Mark Rosenthal remembers the first time he saw Jill Kelley and her identical twin in action. It was at a dinner party at then-Gen. David Petraeus' house, and he was appalled. "They took over the whole conversation," he said. While the man responsible for overseeing two wars nodded politely, Kelley and her sister, Natalie Khawam, talked nonstop about shopping and traveling. "To me it was out of line."If the thousands of emails spent pursuing a younger woman who no longer saw him as useful to her wasn't enough, Petraus's behavior when confronted with a pair of aggressive social climbers seals the deal. The hard bright line separating ALPHA from BETA is how a man deals with female aggression. And this sort of social climbing is every bit as aggressive as the femme fatale, the maneater, or the queen bee. By permitting them to use him as he did, Petraeus was submitting to them, sublimating his will to theirs.
The Dark Lord of the Crimson Arts is astute as ever in describing Petraeus as "the male archetype on display of the 'beta male in alpha clothing'”.
Women like Kelley and Khawam are predators, every bit as ruthless as the pure alpha on the prowl The only substantive difference is what they seek from the opposite sex. Whereas the pure sexual alpha seeks sexual access, these female predators seek social access. The moment a man indicates he is willing to bow to them, they won't hesitate to climb right over his back, not infrequently at his expense.
As with all women with dominant tendencies, such women have to be confronted and metaphorically crushed. An ALPHA would never have permitted those women to rudely dominate the conversation on trivial subjects that no one else cared about, regardless of whether he shut them up with a sly and witty comment or a direct confrontation. I've found a polite Socratic approach to be useful in this regard; simply asking the woman - and it usually is a woman - why she feels the rest of the table is interested in a monologue on the subject, whatever it is, will usually cause her to shut her mouth and pout while the rest of the table breathes a sigh of relief and moves on to subjects of more mutual interest.
Given other things I've heard about Petraeus, such as his habit of wearing all his fruit salad on his civilian suits, I'm not even sure he's a delta. He strikes me more as a try-way-too-hard omega, who somehow managed to figure out how to be socially successful through context without ever truly understanding human social behavior. Had he sexual success rather than contextual social success, he probably would have become a sigma.
