Bruh, that’s problematic: The highly concerning rise of the sigma male movement
By Emily Velasquez
We have seen men become concerningly more comfortable with spewing casual misogyny and passing it as “sigma” male behavior, alluding to characters with that unempathetic, dominant personality.
With the popularity of films like “American Psycho” and “Fight Club,” young people have been gravitating toward masculine characters with mental health issues. However, many have managed to completely miss why these characters were portrayed that way and what message it was actually trying to send. With this came a lot of young men trying to relate to the characters, but not in any healthy way. Instead of identifying with the character’s struggles, they aim to emulate their personalities and actions leading to a lot of aggressive masculinity.
The discussion on men’s mental health has been going on for decades. The idea that men shouldn’t be very emotional is still prominent in our society. This notion stemmed from the misogynistic ideals that told us women are the “emotional beings.” Our society has made steady progress, openly discussing men’s mental health issues. The sigma male movement threatens that progress. When viewers ignore the actual problems with these characters and what they experience and in turn only focus on how “manly” and attractive they are, they’re only pushing patriarchal ideals further.
Books like “American Psycho” and “Fight Club” were written to depict stereotypical masculine characters as insufferable and unstable people. Patrick Bateman and Tyler Durden presented destructive and violent displays of mental illness, which harmed not just them but the people surrounding them. Further, these characters are caricatures of toxic male archetypes as well as undiagnosed harmful personality disorders.
Bateman is a yuppie who preyed on women and killed people. The admiration of his character from other men should be extremely concerning. Tyler Durden is also a character who was created to reflect a bad person. In reality, most of these sigma males who are trying to relate to them are actually nothing like them. They simply see them as a high tier of masculinity that they want to reach due to the character’s physically attractive looks, high paying career, freewheeling lifestyle, and dominant energy.
With the rise of popular internet personalities like Andrew Tate, more and more men are buying into misogyny being sold as self-help. In 2017, Vice described how men see “Fight Club’’ as a “sacred” text and congregate in spaces that have violent ideas about women. It also described how the film has become popular among men’s rights activists, who are very anti-feminist.
Another article refers to another set of underground groups of more dangerous men. These men have taken a liking to “Fight Club” and discuss various techniques to be used to get more women to have sex with them. This is disgusting and predatory. These discussions and spaces have existed way before “Fight Club.” But now the character Tyler Durden is worshiped as an idol by these men despite the message of the film. An article by Lit Hub describes how some men “thought the story was about how men should be able to take out their aggression however and whenever they want.” This displays how the romanticization of these unstable masculine characters aren’t just harming men’s mental health, but also harming women.
When we normalize emotionless, insensitive and unempathetic behaviors in this manner, we open up opportunities for men to excuse gross behavior towards women as just being “sigma males.” Sigma male has become the operative term to define a man who is dominant, successful, attractive, and independent. The term, according to Dictionary.com, originated from a far-right activist named Theodore Robert Beale also known as Vox Day. The term being created by a far-right activist explains why the men who unironically use this term are extreme bigots.
This ideology also impacts younger boys and exposes them to these harmful mindsets. Once extreme ideologies surface and enter mainstream and social media, other similarly harmful ideologies can splinter off from there.
From the beginning of the sigma male trend, I have seen it sprout into encouraging misogynistic habits like improving one’s physical appearance through “looksmaxing,” and pushing body image issues onto young boys. Looksmaxing, according to the Incels Wiki, is “any attempt at improving one’s appearance.” However, most of these attempts come from harmful tips. Some attempts I’ve seen included skin bleaching, anabolic steroids, mewing (keeping your tongue on the roof of your mouth to change your jawline), or bonesmashing (hitting parts of the face with a hard object in order to achieve features like prominent cheekbones). Mewing and bone smashing tend to be most popular among middle school aged boys.
The sigma male trend has also reinvigorated online spaces of men who consider themselves incels, or “involuntarily celibate.” These spaces are known for their idealism of extreme misogyny, extreme racism, and extreme homophobia.
I decided to research these in incel forums myself. They are not as hidden as you think and it can very easy to find for a young boy scouring the internet. What I found on these forums were nothing but hateful men who blame most, if not all, their problems on women and their standards imposed on men. The topic of conversations were almost always violent statements towards women and other marginalized groups. Not only were these men racist and homophobic, but there was an alarming amount of pedophilia as well. Multiple users made comments on being attracted to teenaged girls, some even expressed an attraction to girls younger than that.
Some may believe that this sigma ideology won’t go any further than harmless self-improvement. I would argue that people, especially when struggling or emotionally vulnerable, can easily get sucked into this alt-right pipeline with such easy access to any information related to it. What is currently on the surface is already harmful with casual sexism being so easily passed off as normal comment on the internet. A closer look reveals much more dangerous situations.
Elliot Rodger went on a shooting spree in Isla Vista, California which resulted in 6 deaths, 14 injured, and his suicide. Rodger was a self proclaimed incel and was well known on these misogynistic platforms. Incels to this day still look up to him.
We need to alter this mindset if we want to encourage self-improvement in young men. The sigma male ideology ignites nothing but hatred and misogyny. This might seem like just a small issue affecting a small percentage of men, but it goes deeper and there are hundreds of thousands of men like this out there, thousands you may not suspect.
