He can buy the building, clear the room, and win the fight. He can’t make another man want him back. The book lives at that door, and the writer’s job is to keep him standing in front of it.
Every romance reader has met him. He’s six-four, or six-five when the author is nervous. He owns the company, the penthouse, and the silence in any room he enters, and his abs get itemized with a quartermaster’s patience. His past explains his coldness in a paragraph. His commands are obeyed before he finishes giving them. The narrator calls him an alpha, or the cover copy does, and the word is supposed to settle the question of why anyone should care about him.
It settles nothing. Every item on that inventory is something he already has. Height, money, muscle, and the habit of command are possessions, and a man assembled from possessions arrives at chapter one with his story already finished. Nothing can be taken from him that he’d miss. Nobody in his world can tell him no and make it stick. A hostile takeover may threaten his company, but the reader knows the company is scenery. A gunman may threaten his life, and the reader still knows the genre’s contract. He’s armored on every side, and armor is the least interesting surface a character can turn toward a reader.
Stakes need loss. A reader’s investment in a character runs on the possibility that he’ll lose something he can’t replace, and romance narrows that possibility to its sharpest point—the chance that the person he wants won’t want him back. The alpha template is engineered to close off exactly that chance. It gives the hero enough power to make refusal unthinkable, then asks the reader to feel suspense about an outcome nobody in the book is permitted to prevent.
Here’s the claim this essay argues. Masculine authority becomes interesting on the page when it meets something it can’t command, and the writer has three tools for building that encounter. Give his competence a limit, so there’s a problem his skill can’t solve. Give his control a consequence, so every act of command costs him something he values. And give another person the power to refuse him what he wants, so his height, money, muscle, and rank finally run into a wall they can’t climb.
None of this argues against powerful heroes. I write soldiers, sergeants, and men whose discipline is how they’ve survived, and authority is one of my abiding subjects. Big men, rich men, dominant men, and men who give orders well all belong in romance. The argument is against authority that costs nothing. A command nobody can disobey is a stage direction, and a hero assembled from stage directions can’t surprise anyone, himself included.
The research below comes from zoology, social psychology, gender studies, and romance scholarship. None of it tells a novelist how to write a hero. Most of the attraction research recruited heterosexual women rating described or recorded men, which says something about how readers respond to men on the page and almost nothing about what gay men want from each other. I use these studies for what they can support, which is evidence that power, attraction, and authority behave differently than the alpha template assumes, and I mark where the craft inference is mine.
The alpha was a mistake made in an enclosure
The word comes from wolves, and the wolves were misread. Much of the early research on wolf social dynamics relied on captive animals, unacquainted adults assembled in enclosures where they formed dominance hierarchies and contested rank. Researchers named the winners alphas, and the label escaped into popular culture with its image intact. L. David Mech, whose own earlier work had used the term, spent thirteen summers observing free-living wolves on Ellesmere Island and reported in 1999 that the typical wild pack is a family. Its so-called alphas are the parents. They guide the group through a division of labor, with the breeding female predominating in pup care and defense and the male in foraging, provisioning, and travel.[1]
That correction matters to romance more than it first appears to. The fictional alpha is modeled on strangers fighting in a pen, men whose authority exists only as victory over rivals. The wild wolf leads because others depend on him, and those dependents will grow up and leave. One kind of authority is a rank that sits on top of other bodies. The other is a relationship that lives inside other people’s continued trust. Only the second can be lost by the person who holds it, which means only the second can generate a story about holding it.
Gender scholarship reaches a parallel conclusion from another direction. R. W. Connell and James Messerschmidt, reassessing the concept of hegemonic masculinity, describe it as a pattern of practice that’s relational, historically situated, and open to contest, and they reject reading it as a fixed character type that some men simply possess.[2] Romance shorthand does the opposite. It treats “alpha” as a trait the hero carries in his body, as permanent as his height. Read through Connell and Messerschmidt, the word names a position other people grant, resist, or revoke.
That distinction hands the writer a working method. Write the hero as the occupant of a position and the reader starts watching the people around him, waiting to see who grants him authority and who might stop. Write him as the embodiment of a type and the reader has nothing to watch, because a type can’t be revoked. The first approach generates scenes. The second generates adjectives.
Dominance takes. Prestige is given.
