As a woman who has never understood women, I read this and all the comments hoping for guidance. Alas, it's as I thought, there is none to receive. I've known how to navigate the male hierarchy my entire life, even during the confusing puberty phase, but have always been at a loss about women. The male hierarchy is refreshing, clear, and repeatable. If I behave like X on one day, it is received the same way every time. Not true with women. I can present the same way twice and on one day am loved and the next day outcast. To me, female friendship is shifting, based on how the other feels in that moment and unless you can gauge that emotional shift in her mind and change to accommodate it, you will lose. So I gave up trying when I was nine. I'm often called the Queen Bee by other women, always with contempt. The other day a woman asked me if I'd let my son's girlfriend live with us after college. I said, " I am the lady of the house. I will not share that space with anyone other than family. Unless he puts a ring on her finger, she is not family, no matter how much I adore her. So no, she can't live with us unless he commits." To which the woman said, "you've always been the queen be." As a beekeeper who has studied the honey bee hive for twelve years, I'm not sure anyone is using that term correctly. The queen is in charge and tells the hive what to do, but she makes the ultimate sacrifice for the hive, never leaving except to mate the first time, and then again to swarm in order to make room for the new Queen Bee. This is successful reproduction in the hive. It's her only purpose. While I'm willing to take on that role, methinks most modern women have been raised to despise such homemaking mastery.
My guess is that it is wholly based on the rank of man that each woman can score. The woman of the group who can score the highest ranking man is at the top and the hierarchy goes in a linear pattern down to the least desirable woman.
Women near the top probably have more sway over group decisions and women near the bottom are probably expected to fall in line with whatever decisions the higher ranking women make.
In every group of women there will always be one woman who can score better men than the rest. Women who accept that this woman is the highest ranking one tend to have better friendships.
As for the prettiest woman, she has to befriend women who aren’t bitter that she is better looking than them and who accept that she will generally always score the higher ranking men.
The Female Social Sexual Hierarchy/Pecking Order is:
Too cool for school - Best looking girl, goes out with an older mystery Sigma or Alpha.
Homecoming Queen - Most Popular due to a combination of looks and being friendly to most/everyone.
Best friend of Homecoming Queen.
Close friend of Homecoming Queen.
(Status is a function of proximity to power.)
Queen Bee - Most Machiavellian woman at school, sees the Homecoming Queen as her main competition and usually attacks her by attacking the weakest orost vulnerable of the Homecoming Queens friends.
Queen Bee Lieutenant - Second most Machiavellian woman in group.
3rd in command/status is 3rd most Macchiavellian etc.
The rest of the girls break down the same way. The prettiest/most popular in the group is the leader. Who she seems to be her best friend has the next highest status in that group etc.
When two groups come together it defaults to the prettiest most popular unless one of the groups has a Queen Bee (Mean Girls) to which they will bully the new girls until they conform or are rescued by a man or a better looking/more popular group of other girls.
wait so… is there a hierarchical distribution of the typology of women w.r.t. the SSH status of their husbands? Like, can we find regular patterns of female behavior that strongly correlate to them choosing particular SSH-types of men?
in my personal experience, as someone who usually fits the 'sigma' category in most social settings, the women who've chosen to be with me have all been best friends with an obviously alpha female, but aren't so much alpha themselves
so like, from their perspective, they're looking for a man for whom jealousy won't flare up from the alpha female, but nevertheless still a man with relatively high perceived status
also worth mentioning that the alpha females I have tried to date just hated my lack of risibility and total disregard for the alpha male braggadocio "I'll take your girl" kinda stuff
It is queued up to where he outlines his hierarchy but you'll probably want to watch the beginning where all the girls, including a 1, claim to be "10s".
No idea if there is a Female SSH, or what it might be. But based on my observations in the discussion of the Male-SSH (M-SSH), I suspect the following:
It will a while before we can get the average guy to stop applying the M-SSH to himself, or trying to redefine it to raise his rank. That means for those guys they are still in the awareness stage and can't use the tool properly yet.
