<
https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/jun/12/the-sad-stupid-rise-of-the-sigma-male-how-toxic-masculinity-took-over-social-media>
"You are a lone wolf. You are an independent thinker who makes his own rules.
You are confident and competent. Women are drawn to you, but you don’t really
care about them. Your day begins at 4.30am with a cold shower, followed by a
punishing workout and an even more punishing skincare routine. You shun
conventional career paths and run your own business, probably in crypto or real
estate or vigilante crime fighting. You are that rarest of males – you are a
sigma.
Either that or you’re a bemused bystander who has had a hard time avoiding
content about sigma males and the “sigma grindset”. In the past few years,
sigma masculinity has blown up. It’s all over social media – and it’s helped
define what could be a masculine archetype for our times, supposedly
exemplified by characters played by the likes of Keanu Reeves, Cillian Murphy,
Bryan Cranston and Christian Bale, plus the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate
as well as actual, real life wolves.
All of these and more have gone into the meme-culture blender when it comes to
the sigma phenomenon, which could well be an indication of how deep it has
seeped into the mainstream, and by extension into the minds of our
impressionable, smartphone-addicted youth. It has been described as “extremist
thinking” and “a new kind of toxic masculinity”, although as we shall see,
these fears may be overstated.
Either way, YouTuber Lily Simpson probably summed it up best in a viral post on
Twitter/X from January 2021 that helped put the whole thing into the
mainstream: above four images of various permutations of sigma male content, it
read: “What the fuck is going on with men?”"
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
