

Twitter has taken this poster apart thoroughly, and perfectly, so I won’t dive into it, except to say that it inspired me to look these guys up and see what they do for a living. What products and services do these alpha males actually offer? It turns out most of them are selling classes in some way related to being an alpha male, whether it’s being successful in business or helping men “win back their wife’s attraction so she will want to initiate sex again” AND he specifies that you don’t have to “become a pussy” so, definitely check that guy out. 

I decided this is what I could do with 2022. I will take a class to become an alpha male! I’ll bring that alpha male energy into 2022 and use it to…crush something or dominate…my plants? Ok, maybe I won’t actually use it for anything, but I’ll definitely have it, which seems like the most important part. I searched high and low for the best alpha male class and what I learned was, being an alpha male is expensive!

I saw a 50% OFF Black Friday Sale on The Alpha Male Program (only $248/month!), but I missed it by 0 days, 0 hours, 0 minutes, and 0 seconds.

I was tempted by this $68 CHARISMATIC BADASS course…

… but then saw I could Skype with actual, definitely insufferable, alpha men for 14 hours for only $1450:

I decided I was looking for a more economical way to alpha male, so I took to a learning platform called Udemy. It’s a place where anyone can upload a class on anything from drawing to communicating with extraterrestrials to being an alpha male! They were having a new year’s sale, so I got my pick of classes for only ten bucks! The exact amount I was willing to pay for a certificate that says I’m a big strong boy.

They even had a class on how to be a Sigma Male, the newest and coolest of strong boy personalities. The preview for it was a man explaining how Sigma Males are lone wolves and thought leaders from a tiny room in front of a bunk bed. This guy thinks he’s a lone wolf, but he doesn’t even sleep alone? He goes to bed to the sound of his little brother’s farts? Maybe there’s a hot lady in the top bunk, but somehow I doubt it. The same guy that teaches the sigma male class also teaches one on how to become a professional Super Smash Brothers Player, so I’m just not sure that’s the 2022 vibe I’m looking for? I’m going for something mor– wait, what’s this?

Maturity and wizards you say? I’m interested…

Oh, hell yes. This is my alpha male. He’s got everything I want in a man, sword, magic wand, fur coat, crown, so many crystals. I need drama. I need backdrops. I need not to not feel actively frightened of my teacher, and this guy gave it all. I immediately enrolled in Divine Masculine Initiation: A Man’s Journey Into Maturity. It’s taught by Mark Keane, a man who is probably the only shaman named Mark. I graduated with flying colors, even earning a certificate. 

The main thing I learned is that if a man talks to me long enough and authoritatively enough, I can be brainwashed into thinking he’s smart– even if he’s holding a magic wand. I’m genuinely a little bit worried about myself. I don’t think it would be very hard to initiate me into a cult. At one point, this guy said, “Evil is just live spelled backward,” and I was like WOAH. After about two hours, my brain meat just goes soft and absorbs whatever bullshit is going on. I think it might be a defense mechanism I’ve developed from years of stoned guys talking to me at parties?

Anyway, let me tell you all the one hundred percent accurate things I know about manhood now. Men have four aspects to their personalities. Each aspect has a unique backdrop and costume change. The four aspects of a man, together called the quaternity, are the king, the warrior, the wizard, and the lover. They do pretty much what the name says. The king is about being in charge, the warrior is fighting, the wizard is wisdom, the lover is love, and all of them appreciate a good costume. 

Beyond that, there’s a lot of stuff about Game Of Thrones. Seriously, Game Of Thrones is critical to masculinity. There’s no powerpoint presentation or anything in this class. It’s just one man talking at you and one single title card that appears on the screen. It’s the one note I took in the entire class.

Yes, this three-and-a-half-hour class has one note, and it’s the name of the most despicable Game Of Thrones character who didn’t even make it to the end (spoilers)! Mark mentions and discusses his opinions on a few other characters, but he liked Joffrey so much that he got a title card. After that I’m guessing Mark got tired of making title cards and gave up. 

