This intimacy can only be enjoyed when those roles are left at the door.

I have to disagree here. I am pretty convinced now that hierarchy role games are an important (if not the key) part of sexual attraction. Career lady lawyers are surely sick of intimidating everyone! Feminism would need centuries to change biochemical triggers. And the favour projection towards the 1% alpha is not a logical choice for the most women, I have to suggest.

So you related this diary to me living in Greece, nice! You would expect that above average employment and prospects would be a good sell in a crisis stricken country. But no way you can rely on that! I do not remember pickier women anywhere else (or ever?). Thus I resorted to internet search soon, haha.

I always thought the hierarchy went:

Alpha Males
Alpha Females
Beta Females wanting to be alpha females
Beta Males
Gammas (who are pretty much out of the game in both sexes)

That's certainly how American jock/cheerleader culture seems to work. The cheerleaders slut-shame the female betas 'under' them while having far more random sex than they do, because that happens to be an efficient way to get an alpha husband you can divorce later, and they don't want the competition from their social inferiors.

So far as I can tell from a comfortable distance, being labelled a slut by the popular girls in high school is far more devastating to female self-esteem than anything the boys can say to them.

All the alphas are afflicted with textbook narcissism, which pretty much defines the alpha mindset. Deviations from an idealised image are not allowed.

Here's a female startup founder talking about her job interview style:

Q. What would cut an interview short for you?

A. If somebody is negative at all about anything, it's done for me. If they describe a past job as not fun, I am literally done because it's your job to make your life fun, and it's in your hands. If you didn't figure out how to make something of it, you're not going to figure out how to make something of it here.

Now, no obvious slut-shaming happening here. But woe betide you if you show honest feelings or - worse - an ability to think critically about your work environment, because that marks you out as a loser.

The unconscious irony is strong in this one:

Q. What are some things that are unusual about your culture?

A. Every month, an employee wins the gnome that we named Chomsky, and employees submit a "gnomination" for who they think deserves it most. The winner gets to have Chomsky on their desk for a month and they get $1,000. We read to the entire team why they deserve the award, which is tied into our four leadership principles.

So... alphas are alphas. Male and female alphas do alpha in somewhat different ways, but they're both primarily interested in controlling their environment to maximise their self-image.

For an alpha woman, or a wannabe alpha woman, settling for a non-alpha man would be considered a terrible narcissistic wounding.

Which is why talking about 'men do...' or 'women do...' is stupid. You need more levels to get the nuance.