If they can't apply the M-SSH properly, how can they participate in discovering the F-SSH?
This means that these guys are still too focused on themselves as the frame of reference.
Discovering an outside system while remaining self-focused within one's own system is not likely to yield much. As guys, we are going to have to develop a much better ability to perceive the mechanisms within our own system and learn to observe and anticipate actions.
Predictions, but not what the F-SSH is, but about it's arrival on our shores:
--If defined, only a few will be able to truly perceive it
--Even fewer will be able to apply it
--If the M-SSH is fertile soil for self-focus and squabbles over definitions, this will be no different
--If it makes it into widespread use, husbands will have new questions that will require diplomatic answers. (similar to: Does this outfit look good on me?)
--A sitcom will be ginned up wherein they manage to get the concepts almost, but not entirely exactly wrong.
--Dating apps will add the F-SSH ranks as hashtags or attributes. Like hair color. They will add the M-SSH as well, forcing all men to identify as Alpha or Sigma to get matched. Women will have a feature allowing them to specify a guy's rank as the reason for rejection.
--Left unexplored is the way in which Evangelical pastors will interact with this. The jokes write themselves.
Also prioritzing losing weight and having an under nourished body (in my opinion) seems to be a mostly european women thing. Yes other races do it as well but not to the extent.
This is how I envision the female hierachy: Crone aka the( Mother of Mothers), Mother, then the "not mother group". But within each group there is a hierachy mostly based on beauty but other traits such as skills, charm, and income level counts too. So within the each group there could be "fights" like the article suggests to be better/higher than someone else. So women can change there hierachy position unlike men. Although I imagine at the Crone level their probably isn't much "fighting" since they are older and beauty is fleeting. The only complication to this is women on the spectrum. The article implies healthy feminine female but I'm seeing more stories of females who don't feel feminine and "get a long with guys" more so they don't really interact with the pecking order. As suggested before I think that's a disorder caused by healthy issues or trama and not necessarily normal feminine behavior.
The toxic nature of single female 'friend' groups which resent, undermine, chastise and sabotage members who deviate from the group norm in terms of beliefs and behavior (woke, man-hating, degenerate, self-destructive) leaves some women with few/no close female friends. How well a woman conforms to the increasingly low standards of the majority of her peers should hardly count against her, but rather recommend her.
Girls who "get along with the guys" are the losers of the Female Social Dynamic. Hanging out with simps is a cheap but inadequate substitute. But of course they can't think that far ahead.
The Villages (tm) has plenty of fights among the women. Age and menopause may modulate the drama, but not a cure.
The mother-daughter drama, not to mention the MIL-DIL drama, shows that female cross-generational drama is alive and well. Age is not a hierarchy category, regardless of the children stories.
Women can take mentorship from a women one stage higher and can regress one stage lower when useful to their purposes.
The problem with this hierarchy is that there is no sexual component from a male perspective. (Other then certain problems with women are obviously endemic to certain stages)
For the male SSH, a man's status among other men directly affects how attractive he is to women. For women, their status among other women doesn't have any (direct) bearing on how attractive she is to men. In fact, the causal relationship is more likely reversed: her attractiveness to men greatly determines her status among other women.
The male hierarchy gives men concrete information on how to be more attractive to women, but it isn't as immediately obvious that understanding female competition can help women attract men (except maybe be skeptical of the advice of other women).
If there are any fixed categories in the female SSH, I suspect they have less to do with how they compete with other women, and more to do with what kinds of romantic relationships a woman is able to maintain with what kind of men.
For women it seems like they all want to knock down the pretty nail who sticks out. Which is why the least attractive one is the most slutty, and the one with the prettiest face is encouraged to cut her hair short. Meanwhile the one with the ugly face is always in short-shorts or has her titties on display.
As a non-expert, it seems to me that unlike a male hierarchy, women have more of a committee who ensure everyone is looking, talking, and acting the same. Which probably also explains why they are so likely to vote for collectivists who want to uplift the poor and tax the rich.
