My mom cleans the homes of a variety of people from all different walks of life. One family she cleans twice per week is a family from the middle-east who moved to Canada years ago.
The wife of the household who hired Molly Maid to clean her home does all of the heavy lifting around the house.
She gets up bright and early in the morning to get their two kids ready for school, and drive them to a school outside of their district (the youngest didn’t want to change schools when they moved to their new home).
From there, her day of work begins as she is an Uber driver and delivers goods specifically from Wal-Mart to various people across the city. She also runs a cake baking business where she picks up various supplies, makes cakes at home and delivers those too.
She does that all day until the kids are done with school.
She picks up her kids and returns home at that point where she then cooks supper before going to bed at about 8pm.
And she does this five times per week.
Meanwhile her husband is, presumably, a stay-at-home dad and offers moral support. However it’s not much considering that he’s confused why she goes to bed so early, seemingly oblivious to the amount of work she actually does.
And his reasoning for not doing cleaning or cooking can be boiled down to “that’s women’s work.”
We all have different cultures and they all have drawbacks and benefits to them which is why they’re so deeply embedded in family traditions. For middle-eastern families, they behave much like this but the benefits is that once the kids are older, the father will play a key part in their children’s development.
The mother provides the nurturing at the start while the father will provide discipline and focus later on in life.
In theory, it works. But in practice and in a different country it’s unusual. To us, their way of life is steeped in gender roles which are more restrictive. One slight slip up and the family could be met with catastrophe.
If she, their sole income provider, got in a terrible accident, their main source of income would be cut off.
Obviously people are free to live their lives however they choose. But that doesn’t change the fact that certain views have a regressive feeling to them. And that this feeling is connected to a cultural view that is difficult to get out of.
This culture is a prime example of another cultural phenomenon taking place in self-help right now. It’s a deeply rooted trend among male self-help gurus that has culminated in key figures presenting an ideology that is addictive, appealing, and stupid.
They call it the Sigma Male.
The Foundation Of Sigma Male Is Misleading
The foundation to any ideology is rooted in logic and reasoning. Philosophy — or ways of thinking — were founded on these principles and it makes sense. After all, in order to have an ideology or way of thinking, one must have some principles or guidelines.
In the case of the Sigma male, this ideology emerged from 55-year-old American science-fiction writer and publisher Theodore Robert Beale, who blogs with the pen name Vox Day. He’s a Christian nationalist, racist, and misogynist who argues a variety of cultural issues based on that way of thinking.
But going deeper than that, you will find both hierarchies and wolves.
Hierarchies in the sense that Beale himself attempted to expand on the division between male alphas and betas. From this structure he situated alphas at the top and was followed by betas, deltas, gammas, lambdas, and omegas. Sigmas, according to Beale were adjacent to alphas and outside the boundaries of the hierarchy.
And wolves enter the picture primarily due to the fact that they have natural hierarchies to them. According to (former Doctor) Jordan Peterson, hierarchies are in everything and are a natural way for humans to be living their lives as well.
All of it seems sounds, especially with sound logic from Peterson who thinks “women use the dominance hierarchy to select mates” and that this is “evolutionary science where only the strongest get to breed.”
It’s only diminished by the fact that there is nothing “natural” about this and the concept of “alpha wolves” was manufactured.
To begin, the emergence of the “alpha wolf” behaviour stemmed from a 1940s study that was shaky in its method for study. For some reason, the head researcher decided to prove their hypothesis they would not observe wolves from a distance but rather capture them and keep them locked somewhere.
What the science community found out is that when looking at wild wolfs in their natural habitat, the “hierarchies” that were formed among these animals was more familial than one with a pecking order.
It’s akin to studying a group of prisoners and using those observations to dictate how humans ought to behave.
If we’re off about wolves, than it stands to reason the hierarchy itself it was built around is also off. And fuelled by a man who thinks women shouldn’t vote, and that black men are more inclined to violence than white men and the entire premise is pretty farfetched.
The Primary Sigma Male Figure Is A Joke. Literally.
Beyond the non-existent foundation is the examples of “sigma males” in media. After all, men need more of a guiding hand and role model to follow beyond Mr. Hierarchies-are-amazing Peterson and a raging racist and sexist Christian nationalist.
No.
They need alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate.
They also need great minds like John Wick, Walter White, and Tommy Shelby. They need Brad Pitt’s character from Fight Club, Ryan Gosling’s character in Drive…
They need Patrick Bateman from American Psycho.
Patrick Bateman was the perfect fit as the manosphere already had this character as part of their “hustle culture”. The ideal figure to live up to was already being praised by his hard work, self-discipline, fitness and grooming.
He was perfect to represent the ideal Sigma.
But looking at the film and at Bateman, played by Christian Bale, you would begin to see some cracks in this idea.
Bateman was a Wall Street banker who is wealthy, gym-toned, well-dressed, and hates women.