Psychologists who study social rank distinguish two routes to influence. Joey Cheng and her colleagues, observing groups working on a shared task, found that people gained influence both through dominance, which runs on fear and intimidation, and through prestige, which others confer freely in recognition of skill, knowledge, or value to the group. Both routes worked. Group members deferred to dominant and prestigious individuals alike, but for different reasons, and only prestige was granted rather than extracted.[3]
When researchers ask what makes a man desirable as a partner, the two routes separate sharply. Across three studies with women at two U.S. universities, Jeffrey Snyder, Lee Kirkpatrick, and H. Clark Barrett found that participants preferred men whose status came from peers recognizing their abilities. Dominance used to subordinate rivals appealed mainly inside athletic competition. The same coercive behavior turned unattractive when men directed it at people in ordinary interpersonal settings, and the preference for dominance fell further when participants considered long-term partners.[4]
Earlier work points the same way. Lauri Jensen-Campbell, William Graziano, and Stephen West found across three studies that prosocial, agreeable men were rated more attractive, while dominance alone didn’t raise attraction on any measure they used; where dominance helped, it helped in combination with prosocial behavior.[5] Jerry Burger and Mica Cosby then added the comparison most earlier studies had skipped. Their participants preferred a man labeled dominant over one labeled submissive, but a man described with no personality labels at all outscored both, and few participants chose “dominant” as a quality they wanted in a date or a long-term partner.[6]
The alpha’s full inventory has been tested too. Angela Bryan, Gregory Webster, and Amanda Mahaffey separated dominance into physical, financial, and social dimensions—size, money, and command, more or less the template’s whole kit. In their study of people in monogamous relationships, agreeableness was the strongest predictor of current and future relationship satisfaction and the only significant predictor of whether the relationship dissolved.[7]
These studies sampled mostly heterosexual college students judging vignettes, recordings, or their own partners. They can’t tell a writer what gay men want from each other, and they shouldn’t be stretched to try. What they can tell a romance writer is narrower and still useful. Readers meet a hero the way these participants met a vignette, as a description on a page, and dominance announced through description isn’t doing the work the template thinks it is.
Here’s where the template goes wrong. It hands the hero dominance and expects the reader to supply prestige on credit. Readers rarely extend it. Prestige on the page shows up as other characters choosing to defer when nothing compels them. A deckhand stays an hour past his shift without being asked. A rival who has every reason to dismiss him asks his opinion before the meeting starts. A teenager he once pulled out of a river still calls on the anniversary. Each act costs the person performing it something, each could have been withheld, and that’s why the reader believes them.
Dominance carries its own built-in stake, and the template wastes it. Authority held by intimidation has to be maintained by intimidation, which leaves it exposed to the first threat that fails. A hero whose threats always land never gives the reader reason to worry about him. A hero who issues a threat, watches it fail, and has to decide what kind of man he’ll be without it has just become the subject of a scene.
The most useful character for revealing either kind of authority is the one who won’t defer. When everyone else in the room obeys the hero, the love interest’s refusal to obey turns all that obedience into backdrop. The reader sees the hero’s authority clearly for the first time at the moment it fails to reach someone.
Give competence a limit
Competence is the alpha’s most defensible trait. Readers love watching a man who knows what he’s doing, and nothing here argues for heroes who are bad at their jobs. The problem is competence without an edge. A man who can solve every problem the book presents leaves the reader nothing to fear on his behalf, and the plot has to keep importing external threats because the hero himself never runs short.
A well-known 1966 experiment offers a narrow but useful clue. Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman, and Joanne Floyd played participants a recording of a student interviewing for a quiz team. When a highly competent candidate fumbled and spilled coffee on himself at the end, listeners liked him more than the same candidate without the blunder. When a mediocre candidate made the identical blunder, they liked him less.[8] It’s one old study with a modest sample of male undergraduates listening to tapes, and nobody should build a theory of attraction on spilled coffee. Its useful detail is the condition. The blunder helped only after the competence was established.
Romance writers tend to misread the pratfall in one of two directions. Some give the hero no limit at all, which leaves him a statue. Others give him a decorative flaw—he can’t cook, he can’t dance, he’s hopeless with toddlers—that never touches what the story asks of him. A flaw that costs him nothing in the story he’s actually in is ornament.
The limit that matters sits where his competence ends and the relationship begins, and the strongest limits are made of the same material as the skill. The executive who solves problems by deciding has no move when the problem is someone else’s decision. A surgeon trained to keep his face still can’t make it show the fear the other man needs to see. The sniper who survived by waiting can’t stop waiting when the moment calls for him to speak. In each case the skill that makes him formidable is the reason he fails, and the reader can watch the failure coming because the book has already shown them the skill.
