We’re taking a dive into the bizarre world of sigma male affirmations and the disturbing but also very silly “sigma male industrial complex” on YouTube. From the origins of the dubious sigma male concept in the manosphere to its current online popularity, I examine an assortment of the often ludicrous sigma male affirmation videos on YouTube, their claims, and the psychology behind them. I argue that while affirmations can work, they really only do when they are reasonable and believable, which sigma male affirmations are decidedly not.
This video deals with:
*The evolution of the self-aggrandizing “sigma male” concept from niche internet subculture to viral trend
*Fisking of popular sigma male affirmation videos, from dull to downright delusional
*The psychology behind affirmations: why realistic ones can work and grandiose ones backfire
*Breakdowns of sigma male metaphors, from “lone wolves” to “great white sharks among minnows”
*The appeal of the sigma male archetype to socially awkward men seeking a cool, aloof identity
Also: creepy ASMR-style affirmations, hypnotic “masculine frequencies”, and claims of “massively high sexual marketplace value”. The video also contains dumb jokes, and you get to see the interior of the We Hunted the Mammoth manor.
Sorry it’s taken me this long to post this video. I’m trying my best to get on a weekly schedule, which should become a bit easier as I get more videos under my belt.
Feel free to post ideas for future videos in the comments! And whatever else you want, as is WHTM tradition.
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@ Vicky P
Ah indeed.
With narrowcasting it’s even easier to find a niche outlet that conforms to, and thus reinforces, your pre-exciting views.
It is a dilemma. Although I am very much fan of new media. The problem is, a lot of the time it can be more accurate and nuanced than traditional media. I notice that especially with legal topics. Trad media does its best; but it still gets a lot wrong. Partly that’s just lack of resources. The days of employing legally trained court reporters who actually sit in on trials is long gone. Now it’s just a non specialist journalist trying to make their best of the AP wire.
But of course there’s a lot of bad new media out their too. So how do you differentiate between accurate reportage and partisan editorialising disguised as news? Especially when there is so much distrust of trad media across the political spectrum.
I don’t think our Govt helped there by making it an offence to disseminate false information but then explicitly exempting the BBC from the legislation. Way to feed the conspiracy theorists.
Even with trad media though there was a lot of confirmation bias. As this classic clip demonstrates, and is still pertinent 40 years after first broadcast.
Hahaha no.
Democrats have policies. Quite a lot of them. But nobody actually pays attention to them except those who are really into politics, which is probably like 5% of the population.
Republicans currently have one policy, sort of. Which is ban all abortions everywhere. Except some of them are claiming (lying?) that no, leaving it up to the states really is what they wanted all along, and Trump keeps getting confused which one of those he’s supposed to support. Otherwise they mostly just invent ridiculous evil policies for Democrats to have, which are ignored and forgotten unless they can be turned into Fox News soundbites.
The Heritage Foundation has a Project 2025. They’re technically not a political party, and it’s not clear how much the Republicans would go along, given that Trump says no. Usually. You can never tell with him. The general public still doesn’t know or care much about it.
@ snowberry
There’s a quote from one of the people running HRC’s campaign that I think is very apposite:
“We brought a policy wonk knife to a populist gunfight.”
@Alan Robertshaw: I’m unsure how a Royal Armouries Museum tour demonstrates confirmation bias …
@Snowberry: Republicans currently have one policy, sort of. Which is
ban all abortions everywhere“what Hitler did”. (Including, of course, banning abortion.)That this didn’t have them instantly polling in the low single digits is both appalling and alarming.
The anti-trans backlash is worsening in Canada now, too:
https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2024/10/07/Is-There-Hope-Trans-People-BC/
Especially worrying is the polling data that strongly suggests that the fossil-fuel-funded Nazi-hobnobbing anti-trans Oilievre is going to win the next federal election, sometime in the next year. If his anti-disability and/or anti-welfare policies are sufficiently bad, I’m unlikely to make it to 2029 to vote against him twice, and it will probably be very bad for the LGBTQ+ Canadians and fairly bad for religious and racial minorities — not to mention catastrophic for the climate.
Comment on the subject I came across recently:
Alpha-Beta-Sigma is Astrology for men who get violent whenever a female tells them “no”.
Until the 1933-34 coup from within (when the Nazis had to win elections), they positioned themselves to German Christians as restoring Traditional German Family Values against the HOMOSEXUAL decadence of Weimar Berlin and the Global Radical Left. (And they DID put Prayer Back in Schools as well. Just in a couple years the prayers ended up being to the Fuehrer.)
Another point of their platform was “Blood and Soil” (Blut und Boden), a pre-existing nostagia genre idealizing an older, simpler time before the one-two punch of World War I and its aftermath — sort of a Little House on the Prairie auf Deutsch. And their PR spinmeister knew how to speak God-talk – in quotes from before the takeover, he sounded like a preacher.