You can tell that if Mark ever had to give this presentation again in exactly the same way, he couldn’t. He winged this. There were a few notes, and then he’ll drift off for a while and start talking about Game Of Thrones again, or starting ranting about COVID; that was a surprise, or less surprisingly, start talking about how toxic masculinity doesn’t exist. Then you look down at your very blank notebook, and when you look up again, Mark is suddenly dressed like a wizard, complete with a Jafar staff and a crystal wand. It’s the best class anyone has ever taken.

This is what being an alpha male should be. How many classes on alpha behavior are just a man sitting in front of his bunk bed telling you the least sanitary ways to make your own beef jerky? That’s what I thought I was getting into, and this is so much better. When Mark starts getting all, “COVID lockdowns are suggesting that there’s a higher authority than the individual and the individual isn’t trusted to make decisions for himself so there’s a sense, there’s a risk at the moment for civil liberty to be hijacked under the guise of an emergency situation.” I can completely ignore him and appreciate the craftsmanship on his snake staff. 

It does get a little painful at times, like when he starts describing the plot of Brave New World and he’s getting it completely wrong. He says that Brave New World depicts a future where people don’t have sex, and there are so many orgies in that book. Maybe that’s part of my journey into maturity? Perhaps Mark is teaching us to say things really confidently even if they are devastatingly wrong. It’s a secret stepping stone on my path to man!

I could tell you more about the actual contents of Mark’s class, but I have to say I spent the entire section where he talked about The Warrior aspect of men trying to pinpoint what year he worked at Medieval Times. I remember that in this section, he started to talk about all the things people will say to bring you down, and it got weirdly specific and started to feel like he was targeting things a particular person in his life had said.

It’s sort of like if I were to say, “People will try to get you down. They’ll say, you’re weird, they’ll say your writing sucks, they’ll say your X-Men fanfiction is terrible. They’ll say, why would Rogue and Papa Smurf hook up? They’ll say Papa Smurf isn’t even an X-Man. What is he doing here? And why is he six feet tall and shredded now, Lydia?” You know, that sort of general stuff people say when they put another person down.

While I wasn’t paying attention, Mark did another quick change. And it was really something. This outfit represents the lover aspect of men. In this section, he goes on a rant about how men have “gotten a bit of a bad reputation,” and all of humanity has created the problems in our society, not just men. So to recap so far: be very wrong, share the blame with women, Joffrey Baratheon.

Mark says, “For every CEO there’s a wife. For every world leader, there’s a wife, and that makes sense because masculine energy is directional. So, where the man is quite happy to be out there seemingly making all the decisions in the world, the woman is quite happy to be, um, indirectly dropping those seeds of ideas into her husband. And the man might not even know where those ideas come from. So, the idea that men single-handedly orchestrated society, I would say, is not true. It’s that women, um, actually always sought to influence the world indirectly.” I can’t argue with that! CEOs are married sometimes. Irrefutable evidence that women are also bad. As a woman and Sigma Male I both owe men an apology and will never give them one.

Each section ends with a meditation that allows Mark to stretch the class a little longer without adding much material. At one point, he starts blessing everything in your body, your bones, your blood, your solar plexus, your pelvis, your potency,  your third eye, and this goes on for about three minutes. After talking about The King, you picture yourself being crowned king by God. After The Wizard, you’re looking into a big cauldron of fire; basically, Mark describes metal album covers to you, and it’s pretty peaceful, until the drum comes out.

The drum is present for the last fifteen minutes of the class. You go on a shamanic journey to align your King, Warrior, Wizard, and Lover aspects. It involves listening to a lot of drums, and then finally Mark says, “You’ve been initiated. You are now a man!”

Even though I have been initiated into this off-brand version of alpha manhood and have a sweet certificate for it and everything, I don’t think I have everything it takes to be a real alpha man yet. I feel like I’m missing something. I’m confused yet confident, a dominant leader yet responsible for nothing… what is the last ingredient? Oh! I need that snake staff!