Other than @Julie C and a few others, you all got confused.
Tldr: Female Social Dynamics, too chaotic for hierarchy. BB said family framework, not packs. Women love efficiency and being organized, ala Jordan Peterson. Jealousy due to Gaussian Distribution and advertising.
Trying to look for "hierarchy" is the wrong paradigm and frame of analysis, which leads you down the wrong answers. As Big Bear previously discussed, women generally view groups in a family-type framework. (One reason why "Friends" and #ChosenFamily resonate so much with women in general.) So that is one thing to keep in mind. Instead, look at the Female Social Dynamics. (Hierarchy is too static. Women are too chaotic.)
Look at the mom-influencers. What are they selling, why women follow them. Look at Marie Kondo. Anorexia. The greatest common factor among all those, is "Organized". Women may have a sense of aesthetics, but they are (generally) not sexually attracted to other women, so they cannot measure sexual attractiveness on their own without male help. But they can measure Organized/Togetherness/Ability on their own. They aspire to be organized, in part because they are emotional, (sometimes) having difficulty organizing their own thoughts. So they celebrate the women who can "do-it-all", who can juggle a career and a three-course-dinner, while still have time for a clean house and well-dressed children.
(Fashion and fashion labels remain a mystery to me. Welcome insight on female fashion dynamics.)
So this female veneration for Taylorist efficiency explains much of the non-sexual components of female social dynamics.
Women cannot sustain large groups because of jealousy and competition. I think part of that is the different ability-distribution between women and men. Women's standard deviation is so much smaller than men's. Therefore, women rarely recognize ability differences amongst acquaintances. And therefore, when they see someone else getting what they themselves want, their first thought is often, "why isn't that me getting it?" Some women are of course more content with their station in life than others. However, modern advertising and the overall materialist culture prime women to prioritize Desire/Greed all the time, which makes them less content and often more jealous. (See Filipina's reputation for jealousy vs American ones, eg.)
[Also why some smarter but less pretty women, like gammas, revere iconoclasts and love inversion thinking.]
So women, though liking groups, often devolve into bonded pairs BFFs (in the absence of families). And often parasitizes off of a male social hierarchy, including both social scene and corporate scene.
"Fashion and fashion labels remain a mystery to me. Welcome insight on female fashion dynamics."
This goes back to the herd dynamic. If it is approved by an "authority" (and branding is a proxy for authority), then it must be good and therefore ok for the herd to embrace. Feminine thinking is less able (or maybe just less willing) to evaluate on merits, using emotion, instinct, and herd-approval instead. So what we think of as "fashion" is herd-imprinting which shortcuts the evaluation process. It is why nearly all marketing is aimed at females - not only because of market size, but because of herd-imprinting.
Also in response to Jimmy Wu: I do not think "pack" is appropriate to visualize female groups. Obviously I think "herd" is better. There is a distinction between the two and it is important.
Herd instinct / conformity does not explain how a fashion label get started in the first place from obscurity. Nor does it explain why one particular fashion label is in vogue over the others at any given moment.
For example, why does Gwyneth Paltrow and the Kardashians have branding empires, but, say, Megan Fox is consigned to B-movie status.
[Limiting discussion to female fashion because male fashion is irrelevant outside of Italy and Korea.]
A power-conspiracy model (companies anoint celebrities to sell shit) does not explain why any given celebrity gets anointed over any other ones. Nor does it explain why one wannabe succeeds while others fail. Los Angeles and New York run on failed ambitions.
"Women look at Kardashian because other women do" is a useless explanation. The tabloids are filled with silly celebrity gossips of all sorts. Women pay attention to all of them. Gwyneth and Kim represent two poles of the female sexual behavior spectrum (and body spectrum), with plenty of other competitors. Yet they could leverage into branding while others failed, based solely on female attention consumption. (Men don't buy Kardashian perfumes or Paltrow benwas.) Why.
This distinction now enters the field of commerce. Why Gwyneth or Kardashians? Because brand status was conferred upon them by those wanting to sell makeup and magazines.
