Mamen the alphas: a new rooster has just arrived at the corral.
We are talking about the “sigma man”, someone who is, at the same time, on the same level as the traditional leader of the male packs but far from the trap of “sexual dominance hierarchies”. Sigma man? According to different analyzes of web content, it is a term that, although it has existed since 2010 when the masculinist reactionary Vox Day first wrote about it, has gained traction on the web in the last two years thanks to the photos of the ” manosphere” and the YouTube algorithm.
If to imagine what the “alpha man” is, it is enough to think of the “ringleader” of the quarterbacks of the football team or in his serial version of a dominant Don Draper who attracts women and men alike (the former wish that owns them, the latter want to look like him), the sigma is the hero of our late-capitalist times. Like John Wick or just about any good-looking but allergic-to-authority movie anti-hero. Or a Jezz Bezos, capable of conquering the world by coming out of a mousetrap and succeeding sexually despite being bald.
He is the “lone wolf,” with leadership qualities, strong self-confidence, and a low tolerance for social conventions. He is brilliant, with gray morals, capable of the worst or the best, but only moved by his desires.
Some may confuse your reserved character with weakness, but this is only an error on the part of the interlocutor. And yes, as important as everything else: it is also a sexual magnet. He will flirt as much as he wants. We insist he is more than a “beta”; he would be as powerful as an “alpha” if he wanted to; it is just that he is far above these absurd hierarchies (the authors of these manifestos do not seem to be too aware of the contradiction that exists a perfectly defined anti-system archetype that is included within that structure).
And you know the best of all? It is not a watertight attribute, but you could try to tend toward it. Now you can “become a sigma man, the rarest type of man of all. […] but please, before we continue with this description, let me tell you about our new 30 Days with Alpha course, which includes, among other rewards, three challenges that will completely transform your life”.
In a comment to this video, one man says: “Imagine being attacked by people making up genres but having no problem swallowing videos like this.” Another: “This is like Freud smoking crack and discovering astrology.” “.
The alpha male, the softy man, and how we got here
Although women have been consuming pseudoscientific literature about their bodies and erotica in women’s magazines for decades, men have not been less. Curiously, while for the former, these texts have been losing relevance through the decline of newsstand publications (some would say that shamanism and motherhood have filled this gap), in the case of the latter, these narratives have not stopped growing, especially all in the digital forums, where many men find solace. The masculine hoax has very little inventiveness and is manifested under a single register: animal hierarchization.
The origin of the “alpha men” is double and, in both cases, part of long-refuted biological misinterpretations. The first studies on packs of wolves, which are the ones that spoke of “alpha wolves”, were made in the 40s and updated in the 70s, and in both cases, it was argued that the behavior of captive communities was the same as that of wild animals. Wild animals, when it is not. Although wolves express dominance over each other in certain contexts, their social lives are complex, and most of the time, they are cooperative, forming families ruled by a male and a female.
The supposed hierarchies of competence, where there is an alpha, a beta, and even an omega, do not exist, and since 1999 studies no longer take these premises into account. If you want to go deeper, this post is very good.
The second comes from ethological studies on the life of primates and its extension to human behavior as if they were the same. The concept of “alpha male” in the animal kingdom did not begin to appear until well into the 1950s; until then, biologists had not even considered this possibility. Fascination with alpha chimpanzees and silverback gorillas, physically imposing and displaying grand gestures of social dominance, was transformed by Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal’s 1982 publication of Chimpanzee Politics: Power and Sex Among Apes, a book that began to circulate in the journalistic world at the time, equating what de Waal saw with the behavior in the offices.
By the mid-90s, the “alpha male” was already a colloquial term for trend magazines. Time magazine asked on the cover in 1999, “Can Gore become alpha?”.
The hugely popular 2005 book The Method by Neil Strauss made a lupuprimal remix and applied these precepts to his “scientific seduction”. From there, they catapulted into the world of flirting content (the Spanish example is Álvaro Reyes, but many self-confident male hucksters joined fashion all over the planet), then linguistic neuro programming arrived… And it all ended, of course. , in the self-help groups for men that is the manosphere, where it has gone, little by little, mixing concepts that do have real scientific bases in evolutionary psychology together with fallacies to manufacture a superstitious discourse that serves as reactionary containment against the dismantling that gender roles are experiencing.
Almost as curious as this is that these same biologist arguments they defend provoke in many of them a deep malaise that leads them to fatalism. Since I don’t have the bone structure of an “alpha”, I will never succeed in society. So, voila, for the identity, survival of this good is the archetype of the sigma man.
Sharlene Meriel is an avid gamer with a knack for technology. He has been writing about the latest technologies for the past 5 years. His contribution in technology journalism has been noteworthy. He is also a day trader with interest in the Forex market.
