Great observation about female sexual selection from someone discussing our article elsewhere. I have made a similar point before:

Why would any woman even be qualified to judge whether her man is alpha or not? The very idea is the essence of insolence.

Quite often in war ordinary quiet humble men perform amazing acts of heroism and daring.

It's men who decide who the male alphas are, not women -- this is the fundamental asymmetry.

Men have the last word on judging women and men have the last word on judging other men. It's men who understand who has the sharpest aim in the hunting party, which man will fight to the death to save a comrade, which man is the sharp-scented tracker they cannot find and follow the game without.

This is the basic imbalance. We men can see with our eyes and ears which women are fertile, which women have child-bearing hips, or (in some cases) which women have knowledge of herbs and mushrooms.

Women can't see who are the indispensible male hunters and who are just the helpers. That's why women need social proof so much. They can't judge which man is the real talent and which man isn't. They have to ask other men.

Therefore, this line about loving a man who "isn't an alpha" completely misses the point.

Women shouldn't even be presuming to judge such a thing. It's automatically above their station. They don't know, and a society which indulges women's vain belief they even understand who the male alphas might be is already a broken society.

I read out of interest in the 1980s the book ('Chimpanzee Politics' by Frans der Waal) that popularised the terms "alpha male" "beta male" "alpha female" "beta female", and those terms' incorporation into popularity in everyday anthropology and sociology rests on a huge confusion.