I would argue that a fashion brand "started from obscurity" (if you acknowledge that such a thing is possible) that rises to prominence, does so exactly because it perfectly taps into the herd instinct either intentionally or unintentionally.
Kardashians is a prime example. They exist only because women pay attention. Women pay attention because other women pay attention. They tapped the herd (and significant portions of the NBA) and it worked.
Regarding Megan Fox, who knows why she has no branding empire? Maybe she isn't inclined that way as a person, or never tried? Maybe she didn't test well with female audiences? It's an interesting question, I have no idea.
Because the female "group" has little cohesion (intragroup jealousy and penchant for manufactured drama), female "dominance" is not like male dominance. Female "leadership" is more because women in general, and most of the time, do not know what they want. (Eg, "where do you want to eat?") Therefore, in a pack or dyad context, someone eventually has to take on a lead role reluctantly. (Some Tracy Flick type might be trained to always have an answer, but they don't have social power within a female-only pack directly, absent female status markers like efficiency.)
But the pack remains a consensus organization. Because women often ghost the groups they don't like. So the "leader" raises a suggestion, and if satisfactory, the pack follows along. And over time, the "leader" develops a sufficiently-accurate model of group desires. And they get used to following the leader.
The oft-mentioned meanness and what not, that is often the result of aforementioned jealousy and manufactured drama. And yes, female leaders get jealous or drama-hungry, too.
As a woman who has never understood women, I read this and all the comments hoping for guidance. Alas, it's as I thought, there is none to receive. I've known how to navigate the male hierarchy my entire life, even during the confusing puberty phase, but have always been at a loss about women. The male hierarchy is refreshing, clear, and repeatable. If I behave like X on one day, it is received the same way every time. Not true with women. I can present the same way twice and on one day am loved and the next day outcast. To me, female friendship is shifting, based on how the other feels in that moment and unless you can gauge that emotional shift in her mind and change to accommodate it, you will lose. So I gave up trying when I was nine. I'm often called the Queen Bee by other women, always with contempt. The other day a woman asked me if I'd let my son's girlfriend live with us after college. I said, " I am the lady of the house. I will not share that space with anyone other than family. Unless he puts a ring on her finger, she is not family, no matter how much I adore her. So no, she can't live with us unless he commits." To which the woman said, "you've always been the queen be." As a beekeeper who has studied the honey bee hive for twelve years, I'm not sure anyone is using that term correctly. The queen is in charge and tells the hive what to do, but she makes the ultimate sacrifice for the hive, never leaving except to mate the first time, and then again to swarm in order to make room for the new Queen Bee. This is successful reproduction in the hive. It's her only purpose. While I'm willing to take on that role, methinks most modern women have been raised to despise such homemaking mastery.
I don't think this is profound, but hostility to improvement is also a Gamma trait. Gammas really do think like women.
My guess is that it is wholly based on the rank of man that each woman can score. The woman of the group who can score the highest ranking man is at the top and the hierarchy goes in a linear pattern down to the least desirable woman.
Women near the top probably have more sway over group decisions and women near the bottom are probably expected to fall in line with whatever decisions the higher ranking women make.
In every group of women there will always be one woman who can score better men than the rest. Women who accept that this woman is the highest ranking one tend to have better friendships.
As for the prettiest woman, she has to befriend women who aren’t bitter that she is better looking than them and who accept that she will generally always score the higher ranking men.
Here's my first attempt at:
The Female Social Sexual Hierarchy/Pecking Order is:
Too cool for school - Best looking girl, goes out with an older mystery Sigma or Alpha.
Homecoming Queen - Most Popular due to a combination of looks and being friendly to most/everyone.
Best friend of Homecoming Queen.
Close friend of Homecoming Queen.
(Status is a function of proximity to power.)
Queen Bee - Most Machiavellian woman at school, sees the Homecoming Queen as her main competition and usually attacks her by attacking the weakest orost vulnerable of the Homecoming Queens friends.
Queen Bee Lieutenant - Second most Machiavellian woman in group.