Picture a search-and-rescue team leader named Sorensen and a reporter named Pike, embedded with the team for a week of storm season. Here’s a flat version of their first night.
Sorensen took the radio, issued three orders, and had the team moving before Pike finished his question. Nobody argued. Nobody ever did.
That passage establishes competence and stops. It tells the reader Sorensen is in charge and invites admiration, which the reader will supply for about two pages. Here’s a version that gives the competence an edge.
Sorensen had the team moving before Pike finished his question. Then Pike asked when he’d last slept, and Sorensen discovered he had no order for that.
The second version keeps every ounce of authority from the first and adds a problem his authority can’t touch. The problem arrives from the person the book is about to make him want. Sorensen’s limit has nothing to do with clumsiness. It marks the boundary of a skill set built for emergencies and useless for being asked how he is.
Two cautions keep the limit honest. The love interest shouldn’t fix it by tutoring him. If Pike’s role is to teach Sorensen how to have feelings, Pike has become a therapist with a love scene attached, and the limit has turned into a lesson plan. The limit should cost Sorensen something in the story before it changes—a rescue that goes wrong because he wouldn’t admit exhaustion, a friendship he lost by solving a problem nobody asked him to solve. The limit also shouldn’t vanish at the climax. A man who learns in chapter thirty to say he’s afraid will still find it hard in chapter thirty-one. Let the reader see the effort.
Give control a consequence
The alpha’s second signature is control. He decides where they eat, when they leave, who’s allowed near the love interest, and what happens next. The template treats each decision as proof of strength and never sends the bill.
Research on power suggests what the bill should be. Dacher Keltner, Deborah Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson proposed that power activates approach-related tendencies, including attention to rewards and faster, less inhibited action, while lacking power activates inhibition, including closer attention to threats and to how others are judging you.[9] Adam Galinsky and his colleagues tested one piece of that picture directly. Participants led to feel powerful were less likely to adopt another person’s visual perspective and less accurate at reading other people’s emotional expressions.[10] These are laboratory studies using short manipulations, and they describe tendencies across groups. No individual character is bound by them. They do name a failure mode that power invites, and the failure mode is inattention.
That gives the writer a consequence engine that needs no villain. Every act of control can cost the controlling man information. If he decides for the other man, he never learns what the other man would have chosen. Clearing the room removes the witnesses who might have told him the truth. Protection that arrives before anyone asks for it can teach the protected man to stop reporting what frightens him, because each report triggers an intervention he didn’t want. The consequence arrives as adaptation. The people around the alpha learn to manage him, and a man being managed by everyone he loves is losing them by inches.
Back to the search team. Sorensen learns that Pike’s editor wants him home before the worst of the storm, and he calls the editor himself to arrange an extension. He believes he’s solved a problem. Pike had planned to decline the recall on his own terms. Now he owes his job to a man he’s known four days, and the next time something goes wrong at the paper, he doesn’t mention it at dinner. Sorensen notices the silence and can’t trace where it started. Nobody yelled and nobody left, and the relationship just lost a channel it’ll need later.
Money works the same way, only faster. The billionaire hero who pays off the love interest’s debt without asking reads to himself as generous and to the other man as a purchase. The gift removes a burden, and it also removes the other man’s chance to carry that burden himself, to owe nothing, to arrive in the relationship as an equal rather than an acquisition. A writer can keep the gift. The writer just has to let it cost something—gratitude that curdles, independence that hardens into distance, a fight three chapters later about who gets to decide what the other man needs.
Consequence should also persist. The template’s favorite move lets the hero overstep, apologize in one charged scene, and wake the next morning with his authority restored and his debt erased. Real consequences outlive the apology. Pike can forgive the phone call and still keep handling his own problems in silence for weeks, because forgiveness doesn’t restore the habit of telling. Sorensen has to earn back the channel one unforced confidence at a time.
None of this means control is always wrong. In a consensual power exchange, control can be among the most intimate gifts two men give each other, and I’ve argued in Submission and Control that dominance in that setting is best written as attention, responsibility, and restraint. The difference lies in the agreement. Control the other man has asked for, scoped, and can revoke is something he’s chosen to hand over. Control taken without asking is a debt the hero runs up whether or not he notices, and the story should keep the ledger even when he doesn’t.
