Lexicon ·
AMOG
noun, an acronym (alpha male of the group)
- Stated meaning
- The dominant man in a group, who competes for the attention of the same woman.
- Operating meaning
- A second bidder in the room, ranked first by the man who named him, who then plans the evening around the ranking.
- Origin
- Pickup vocabulary, already the subject of whole threads on the moderated seduction newsgroup by October 2003. Neil Strauss's The Game glossed it in 2005.
“You don’t giggle when AMOG makes a joke at your expense, he doesn’t like that?” The line was posted to the seduction newsgroup alt.seduction.fast (opens in a new window) on October 23, 2003, and a week later another poster there noted “entire threads on mASF devoted to handling AMOGs,” mASF being its moderated twin. The Game (opens in a new window) glossed the acronym in 2005 as “alpha male of the group or alpha male other guy,” “a socially comfortable male who competes with a pickup artist for a woman,” and “a constant thorn in the side of sargers.” Dictionary.com (opens in a new window) keeps the first expansion.
Psychology had studied the contest without the acronym. In 1988 David Buss (opens in a new window) described intrasexual competition as one in which “individuals compete with members of their own sex for reproductively relevant resources held by members of the opposite sex,” and measured the “performance frequencies of 23 tactics.” The pickup shelf named the competitor and sold the tactics for handling him. In its vocabulary the contest is between 2 men, and the woman is where the resources are held.
Under load, the AMOG is a ranking that one bidder performs on another. The man who names him has placed the other man at the top of a hierarchy he alone is keeping, and then plans the evening around it. The other man is often unaware that a contest has opened. The woman it concerns is the one party whose preference has not been entered, and the acronym has no field for it.