3rd in command/status is 3rd most Macchiavellian etc.
The rest of the girls break down the same way. The prettiest/most popular in the group is the leader. Who she seems to be her best friend has the next highest status in that group etc.
When two groups come together it defaults to the prettiest most popular unless one of the groups has a Queen Bee (Mean Girls) to which they will bully the new girls until they conform or are rescued by a man or a better looking/more popular group of other girls.
Can a bucket of crabs have a hierarchy? I don't have the IQ to figure it out.
wait so… is there a hierarchical distribution of the typology of women w.r.t. the SSH status of their husbands? Like, can we find regular patterns of female behavior that strongly correlate to them choosing particular SSH-types of men?
Gamma^
I was social chair of the largest and most popular fraternity on my college campus. Not everyone smarter than you is a gamma.
Kind of you to prove his point for him.
You're probably even more retarded than this comment makes you seem.
in my personal experience, as someone who usually fits the 'sigma' category in most social settings, the women who've chosen to be with me have all been best friends with an obviously alpha female, but aren't so much alpha themselves
so like, from their perspective, they're looking for a man for whom jealousy won't flare up from the alpha female, but nevertheless still a man with relatively high perceived status
also worth mentioning that the alpha females I have tried to date just hated my lack of risibility and total disregard for the alpha male braggadocio "I'll take your girl" kinda stuff
This is a pretty interesting take on the female hierarchy by hoe_math.
I'm a 10: Status Games: https://youtu.be/PQtdOuD4cLc?feature=shared&t=204
It is queued up to where he outlines his hierarchy but you'll probably want to watch the beginning where all the girls, including a 1, claim to be "10s".
This dude has nice rhetoric but it’s all a fancy coverup for the nonsense that comes out of his mouth.
Female hierarchy is simple. On a scale of 0 to 1, would?
No idea if there is a Female SSH, or what it might be. But based on my observations in the discussion of the Male-SSH (M-SSH), I suspect the following:
It will a while before we can get the average guy to stop applying the M-SSH to himself, or trying to redefine it to raise his rank. That means for those guys they are still in the awareness stage and can't use the tool properly yet.
If they can't apply the M-SSH properly, how can they participate in discovering the F-SSH?
This means that these guys are still too focused on themselves as the frame of reference.
Discovering an outside system while remaining self-focused within one's own system is not likely to yield much. As guys, we are going to have to develop a much better ability to perceive the mechanisms within our own system and learn to observe and anticipate actions.
Predictions, but not what the F-SSH is, but about it's arrival on our shores:
--If defined, only a few will be able to truly perceive it
--Even fewer will be able to apply it
--If the M-SSH is fertile soil for self-focus and squabbles over definitions, this will be no different
--If it makes it into widespread use, husbands will have new questions that will require diplomatic answers. (similar to: Does this outfit look good on me?)
--A sitcom will be ginned up wherein they manage to get the concepts almost, but not entirely exactly wrong.
--Dating apps will add the F-SSH ranks as hashtags or attributes. Like hair color. They will add the M-SSH as well, forcing all men to identify as Alpha or Sigma to get matched. Women will have a feature allowing them to specify a guy's rank as the reason for rejection.
--Left unexplored is the way in which Evangelical pastors will interact with this. The jokes write themselves.
I ordered the large popcorn for this one.
Losing unnecessary fat and under nourished are not the same thing. Excess fat is unhealthy. Slender is healthy. Body positivity is bad.
Also prioritzing losing weight and having an under nourished body (in my opinion) seems to be a mostly european women thing. Yes other races do it as well but not to the extent.
Sounds like you haven’t been to Korea.
This is how I envision the female hierachy: Crone aka the( Mother of Mothers), Mother, then the "not mother group". But within each group there is a hierachy mostly based on beauty but other traits such as skills, charm, and income level counts too. So within the each group there could be "fights" like the article suggests to be better/higher than someone else. So women can change there hierachy position unlike men. Although I imagine at the Crone level their probably isn't much "fighting" since they are older and beauty is fleeting. The only complication to this is women on the spectrum. The article implies healthy feminine female but I'm seeing more stories of females who don't feel feminine and "get a long with guys" more so they don't really interact with the pecking order. As suggested before I think that's a disorder caused by healthy issues or trama and not necessarily normal feminine behavior.
