The Sad, Stupid Rise of the Sigma Male
The Guardian does its best to try to bury the Socio-Sexual Hierarchy
What feels like the Guardian’s thirty-seventh hit piece on me in the last 11 years reads rather like the advice Bernadette gave to Howard when he was being bullied by the other astronauts on the space station.
“Being Sigma is sad, stupid, and cringe. What’s cool is being nice!”
The sad, stupid rise of the sigma male: how toxic masculinity took over social media
His heroes are Patrick Bateman, John Wick, Tommy Shelby and Walter White. He follows Andrew Tate and idolises wolves. And he has quickly become a laughing stock. Welcome to the world of the sigma male
While we should worry about the conduit from toxic manosphere fringe to teen-friendly TikTok fare, if the plan was to brainwash a new generation, it doesn’t seem to be working very well. In fact, sigmas have become a bit of a laughing stock.
“One of the first things I would say if somebody was coming to me asking what a sigma male was, is ‘Don’t take it too seriously’,” says Don Caldwell, editor in chief of Know Your Meme, which tracks meme culture. “I’d say 90% of the time it’s being used ironically, in a joking fashion.” Almost as soon as the sigma male went viral in 2021, “people started to meme it, because they thought the concept was really funny and silly”, says Caldwell.
When I ask a small sample of 15-year-olds what comes to mind when they hear the word “sigma”, the universal response is: “cringe”. Cringe at hearing someone of their parents’ generation using the term, but also cringe at the general idea of sigmas.
“I’ve never in my life heard anyone use it in a serious way,” says Mabel.
“You might use it to take the piss out of someone,” offers Alex. “Like, if someone posted their workout video online you’d go, ‘Oh he’s being a sigma.’”
They’ve mostly come to sigma content secondhand, after it’s been recycled and chopped up and folded into TikTok videos and the like. They’re familiar with sigma types like Bateman and Tate, but have no idea of the term’s manosphere roots or its original meaning.
“The type of male who’s like masculine and strong and provides,” says Alex.
“I think it’s sort of like an alpha, wolf kind of person?” says Mabel.
“The existing worry is that as these terms travel from the fringe of the web to the mainstream, they surreptitiously spread their reactionary messages, but that assumes that the meaning of these terms stays the same as they travel across different platforms,” says Dr Daniël de Zeeuw of Amsterdam university, who studies online culture. Just as offline language changes and evolves continuously, so too does online language, says De Zeeuw, except at a much faster rate. “You differentiate yourself by way of these mimetic innovations, so constantly coining neologisms, bending and transforming language and visuals.”
Now, what’s fascinating about this article, aside from serving as irrefutable evidence of the backwardness of the current state of science and establishing precedence for me as the father of anthrothesiology, is the idea that there is an “existing worry” about the mere existence of “these terms”.
What is it about the socio-sexual hierarchy that is so fundamentally threatening to Clown World? What is it about the concept of the Sigma Male that merits such a targeted disinformation campaign, even as their own experts assure them that the essential meanings will be lost in translation anyhow.
Why are they so desperate to convince young men that being Sigma is not an aspirational objective, but is sad, stupid, cringe, and will only make you a laughingstock. You wouldn’t want people to laugh at you, would you, Anon?
(By the way, this last bit is a Gamma red flag. Only Gamma Males live in absolute terror of the idea that someone, somewhere, might be laughing at him. That’s why they’re always appending LOL to their written statements.)
And what is “reactionary” about a simple taxonomy of observable human behavior that dates back to the earliest examples of our written records?
Only when you understand the answers to these questions can you truly fathom how utterly irrational, how completely insane, the current mainstream Clown World narrative is. One day, the science will catch up to the concepts that have been introduced here and begin not only substantiating them, but utilizing them.
But it’s going to take a while. And in the meantime, the Gammas in the media are going to fight it every step of the way. One guess as to why Steve Rose, the author of the article who is pictured below with his memetic archetype, instinctively hates the very concept of the SSH.
The beauty of the SSH is its antifragility. Even its strongest, most dedicated critics only serve to demonstrate its relevance.
I don't always agree with you or your takes, but The Guardian and that Steve Rose hit piece on you is idiocy.
This kind of article is only going to cause more men to look up the SSH! So retarded and clumsy that it mocks itself...But then, the Guardian can be pretty much counted on to publish thiis sort of drivel...