So New York magazine’s Jesse Singal — GamerGate bete noire and one of the central figures in Candace Owens‘ crackpot conspiracy theories — has written a really quite fascinating piece on the history of the alpha male. Or at least on the history of the idea of the alpha male, from its humble origins in primatology to its current obsessional ubiquity amongst pickup artists and Red Pillers and cuck-calling Anime Nazi Trump fans.
So how did Singal’s internet, er, critics attempt to rebut his claim that Americans have become “infatuated with a cartoonish idea of ‘Alpha Males?'”
And then there was this, Tweeted out shortly before New York put up Signal’s piece this morning by someone mad about a different Singal article:
Booplesnoot, I will take that bet.
@Eva, I’m not sure what exactly you’re testing with that! It does sound like a terrible website though :s
@Dalillama, ooooo I will look it up. That is my thing.
@Paradoxical Intentions, Resident Sigmoidal Slut … Sigma Male. Another greek coded masculine stereotype, now? I want to look into it. Let’s do a google and see what comes up on it, it sounds like more ego-reinforcing bullshit.
…. eeeyup. First google hits are /r/RedPillWomen and MRA blogs. Exactly zero hits for the unified phrase on google scholar. Quelle suprise..
Top link on the general search is from a place called “The Sigma Project”, which has an article about “What is a Sigma Male.” So what are these mysterious manlymans? Are they referencing a sigmoidal function, maybe? That would be appropriate. They –
… oh, no, the “sigma” is just because it’s another greek letter. Okay, so what makes them so awesome that they might even be more alpha than the alphamans? They –
pfffffhhhhttttt
Okay, okay, okay, guys. Really. They’re like the alphamans, so they’re successful and strong and heroic and all the girls want them and all the guys are super jealous. But they don’t play the game. They don’t fit into society. They don’t follow your rules, man! They win at the game of social interaction, but man, they don’t even care, man!
So they’re as alpha’ey as any alphaman, but they don’t have a pack. They a lone wolf that hunts alone.
So they’re an “alpha male” that has stuck a different letter on their faces, since they’re defined the exact same way as they define their alpha male. Alternatively, what a MGTOW tells himself to rationalize why people don’t want to be around him.
(my brain keeps shifting sigma male –> smegma male, and it’s awful and hilarious)
Welp, that was fun! MRA’s and their adjacents are so weird, guys! It’s all about hierarchy and classification and rules. So desperately authoritarian.
We should come up with a linnaean taxonomy of MRA’s. That would be fun.
@Scildfreja:
A Linnaean taxonomy sounds great fun. However, I foresee a problem: Linnaean taxonomy assumes that categories are well-defined and non-overlapping.
I suggest that an Euler diagram may be a better one; and if that gets too complex then an n-dimensional scatter plot is the obvious answer, although it might be difficult to represent visually.
On second thought, in the specific case where n=3, we could map it to RGB colour space and then define the axes so that Carl Benjamin of Swindon is a particularly ugly shade of puce.
I adore colour mapping. I don’t know why. One of my more recent visualizations of learner competence (a.k.a. grading system) was a karyotype map, with all of the different areas of learning as different “chromosomes” in the map and all of the skill “genes” different colours based on score. Wasn’t easy to tell exactly where your problems were, but you could tell right away whether your skills in a particular field were well-unified, and could easily link your strong areas between fields. Was a fun little test!
http://schoolbag.info/biology/living/living.files/image287.jpg
Smegma Male, Smegma Male,
Hasn’t got over the Hugo fail
Tells a tale, mostly lies,
Sorry can’t chat, how time flies
Look Out! Here comes the Smegma Male
They say heeeeeee can fight!
and he gets all the 10’s
and he’s reeeeeeeally bright!
more than the alpha mens!
Smegma male, Smegma male,
Knows judo, eats his kale
Better than, all the rest
In tuxedo and buttoned vest
Look out!
’cause he’s just a manly hang-up,
argue and there’s a bang-up,
’cause he’s a Smegma maaaaaaaale!
Sigma Male
http://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/megaman/images/4/41/Mmxsigma.jpg
Probably the original idea of the ‘Sigma Male’ is that he’s one step removed from the Alpha… so using Sigma as the standard deviation steps away from the peak. At least, that’s the only way in which some of those lines above makes even a vague approximation of sense.