The toxic nature of single female 'friend' groups which resent, undermine, chastise and sabotage members who deviate from the group norm in terms of beliefs and behavior (woke, man-hating, degenerate, self-destructive) leaves some women with few/no close female friends. How well a woman conforms to the increasingly low standards of the majority of her peers should hardly count against her, but rather recommend her.
Girls who "get along with the guys" are the losers of the Female Social Dynamic. Hanging out with simps is a cheap but inadequate substitute. But of course they can't think that far ahead.
The Villages (tm) has plenty of fights among the women. Age and menopause may modulate the drama, but not a cure.
The mother-daughter drama, not to mention the MIL-DIL drama, shows that female cross-generational drama is alive and well. Age is not a hierarchy category, regardless of the children stories.
The self aware woman
The idealistic woman
The independent woman
The good girl
The bad girl
Women can take mentorship from a women one stage higher and can regress one stage lower when useful to their purposes.
The problem with this hierarchy is that there is no sexual component from a male perspective. (Other then certain problems with women are obviously endemic to certain stages)
I hope this is useful.
For the male SSH, a man's status among other men directly affects how attractive he is to women. For women, their status among other women doesn't have any (direct) bearing on how attractive she is to men. In fact, the causal relationship is more likely reversed: her attractiveness to men greatly determines her status among other women.
The male hierarchy gives men concrete information on how to be more attractive to women, but it isn't as immediately obvious that understanding female competition can help women attract men (except maybe be skeptical of the advice of other women).
If there are any fixed categories in the female SSH, I suspect they have less to do with how they compete with other women, and more to do with what kinds of romantic relationships a woman is able to maintain with what kind of men.
For women it seems like they all want to knock down the pretty nail who sticks out. Which is why the least attractive one is the most slutty, and the one with the prettiest face is encouraged to cut her hair short. Meanwhile the one with the ugly face is always in short-shorts or has her titties on display.
As a non-expert, it seems to me that unlike a male hierarchy, women have more of a committee who ensure everyone is looking, talking, and acting the same. Which probably also explains why they are so likely to vote for collectivists who want to uplift the poor and tax the rich.
Other than @Julie C and a few others, you all got confused.
Tldr: Female Social Dynamics, too chaotic for hierarchy. BB said family framework, not packs. Women love efficiency and being organized, ala Jordan Peterson. Jealousy due to Gaussian Distribution and advertising.
Trying to look for "hierarchy" is the wrong paradigm and frame of analysis, which leads you down the wrong answers. As Big Bear previously discussed, women generally view groups in a family-type framework. (One reason why "Friends" and #ChosenFamily resonate so much with women in general.) So that is one thing to keep in mind. Instead, look at the Female Social Dynamics. (Hierarchy is too static. Women are too chaotic.)
Look at the mom-influencers. What are they selling, why women follow them. Look at Marie Kondo. Anorexia. The greatest common factor among all those, is "Organized". Women may have a sense of aesthetics, but they are (generally) not sexually attracted to other women, so they cannot measure sexual attractiveness on their own without male help. But they can measure Organized/Togetherness/Ability on their own. They aspire to be organized, in part because they are emotional, (sometimes) having difficulty organizing their own thoughts. So they celebrate the women who can "do-it-all", who can juggle a career and a three-course-dinner, while still have time for a clean house and well-dressed children.
(Fashion and fashion labels remain a mystery to me. Welcome insight on female fashion dynamics.)
So this female veneration for Taylorist efficiency explains much of the non-sexual components of female social dynamics.