Give another person the power to refuse him
This is the center of the argument. Limits and consequences make the alpha vulnerable to circumstance. Refusal makes him vulnerable to a person, and in a romance a person is the only threat that finally matters.
Pamela Regis, in her account of the romance novel’s structure, names the barrier between the lovers and the point of ritual death—the moment their union appears impossible—among the genre’s essential elements.[11] Look at what the alpha template does to both. A barrier made entirely of external circumstance can be overcome with money, strength, or rank, and the template usually lets the hero do exactly that. A point of ritual death carries no suspense when the reader knows he can buy, fight, or order his way past it. The only barrier the alpha can’t dismantle with his own resources is the one that lives inside another person’s will. When the love interest can say no, and the no can hold, the genre’s oldest machinery starts running again.
Consider what a romance hero wants that no possession can secure. He wants to be chosen, which can’t be bought. He wants trust, which can be lost faster than it was earned and can’t be ordered back. Forgiveness, a first name used in private, permission to touch, entry into a past the other man guards, someone who stays after seeing the worst of him—none of these respond to height or money, and any attempt to compel them ends the romance and starts a much darker book. The hero’s most valuable goals are the ones his power can’t reach. Build the plot around those goals and his power becomes a liability, because every time he reaches for it the reader can watch it fail.
Social psychology suggests why this works beyond plot mechanics. Joseph Vandello, Jennifer Bosson, and their colleagues found across several studies that people described manhood as a status that has to be earned and can be lost through social failure, while they described womanhood as more permanent. When the researchers threatened men’s sense of their own manhood, the men showed more signs of anxiety.[12] The alpha template presents a hero who can’t lose his masculinity. The research describes a culture in which many men believe they can lose theirs on any given day, through any public failure. That gap is a stake the template hides inside its own costume. What the hero fears losing when he’s refused may not be the other man at all. It may be the version of himself he built to be unrefusable.
Write that fear and the hero changes shape. His coldness becomes a defense with something behind it. His commands become an attempt to make refusal impossible before it can happen. And the love interest’s no lands where the template never allowed anything to land, on the self-image the hero has spent his life fortifying.
Refusal on the page has to meet three conditions to do this work. It has to be real, which means the refusing character could hold it indefinitely and the narrative doesn’t punish him for holding it. The refusal also has to be free, which means it doesn’t depend on the hero’s permission and doesn’t evaporate the moment the hero gets frustrated. Finally, the hero’s response has to define him. The measure of the powerful man is what he does after no. Pushing tells the reader he’s dangerous. Withdrawing into wounded silence tells them he’s fragile. If he accepts the refusal, keeps wanting, and changes what he offers, the reader learns he’s worth the wait.
That third response is where the alpha’s authority finally becomes attractive, because it’s the first moment his strength serves someone else’s will instead of overriding it. Return to Sorensen. Late in the week, after a rescue that nearly went wrong, he asks Pike to stay through the end of the season. Pike says no. He has a life and a deadline, and he doesn’t trust what he feels for a man who still tries to arrange everything for him.
Sorensen had a dozen arguments ready and the editor’s number already in his phone. He used neither. He asked what Pike would need to see before the answer could change.
Nothing in that passage diminishes him. A man who could make the problem go away chooses not to, and the reader watches the choice cost him. The refusal didn’t make Sorensen weaker. It made his strength visible for the first time as something he governs, where before it had governed him.
The same logic runs through every power structure romance likes to borrow. In Writing the Lives Between Duty and Desire, I argued that rank matters in military romance because the junior man may pay for refusing. In Why Forced Proximity Works in M/M Romance, the confinement removes the exits while every romantic and sexual choice stays live. The alpha is the same problem in civilian clothes. His wealth and size raise what refusal might cost the other man, and the story has to show the reader that the cost is survivable—that the less powerful man can say no and remain safe, employed, housed, and respected. Until the book proves that, the reader can’t trust any yes he gives.
The M/M alpha wears borrowed clothes
M/M romance inherited the alpha from two directions at once. One inheritance comes from heterosexual romance, where the alpha hero has a long and complicated history. The other comes from gay culture’s own relationship with masculinity, which carries costs the heterosexual version keeps out of view.
