He singled out actor Clint Eastwood’s movie characters as examples of sigma males. The sigma male is introverted and shuns mainstream society, yet still manages to be a successful man who is popular with women.īeale described sigma males as “lone wolves” and likened them to introverted alpha males. While a so-called alpha male is aggressive, sociable, and outgoing, the sigma male is constructed as succeeding in life and in relationships without actively engaging in social interaction. There’s no reason given for the use of Sigma, though I do note that the letter is used in statistics for the standard deviation or in geometry for an unknown angle, and it has an association with General Electric’s “Six Sigma” doctrine, popularized by Jack Welch, the man who killed Fordism.Īccording to ’s slang page about the Sigma Male: Specifically, Theodore Robert Beale, also known as Vox Day (who is discussed brilliantly in Elizabeth Sandifer’s Neoreaction a Basilisk, which is in turn reviewed by Edgar here,) picked it. Well, in Mech’s original typology, the Omega was the “lone wolf”, but MRAs already decided that being the Omega was bad, so they picked a new letter. So, if we have the A, B, G, and O, where the hell does the S come in? Even if the form of society might replicate the form of the prison, we here at Broken Hands Media are a bit to Deleuzian to accept that at purely face value. We will leave the ghost of Michel Foucault where it is, because he doesn’t have anything helpful to add here. Essentially, they were looking at the dynamics of a prison gang, played out in captive animals, and assuming that this holds true for human beings in day to day society. As Mech and other researchers note, they were observing male wolves in captivity, usually from different packs. Sometimes, it’s thought that there’s room for a population of subordinated “Gammas”, but all of this is bullshit and isn’t borne out. The leader is the Alpha, his collaborators are the Betas, and the member of the group picked on by the others is the Omega. This concept essentially boils down to the idea that there is a static and immutable hierarchy of dominance in all groups: one person (usually a man) leads, and the rest follow. David Mech, who has tragically had to spend the rest of his career trying to debunk it, in his 1970 book The Wolf. This was first done by Rudolph Schenkel, a researcher at the University of Basel, and was picked up later by L. This is a cancerous outgrowth of work done on captive gray wolves. There is a concept out there that all of society is predicated upon a socio-sexual hierarchy, and that we all have a place in it. Unfortunately, this means I need to write a primer on this topic, so I’m sorry in advance. However, while talking with Edgar yesterday, I came to a realization about the whole “Sigma Male” thing that I realized that I need to share. This week’s series from Behind the Bastards is an excellent primer on the concept and the general state of the so-called “manosphere” (I especially liked being pointed towards We Hunted the Mammoth’s photo series of MGTOW food, which were an excellent example of what I defined cringe as in my piece on American Cringe – read: something of which no parody is really possible.) Throw into the mix the recent discourse about so-called “Sigma males”, and you have a recipe for something that really needs to be talked about. This might have to do with the number of transmasculine people I’m hanging out with these days (Edgar, while nonbinary or agender, also identifies as trans-masculine, and one of our most common drinking buddies is a trans man,) which throws the whole thing into a somewhat different light: it’s been commented that talking to cis people about gender is like taking a 101 course and talking to a transgender person about gender is like taking a master class, and while this is somewhat reductionist, I feel it generally holds true. I’ve been thinking about returning to my series on Healthy Masculinity lately, and it has never seemed quite so relevant.
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