Women cannot sustain large groups because of jealousy and competition. I think part of that is the different ability-distribution between women and men. Women's standard deviation is so much smaller than men's. Therefore, women rarely recognize ability differences amongst acquaintances. And therefore, when they see someone else getting what they themselves want, their first thought is often, "why isn't that me getting it?" Some women are of course more content with their station in life than others. However, modern advertising and the overall materialist culture prime women to prioritize Desire/Greed all the time, which makes them less content and often more jealous. (See Filipina's reputation for jealousy vs American ones, eg.)
[Also why some smarter but less pretty women, like gammas, revere iconoclasts and love inversion thinking.]
So women, though liking groups, often devolve into bonded pairs BFFs (in the absence of families). And often parasitizes off of a male social hierarchy, including both social scene and corporate scene.
"Fashion and fashion labels remain a mystery to me. Welcome insight on female fashion dynamics."
This goes back to the herd dynamic. If it is approved by an "authority" (and branding is a proxy for authority), then it must be good and therefore ok for the herd to embrace. Feminine thinking is less able (or maybe just less willing) to evaluate on merits, using emotion, instinct, and herd-approval instead. So what we think of as "fashion" is herd-imprinting which shortcuts the evaluation process. It is why nearly all marketing is aimed at females - not only because of market size, but because of herd-imprinting.
Also in response to Jimmy Wu: I do not think "pack" is appropriate to visualize female groups. Obviously I think "herd" is better. There is a distinction between the two and it is important.
Herd instinct / conformity does not explain how a fashion label get started in the first place from obscurity. Nor does it explain why one particular fashion label is in vogue over the others at any given moment.
For example, why does Gwyneth Paltrow and the Kardashians have branding empires, but, say, Megan Fox is consigned to B-movie status.
[Limiting discussion to female fashion because male fashion is irrelevant outside of Italy and Korea.]
@Adam, your explanation is useless.
A power-conspiracy model (companies anoint celebrities to sell shit) does not explain why any given celebrity gets anointed over any other ones. Nor does it explain why one wannabe succeeds while others fail. Los Angeles and New York run on failed ambitions.
"Women look at Kardashian because other women do" is a useless explanation. The tabloids are filled with silly celebrity gossips of all sorts. Women pay attention to all of them. Gwyneth and Kim represent two poles of the female sexual behavior spectrum (and body spectrum), with plenty of other competitors. Yet they could leverage into branding while others failed, based solely on female attention consumption. (Men don't buy Kardashian perfumes or Paltrow benwas.) Why.
Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Kim Kardashian are ticket takers. Their fame is inorganic and their success isn't real.
Ticket-takers do compete with each other, limited though it may be.
This distinction now enters the field of commerce. Why Gwyneth or Kardashians? Because brand status was conferred upon them by those wanting to sell makeup and magazines.
I would argue that a fashion brand "started from obscurity" (if you acknowledge that such a thing is possible) that rises to prominence, does so exactly because it perfectly taps into the herd instinct either intentionally or unintentionally.
Kardashians is a prime example. They exist only because women pay attention. Women pay attention because other women pay attention. They tapped the herd (and significant portions of the NBA) and it worked.
Regarding Megan Fox, who knows why she has no branding empire? Maybe she isn't inclined that way as a person, or never tried? Maybe she didn't test well with female audiences? It's an interesting question, I have no idea.
See above.
Added note:
Because the female "group" has little cohesion (intragroup jealousy and penchant for manufactured drama), female "dominance" is not like male dominance. Female "leadership" is more because women in general, and most of the time, do not know what they want. (Eg, "where do you want to eat?") Therefore, in a pack or dyad context, someone eventually has to take on a lead role reluctantly. (Some Tracy Flick type might be trained to always have an answer, but they don't have social power within a female-only pack directly, absent female status markers like efficiency.)
But the pack remains a consensus organization. Because women often ghost the groups they don't like. So the "leader" raises a suggestion, and if satisfactory, the pack follows along. And over time, the "leader" develops a sufficiently-accurate model of group desires. And they get used to following the leader.
The oft-mentioned meanness and what not, that is often the result of aforementioned jealousy and manufactured drama. And yes, female leaders get jealous or drama-hungry, too.