As you can see from the near-complete lack of activity, it has been a very, very busy week for me. But that has not quite stopped me from checking out amusingly stupid things on TEH YOOTOOBZ from time to time. And few things are more stupid, or more amusing, than a new video from everyone’s favourite gym brah, Dom Mazetti. This time, he unpacks for us the strange and mysterious “Sigma male”, in his signature style:

Dom’s comedy isn’t for everyone, but for meatheads like me, he’s hilarious.

In all seriousness, though, Dom actually hits on a rather contemporary trend. Why is everyone so blasted interested in Sigma males???

I suspect that this is because the ideas behind Our Beloved and Dreaded Supreme Dark Lord (PBUH) Vox Day the Most Malevolent and Terrible‘s Socio-Sexual Hierarchy have reached escape velocity in the public consciousness. Of course, he will not be given the slightest amount of credit for it, but it is his invention (based on earlier work done by the PUA types and others). And it is designed to provide a reliable heuristic that explains male interactions in society:

OBADSDL(PBUH)‘s SSH is a tool, and a damned good one. But, unfortunately, like any tool, it can be easily and flagrantly abused – and often is.

Far too many men use the SSH to try to make themselves look and sound good, to themselves and to others. I have seen a number of comments amounting to something along the lines of, “I’m a Delta with a mix of Sigma and Alpha”. I’ve been guilty of it myself, in the past, before His Voxness set me straight in rather peremptory fashion some years ago in a response to one of my email queries to him.

Let’s get this straight, here and now:

The SSH does not exist to make you feel better about yourself.

The SSH exists to tell you what you are, and give you some pointers about how you can set about improving yourself.

Furthermore, you don’t get to pick your SSH ranking. Others pick it FOR you.

If you are an Alpha, that is because you are widely admired, socially and sexually VERY successful, and deeply sought-after. People practically leap to attention when you walk into the room. They instinctively seek out your advice and ideas, because you have a natural and powerful charisma.

There are different grades of Alpha, of course. Take a look below and you’ll see what I mean.

This man is an Alpha:

This man was an Ur-Alpha, a silverback Alpha, the kind that made other Alphas jump to attention and compete for his favours like giddy schoolgirls around a rock-star:

And this man is… well, the God-Emperor:

Alphas generally share common traits. They are handsome, wealthy, successful, immensely charismatic, highly capable, and (to a large extent) extroverted.

They are also vain, arrogant, pompous, self-obsessed, and paranoid about threats to their power. Being an Alpha is NOT necessarily a Good Thing – like all else in life, Alpha status involves trade-offs.

If you are a Bravo, you have other traits – loyalty, hard work, strength of character, and an unswerving dedication to a cause. But Bravos also tend to have issues with taking on responsibility as leaders – it isn’t natural to them – and tend to be lost without their Alphas.

I will skip over Deltas, simply because they are not relevant to the discussion. To give them their fair due, we must note that Deltas are THE most important group in terms of the contributions that they make to society – without hard-working, uncomplaining Deltas, everything basically falls apart. Deltas should be treated with respect and dignity as the bedrock of society – but they are not, much to our great shame.

The real issue here is with the most troublesome rank of the lot – the Gammas. The problem with Gammas is, and has always been, that they want to be at the top of the SSH, but they cannot be. They are not physically, mentally, or morally suited to it, at all. Their very presence tends to be outright repulsive to women and men, due to their neediness and lack of social skills, yet they possess a natural intelligence that gives them an inflated sense of self. This makes them highly disruptive in any well-functioning organisation, because they tend to come from highly emotionally repressed families with weak, or non-existent, fathers, who failed to teach them how to handle and move beyond conflict.

Inevitably, Gammas tend to want to run things, but end up making a gigantic mess when put in charge because of their passive-aggressive actions around men, and their inability to win the respect and affection of women.

To make themselves feel better about their own lack of real status, Gammas then fixate upon the traits of those at the top of the hierarchy, and either make every possible effort to find some way to turn themselves into Alphas, or endlessly snipe at those who are Alphas, simply because they cannot bear to be ignored.

In fact, if you ever want to see the perfect example of Gamma behaviour in action, watch (if you can stand it) an episode of The Big Bang Theory called “The Bath Item Gift Hypothesis”:

Watch how Leonard deals with both Penny and Dr. David Underhill in that episode. The Underhill character is classic Alpha-jock – smart, charismatic, handsome, extroverted, and a huge hit with women. When he deigns to notice Leonard, the Gamma, the latter fawns over the former like a star-struck schoolgirl at a boy-band concert. But, the moment that the Alpha takes something that the Gamma wants, the Gamma lashes out with passive-aggressive bitchiness.

With respect to this recent interest in Sigmas, I’ve noticed an interesting trend over the past few years in the red-pill community. A lot of the navel-gazing about what is, and is not, “Alpha”, has really died down of late. My hypothesis is that this is because there are now so many Gammas in charge of things – and thereby making a gigantic mess in the process – while the real Alphas are rapidly being chased out of society.