Because of this, German Christians crusading for Kulturkampf gave them their support.
Algorithm Echo Chambers, precision targeted.
As Reichsminister Goebbels put it, the most effective propaganda is that which convinces the target that he has come to his own conclusions (“Did My Research”); once that is achieved, the internalized propaganda line becomes impossible to break.
Originally from study of wolves in captivity, thrown together from unrelated packs with no existing social structure or relationship – just like a prison gang.
In the wild, wolfpacks are family groups; the “Alpha Male” is actually the father/grandfather of the wolves in the pack. Even superpacks like Yellowstone’s (up to 50 instead of the usual under a dozen) are extended family groupings of family packs, like a human nomadic tribe. And the “Alpha couples” are actually pretty monogamous; it could be years before a widowed Alpha takes another mate.
I wrote:
Amend that, due to two more data points.
One: in addition to all of the above, Oilievre’s Vichy regime will likely roll out the welcome mat for the Panzers when they start rolling north, with not even the Ardennes to stand in their way this time, and what comes with them will be far worse for LGBTQ+ Canadians and other marginalized groups than Oilievre’s regime had been. The phrase “poutine-eating surrender monkeys” might briefly enter the vocabulary, before being expunged from it, alongside everything else, via mushroom cloud.
And two, my health is now imploding so fast I might be spared having to witness all of that shit. If so, Doug Ford will get to be my murderer, beating Oilievre to the punch by somewhere around six or seven years, as it will then turn out that he was signing my death warrant when he signed … well, whatever it was that he signed that ended the general availability of family doctors in Ontario to make space for unCanadian for-profit health care companies like Appletree to start pushing their noses into the tent.
Headless Unicorn Guy said:
AKA how “Inception” was accomplished in the movie of the same name, except without the fancy SFX.
@HeadlessUnicornGuy: and isn’t the true boss the Alpha female?
I like the astrology crack. Although at least you can see stars and constellations, they actually exist.
@ Surplus to Requirements
Hitler banned guns, you forgot THAT small detail.
You again.
Hitler banned the possession of guns by Jews; he did not ban guns in general. If Trump bans African-Americans from possession of guns that would be analogous (and would just be codifying what’s already a de-facto ban, punishable by summary execution).
First of all, this Nucleus guy sounds like a bad Arnold Schwarznegger impression. A REALLY bad Ahnold impression.
And Miss Whisper with the crackle-pops sounds like she’s trying way too hard to be Mysterious. (like that third-string superhero “The Sphinx” from Mystery Men. Could anyone understand a word of what she said? All I heard was to a faint signal on an AM radio with the antenna hooked to the spark coil of a car engine.
And look at a lot of the imagery involved in these Affirmations:
“I am a wolf among sheep…”
“I am a Great White Shark among minnows…”
“I make my own rules; I live my own rules…”
i.e. “I AM THE APEX PREDATOR. ALL OF YOU ARE PREY.”
The same Masculine Attitude preached by a famous Cult some 90 years ago led by an Austrian Cult Leader with a funny little mustache. Who turned his entire country — the powerhouse of Central Europe — into a nation of Apex Predators among the Prey.
Do you really want to be around someone like that?
Especially since He’s the Predator so you must be the Prey.
This isn’t so much Sigma (i.e. Uber-Uber-Alpha so Alpha only One exists in the entire universe) as Alpha and Uber-Alpha in general.
Long before Andrew Tate, I encountered Alpha Maledom in the magazine rack at the Cal Poly Pomona Bookstore, circa 1977. Specifically, Soldier of Fortune and the editorials in Guns & Ammo. The exact same blend of condescension and sneering hatred towards Betas (then called “Pussies, Pansies, and Sissies”), AKA “spoiled rotten baby-fat American sissies” contrasted with “The Rugged COMMUNIST Supermen”.
Then in the Men’s Action Adventure paperbacks of the Eighties (a genre which tanked with the end of the Cold War), sort of third-rate relatives of the Technothriller. “Gunpowder Porn” with weapon systems described in loving adoring hyperdetail, wielded by Sigma Male Heroes shooting and screwing their way through Droogy Ultraviolence, racking up both kinds of body counts. In retrospect, they read like Bad Author Self-Insert Fanfic on the level of Atlas Shrugged or Left Behind.
My grandpa was an avid hunter and had quite the collection of boom sticks. He was also a decorated Navy skipper. He dropped his Guns and Ammo subscription because of those editorials. He kept the hunting ones, because he didn’t kill anything except deer to eat. His reading obsession was collecting all the Perry Mason books.
I had a picture of him in dress whites during or right after WWII up in my dorm room. The other girls wanted to know who the hunk was, and thought Grandma was a lucky girl.