He’s also narcissistic and is a delusional serial killer to boot.
To Beale, the choice of Bateman being the prime example of Sigma is an odd choice to build your life around. In the film, Bateman is far from working independently as a Sigma is meant to act like according to Beale. Bateman is constantly around his group of peers and is obsessed with the design of their business cards.
Bateman dresses sharp, but also looks like every single Wall Street wannabe.
Even his music preferences were common at the time.
Sure, the culture is different. American Psycho hit the silver screen in 2000 and was based in the 1980s. These days, businesses might not require sales reps to dress sharply and Huey Lewis and the News is out of the public zeitgeist.
But for 1980s, Bateman was anything but unique or different from the rest of the pack.
That was the whole point.
American Psycho in its entirety was meant to be satire. A joke. A big gaff.
And the poor role models continue on.
Sigma Male Examples Aren’t That Compelling
The trend really started to kick off when Mark Wahlberg and Dwayne Johnson broadcast their workout schedules. While it’s a nice way to connect with fans and show what’s going on behind the scenes, people can take that information literally and present it as creed or guidelines to follow.
In the case of Wahlberg’s workout schedule it begins at 2:30am before a 90-minute workout, breakfast, prayers, and a round of golf. All of this is done before 8am.
As inspiring as that may be, conveyed by the writer excitedly pointing out Wahlberg’s routine as “no excuse to get up early”, it’s not at all practical.
Wahlberg isn’t doing anything extremely out of the ordinary. From the looks of things, he’s spending most of his time golfing since cooking and eating breakfast and praying combined shouldn’t take hours to do. He does have four hours (after working out) to do those things after all.
And if you’re not a golfer, what’s stopping you from doing those other things at 5am? Or more reasonably, 6 or 7am?
Unless the idea of getting to bed at 6 or 7 pm every night is something you really want to do, it’s not a realistic benchmark to be hitting.
Beyond that, a lot of the pseudoscientific remarks are picked out of various scenes from TV shows and films where those aforementioned “Sigma Males” performed in. It’s easy to contextualize all this and push a specific narrative after all.
One can make Jordan Peterson sound smart, especially when he’s in his element and explaining something. But it’s easy to take his speech and twist the question and conveniently leave out what was being asked of him. It’s easy to take clips of him crying about the story of Cain and Abel and deliver a specific narrative about it rather than take it for what it actually is.
A grown man crying for no apparent reason over this story that was brought up haphazardly and has nothing to do with what was being asked of him.
All the same, it’s easy to take quotes from Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and others like him and not realize the full context.
Steve Jobs, as great of a visionary as he was with Apple products, was also a crass dumbass who died from a condition that could’ve been treated. This is on top of his eccentric lifestyle choices like bathing in toilet water and eating the same foods day after day.
He’s definitely Sigma in the sense that what he’s doing is out of the norm of most people. But I wouldn’t call these qualities or virtues to live by let alone build my identity around the quotes uttered by a man who thought eating nothing but fruit is akin to taking a shower and keeping up personal hygiene.
And that’s all before Elon Musk, a man who if you spend any time listening to in his recent interviews is a bumbling mess and doesn’t seem to know how to run a company at all. Not to mention the only women he seems to attract are the ones hellbent on suing him because he was being a creep to them.
Like any sensible woman would do when approached by a grown man who treats them as objects or a notch on his bed post.
There’s better examples overall to aspire to be like in the end.
The Sigma Female Failed
In the end, Sigma Male is more commonly labelled as a meme and younger generations haven’t heard it being used in any serious context. In all likelihood, the concept is going to be contained in the manosphere that created it.
Similarly, Sigma Female also failed tremendously.
Probably because the rules are dumb.
But beyond that, another reason is because of something that women have built up over the years that men these days lack.
Human connection, a reliable network they can count on, and their own solid identity.
They didn’t need another identity provided to them. Each one is forging their own.
The problem with the popularity of this in certain circles is the fact that men lack those things women now enjoy. There used to be gentleman’s clubs where guys could hang out and be guys. Those no longer are a thing.
And when women began to get into the workforce and into positions of power, men had this anxiety around women. They believed women didn’t belong here and acted accordingly.
Instead of trying to learn to work together, men effectively went back to kindergarten where all girls had “cooties” and should be avoided in any serious context. To many, their usefulness rested in their sex appeal.
And that’s putting it lightly.
Ever since then, we’ve been watching the male reality be torn down by women who are seeking equality. Instead of progressing towards helping women and enjoying one another’s company, key male figures have pointed out this fact and have made a point of building an identity to resist that.
And it fucking worked.
The upside is, it’s easier to refute all this by simply doing what so many women have strived to do. Get back the healthy connections, drink some actual water rather than our piss, and hustle to bridge the gap and form genuine bonds with people so you can talk about more interesting things than real estate, crypto, and workout routines.
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