It is easy to mistake Groove Papi, for one of the many relationship experts on the internet who promises their followers tips that are sure to get them into relationships. In part because the pinned tweet on his Twitter is a thread on how to woo a girl.
“STOP TRYING TO APPROACH WOMEN THROUGH INSTAGRAM, SNAPCHAT OR TWITTER. She can easily disqualify you if you don’t reach her delusional standards, but when you approach her face-to-face then your personality will cover for you,” he says in the thread.
He tells his followers to approach her in person. If you’re at a party, talk to about ten women he says. Six could be interested.
But on closer examination, his real intention bares itself. He is not offering regular dating advice. Groove Papi is at the forefront of the war, and he has struck the first punch.
The Alpha Male Mentality
They call themselves members of the “Alpha Male Mentality.” It is a brotherhood, of some sort, of social media knights who mostly post disparaging comments about feminism and women.
“Society will applaud a Lady for beating a man up. They would rather stay back, watch and laugh when a woman hits a man, still blame the man and call him a weak man. ‘How can a woman beat you?’ But when these men y’all call weak to retaliate, it becomes assault. Y’all ain’t real,” TheManShola, who has assumed the role as the de-facto leader of the park in Nigerian cyberspace tweeted recently.
“Feel free to fight her man to man,” he adds in another tweet. He tells his followers to never apologise to women when she is wrong. “Dump her before she dumps you,” he says.
Tweets from members of the Alpha Male Mentality carry this type of theme: how women are in fact the sex that benefits the most from the gender imbalance in society, how they should be grateful to have the attention of any man, how feminism has come to destroy the world order of men in leadership positions.
They reject notions of men being emotional or vulnerable.
The movement cuts across cultures, geopolitical zones, religious ideologies, historical moments and now social media apps.
How it all started
Long before people that subscribe to the Alpha Male Mentality found camaraderie on the internet, they had been gathering together for centuries, encouraging one another, holding the fort against the feminist movement.
During the suffragist movement in the late 20th century, when women stormed state properties in Europe demanding their right to vote, they were met with backlash. Members of the Alpha Male Mentality plastered fear-mongering posters on the streets; they depict men feeding their babies, cleaning their homes etc.
When radio emerged as the next frontier, talk show hosts with similar ideas quickly found their niche. Rush Limbaugh, the American talk show host embodied the movement. He disparaged feminists on his radio show as “feminazi.“
He described women’s right to choose if they wanted to become mothers or not as “a modern-day holocaust.” He described women who attained the highest level of education and became professors “professorette,” a term he used to make fun of them. He called them “militant women,” who “don’t need men in order to be happy. They certainly don’t want males to be able to exercise any control over them.”
When social media became the de-facto town square, the Alpha Male Mentality believers brought their agenda to the fore.
Influencers like Andrew Tate spread the gospel on Twitter. “It’s bang out the machete, boom in her face and grip her by the neck. Shut up bitch,” he screamed in one video. On ClubHouse, there is a club Alpha Males Mentality where moderators host rooms with topics such as “Feminists Deception,” just this week.
An ideology that seduces young men
“After finding the truth about masculinity and how it is slowly fading away, I became so uncomfortable because a lot of young men around me still had their feminine way of thinking,” Groove Papi, who has become a micro-influencer hosting Twitter Spaces, said of how he got involved in the movement.
The Alpha Male Mentality in the Nigerian space wraps itself in a nationalist, anti-western idea movement, using buzzwords such as “natural order.” But it usually ends up pushing against the new global way of thinking birthed by years of research by international bodies and think tanks looking to accelerate economic and social growth.
Read also: The rise and ban of Andrew Tate and the lessons about social media regulation
For these online Alpha Male Mentality soldiers, it’s about the performance of gender. David Hammond, who has over 200,000 subscribers on YouTube regularly posts videos teaching men how to behave.
For them, alpha masculinity is supposed to be a performance, a dance of some kind, that they know the steps to. In one of his videos, he declares that society hates strong men. He then goes on to advise his followers to not allow themselves to be demonised by the woke culture.
A TikTok user who simply goes as FitxFearless takes it up the notch, going as far as showing his users how they must walk to be alpha males.
“I literally focus on tackling issues with women, finance, fitness and controlling emotions. If all those issues are solved in a man’s life, then he’ll live a greater life for sure,” Groove Papi said.
What excites many of these young men who join the movement on social media is not just that they are being told that being born male itself automatically counts for something in society, but that these men also promise them paths to financial stability.
This forms the bedrock of the anti-intellectualism that makes the movement pervasive.
A reason why
It smuggles itself into the cultural consciousness as a path to financial independence. The firebrand idealogues parroting the ideals of the mentality tell their users that with a little cash they can achieve this. TheManShola has written a book Becoming a Better Man. Andrew Tate, make his followers pay for classes from his Hustle University.
Groove Papi has started hosting sessions on Telegram where he teaches users how to trade forex.
Groove Papi says that his quarrel with the feminist movement is that it promotes the idea that women don’t need men.
“Many women take feminism to the extreme, by telling ladies that they don’t need a man, saying men and women are equal, and other funny things I’ve heard,” he said.
“The truth is if women follow this advice then they’re only setting themselves up for a depressing life when they get older…A woman naturally wants to nurture, and they’re more interested in people…That’s why engineering is filled with men and nursing is filled with women,” he said.
In Africa, only thirty-five per cent of nurses are male, the highest number all over the world.
Bottomline
While the movement has seen a rise in the age of social media, the alpha male mentality has been with us for many years taking different forms to fit into the times. But the ethos remains the same; that feminism is the end of the world.
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