Part 10 - Alpha interactions

This is where things get complicated, to say the least.  All women learn to be wary when meeting other women because alliance boundaries, alliance membership, the presence of alpha and non-alpha females etc are not easy to make out.

As alphas compete for dominance, there tend to be fights and stalemates. In stalemates, there is no clear winner and it is as if both parties have lowered their weapons and ceased fighting for that round of the battle.

Examples of possible stalemate interactions:
1. Queen versus Queen
2. Mama verses Queen
3. Aunty verses Queen

When alphas fight for dominance, things get heated and are sometimes publicly aired.
In conflicts, alphas who are a queen do not battle themselves.  Instead, they seem to use a similar strategy, in all parts of the conflict.

To exercise dominance, alphas will:
- first increase group size by drawing in non-alpha females and lower standing alpha females,
- resort to recruiting the very clueless, i.e. men, who are nothing more than pawns to be used as well,
- use lower level alphas eg. princesses to duke it out, while they selectively speak,

On the other hand, alpha females do not get drawn in though they may sit on the sidelines and laugh. At the end of the conflict, each goes their separate way and no female crosses the other's boundary or alliance.

Such a situation happened in Singapore in 2009 involving the women's group AWARE (http://www.aware.org.sg/). Try a google seach with "aware saga" to read articles written by various people. The gist was that one group of women tried to outmatch another group but both employed the same strategy during the conflict and after.

For the AWARE group:
- membership stagnant for many years at 300 people swelled to 3000 people in a month,
- women took to speaking out and challenging each other, issues unrelated to the struggle were aired,
- a few men spoke out about the unrelated issues, believing they could help and all the time remaining clueless about the alliance feud that was really going on.

Alpha females who could see the "true" reasons of the conflict, steered clear of it.

After the episode, the victors paid some lip service to reconciliation with the losers but it only that.
Had this been a group of men, post conflict, the victors might likely taken their spoils by subsuming some of the losers on their side if they saw a possibility of exploiting the talents of those people.

As this was women, really, there would be NO reconciliation AND, each side (and all the members) would be dead to the other.

Part 9 - Non-Alpha females

This comprises the general population of females.  Ages range from the very young to the very old.
All females seem to start out as non-alphas. Other women have described such people as chicks, like the young of chickens. While some will dominate others even from an early age, the alpha tendencies do not seem to appear till early adulthood. A combination of family of origin, the presence of other alphas in the immediate family, testing scenarios or a trial by fire seems to give the non-alpha the confidence to move into an alpha role.