The heterosexual history is more interesting than its stereotype. Janice Radway’s study of a community of romance readers in the early 1980s found that the women valued heroes whose spectacular masculinity concealed a capacity for tenderness, and that much of the story’s satisfaction lay in watching that tenderness emerge and turn toward the heroine.[13] The genre’s own readers, in other words, treated the hard exterior as packaging. The payoff was the moment it gave way. A writer who keeps the hardness and drops the yielding has preserved the wrapping and thrown away the gift.
The gay inheritance is harder. In a qualitative study, Francisco Sánchez, Stefanie Greenberg, William Ming Liu, and Eric Vilain asked gay men how masculine ideals affected them. Participants reported more harm than benefit, including difficulty being emotional and affectionate and a felt need to appear masculine in order to be accepted by society and desired by other gay men.[14] In an experiment with Italian gay men, Christopher Hunt and his colleagues found that participants whose masculinity was threatened reported feeling more similar to masculine gay men and showed less interest in interacting with feminine ones.[15]
Both studies describe real men, and neither describes fictional characters. They do suggest that an M/M alpha who’s hard, guarded, and incapable of tenderness can be read two ways. He can be a fantasy borrowed whole from straight romance. Or he can be a gay man who built his hardness for protection, whose armor is one of the last fixtures of a closet he left years ago. The second reading gives the writer an enormous stake. What he’d lose by letting another man see him want goes deeper than pride. He’d lose the defense that kept him safe, and he has no evidence yet that he can survive without it.
That stake is mine to argue rather than the research’s to prove, and it’s the reason I find the M/M alpha worth writing at all. A straight alpha’s tenderness costs him an image. A gay alpha’s tenderness may cost him the strategy he used to get through adolescence, a career, a family, or a unit. The Staff Sergeant in my novel Rain by Midnight survives by keeping every part of himself separate, and the book’s tension comes from what that separation protects and what it has cost him. His authority is real. So is what he stands to lose.
M/M also removes the template’s easiest shortcut, which assigns one man all the authority and the other all the yielding. Two men can both be powerful, and the most interesting pairings make each man’s power a problem for the other. If both are used to command, the question becomes what each can refuse the other and what each does when refused. When one man has the obvious power of money, size, or rank, the other’s power may be quieter and just as decisive. The man who can say no holds the only authority the alpha can’t buy, and the story should treat that authority with the same respect it gives a bank balance. I’ve argued in Submission and Control that top and bottom, dominant and submissive, and masculine and feminine don’t map onto each other automatically. The alpha template’s habit of mapping them anyway is one more reason it bores.
Revising the man with nothing to lose
When a draft’s powerful man feels inert, the trouble is rarely his power. Usually nothing in the book can touch it. These questions help locate where.
- What does he have that the story could take from him, and would he notice the loss?
- Where does his competence end, and is that edge made of the same skill that makes him formidable?
- What did his last act of control cost him, and who has started managing him because of it?
- Who defers to him by choice, and what would make them stop?
- What does he want that money, size, rank, and command can’t secure?
- What can the love interest refuse him, and does the refusal hold?
- What does he do after no?
- Strip out his height, wealth, and muscle. What’s left for the reader to want?
At the sentence level, the template leans on adjectives and verbs of dominance—towering, commanding, possessive, growled, ordered—because it has to keep reminding the reader of an authority the plot never tests. Prose that has earned the authority can afford to stop announcing it. Compare two versions of one moment.
He towered over Pike, jaw tight, every inch of him radiating command. “You’re not going out there,” he growled.
“Don’t go out there.” Sorensen heard how it sounded and added, “Please,” which he hadn’t said to anyone in years.
The first version insists on power the reader is supposed to find thrilling. The second shows power meeting its limit in real time. Sorensen still wants to command, and the reader can see the habit fire. Then he notices it, and the correction costs him a word he doesn’t spend easily. One line has given the reader his authority, his limit, and the person who’s beginning to change what he’s willing to spend.
Revision also means auditing the external plot. When a threat arrives, ask whether the hero’s resources solve it without cost. If the answer is yes every time, the threats are scenery, and the reader has learned to skim them. At least once where it matters, his resources should fail, or succeed at a price he’d rather not have paid. His money can buy the solution and lose him the other man’s trust. Or his strength wins the fight and costs him the hour he was supposed to spend somewhere else.