Witness, after all, what happened to the God-Emperor of Mankind. In many ways, the Fake Election was the revenge of the Gammas – though the issues there ran much deeper, due to the ongoing war between the globalist Pharisatanists and the increasingly small minority of Christian nationalists.

But, being in power has not given the Gammas any more respect from men or affection from women – which are the two things that they truly crave. So now, they have found a new fixation:

The elusive and mysterious Sigma Male.

The “Sigma”, as His Voxness defines it, is:

The outsider who doesn’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The sigma is hated by alphas because sigmas are the only men who don’t accept or at least acknowledge, however grudgingly, their social dominance. (NB: Alphas absolutely hate to be laughed at and a sigma can often enrage an alpha by doing nothing more than smiling at him.) Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. In a social situation, the sigma is the man who stops in briefly to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a Tier 1 girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas like women, but tend to be contemptuous of them. They are usually considered to be strange. Gammas often like to think they are sigmas, failing to understand that sigmas are not social rejects, they are at the top of the social hierarchy despite their refusal to play by its rules.

— Vox Day, “The Socio-Sexual Hierarchy“, 2011

This is commonly misunderstood as the “Lone Wolf” archetype, and that is a remarkably silly way of looking at things, not least because wolves in the wild are actually pack animals that live and thrive together. Wolves mate for life, love being around their pack, and need vast amounts of social contact and playfighting in order to maintain their bonds with each other.

This is the exact opposite of the hard-as-nails, go-it-alone, introverted loner that people think is the “Sigma Male”.

Indeed, as far as I can tell, most Gammas don’t have the first clue what a Sigma really is. And that is not for lack of interest in the subject. The “Sigma” archetype has definitely been blowing up in recent years, as you can see from the Google Trends data:

A search on TEH YOOTOOBZ reveals a similar trend. All you have to do is search for the term, and you will quickly realise that this has become something of an obsession with spergy nerds.

So what, then, is a “Sigma male”? Well, here’s one take on it:

Joker’s definition of a Sigma is indeed something, or someone, that you probably don’t want to be. It’s not a nice way to live life. It is exceptionally lonely and difficult, but it is also intrinsically very rewarding for a man who values his alone time and needs to be away from other people.

And yet… even the most introverted of men needs to be around people, at least some of the time. You cannot find a more introverted and yet socially functional human than OBADSDL(PBUH) Vox Day. Yet he has been married for 25 years to the same woman, has raised 4 children with her, and clearly loves being around his family and his dogs. His wife, Spacebunny, jokes with him about how 23 1/2 hours of alone-time a day are just not sufficient for him. But he has a strong family around him to keep him grounded and happy.

That, then, is the true essence of a Sigma. It is a man who deliberately stays out of society’s hierarchies, and goes and creates his own familial hierarchy. And that is a worthy goal toward which most men should aim themselves.

It is good and right for a man to seek to create a family. A man should find a good woman, commit to her, pump her full of babies (and the process of doing so should be immensely good fun for both parties involved), and raise them well. He should raise civilised, capable, respectful, and Godly sons and daughters.

But no man can do this without growing into a man in the first place. Too many men, especially Gammas, try to take shortcuts here. There are no shortcuts and no easy paths to adulthood. Growing up into a man, wherever you are on the ladder, is hard, painful, miserable, unrewarding, and gruelling work.

You still have to do it.

So, if you are one of those Gammas that wants to know whether you can be a Sigma, and you want to emulate Sigma traits and go around boasting about your “grindset”… do yourself, and the rest of society, a huge favour, and STOP.

(If you want to know whether you are a Gamma or not – ask any woman that you know. If you ARE a Gamma, of course, most women will find you utterly repulsive. So go read Lacey Fairchild’s web-comic, Hypergamouse, over at Arkhaven Comics, and see if you recognise yourself. If you do – you’re a Gamma, end of.)

Put away the silly self-referential “10 traits of a Sigma male” videos and instruction books. Concentrate instead on hitting the books, the gym, and the streets to carve out your own path through life. Seek to be the best that you can be in whatever you choose as your path. Put in the hard yards, and understand that, while hard work never guarantees success, it does make success a damned sight more likely.

Do not make women and pursuits of the flesh your goal. Be honourable, courageous, fair, respectful, and unflinchingly honest.

Take the beatings that life will administer to you, rise up when they are done, spit out the blood, smile through the pain and broken bones and missing teeth, and say, “is that the best you can do?”

And when you do these things, and you grow up in the process, you will very likely wake up one day to find that your leadership, insights, counsel, and masculine strength will make men follow you, and women desire you. I speak from experience here – when you are an adult man, walking in the ways of God (though admittedly this doesn’t apply to me), you will find yourself in exactly the place that you wanted to be for so long, yet could never find.