Last, check the ending. The template often closes with the hero’s authority fully restored and newly extended over the love interest, which reads less as a romance than as an acquisition. A stronger ending shows authority redistributed. The hero still commands his crew, his company, or his unit. In the relationship, he’s learned to ask, and the other man has learned that his no will be heard. Neither man has less power than he started with. Both have power the other can trust.
What the powerful man stands to lose
The alpha has nothing to lose, and that’s why he can’t win anything either. A victory requires a contest, and a contest requires the possibility of defeat. A man whose height, money, muscle, and commands guarantee every outcome hasn’t won the love interest. He’s been issued one.
Give him something to lose and every one of those possessions changes meaning. Height becomes something to be careful with in a dark doorway. Money starts to insult. Muscle turns into a promise the other man has to trust him to keep. And the commands become a habit he has to notice, interrupt, and sometimes apologize for. None of them disappear. All of them start costing him, and cost is what turns a description into a character.
Write the limit, the consequence, and the refusal. Let the man who could have anything discover that what he wants most has to be offered. Then keep the reader beside him while he waits for it, strong enough to take what he wants, and finally strong enough not to.
Sources
These works inform my craft argument; none is offered as proof of how a fictional scene must unfold. Most of the attraction studies sampled heterosexual participants and say nothing direct about what gay men want from partners.
- L. David Mech, “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs,” Canadian Journal of Zoology 77, no. 8 (1999): 1196–1203, https://doi.org/10.1139/z99-099. ↩
- R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 6 (2005): 829–59, https://doi.org/10.1177/0891243205278639. ↩
- Joey T. Cheng, Jessica L. Tracy, Tom Foulsham, Alan Kingstone, and Joseph Henrich, “Two Ways to the Top: Evidence That Dominance and Prestige Are Distinct yet Viable Avenues to Social Rank and Influence,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 104, no. 1 (2013): 103–25, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0030398. ↩
- Jeffrey K. Snyder, Lee A. Kirkpatrick, and H. Clark Barrett, “The Dominance Dilemma: Do Women Really Prefer Dominant Mates?,” Personal Relationships 15, no. 4 (2008): 425–44, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-6811.2008.00208.x. ↩
- Lauri A. Jensen-Campbell, William G. Graziano, and Stephen G. West, “Dominance, Prosocial Orientation, and Female Preferences: Do Nice Guys Really Finish Last?,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 68, no. 3 (1995): 427–40, https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.68.3.427. ↩
- Jerry M. Burger and Mica Cosby, “Do Women Prefer Dominant Men? The Case of the Missing Control Condition,” Journal of Research in Personality 33, no. 3 (1999): 358–68, https://doi.org/10.1006/jrpe.1999.2252. ↩
- Angela D. Bryan, Gregory D. Webster, and Amanda L. Mahaffey, “The Big, the Rich, and the Powerful: Physical, Financial, and Social Dimensions of Dominance in Mating and Attraction,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 37, no. 3 (2011): 365–82, https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167210395604. ↩
- Elliot Aronson, Ben Willerman, and Joanne Floyd, “The Effect of a Pratfall on Increasing Interpersonal Attractiveness,” Psychonomic Science 4, no. 6 (1966): 227–28, https://doi.org/10.3758/BF03342263. ↩
- Dacher Keltner, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson, “Power, Approach, and Inhibition,” Psychological Review 110, no. 2 (2003): 265–84, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.110.2.265. ↩
- Adam D. Galinsky, Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H. Gruenfeld, “Power and Perspectives Not Taken,” Psychological Science 17, no. 12 (2006): 1068–74, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01824.x. ↩
- Pamela Regis, A Natural History of the Romance Novel (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003). ↩
- Joseph A. Vandello, Jennifer K. Bosson, Dov Cohen, Rochelle M. Burnaford, and Jonathan R. Weaver, “Precarious Manhood,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 6 (2008): 1325–39, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0012453. ↩
- Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (University of North Carolina Press, 1984). ↩
- Francisco J. Sánchez, Stefanie T. Greenberg, William Ming Liu, and Eric Vilain, “Reported Effects of Masculine Ideals on Gay Men,” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 10, no. 1 (2009): 73–87, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013513. ↩
- Christopher J. Hunt, Fabio Fasoli, Andrea Carnaghi, and Mara Cadinu, “Masculine Self-Presentation and Distancing from Femininity in Gay Men: An Experimental Examination of the Role of Masculinity Threat,” Psychology of Men & Masculinity 17, no. 1 (2016): 108–12, https://doi.org/10.1037/a0039545. ↩