The Oxford English Dictionary by John Andrew Simpson

In 2014, author John Alexander would use the term in the title of his relationship advice book The Sigma Male: What Women Really Want. It would mainly be used by followers of Beale and other members of the manosphere who came across it. Sigma male would remain relatively obscure over the rest of the decade. In a more recent post about the topic, he would further define the sigma male as “The outsiders who don’t play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow.” According to Beale, alpha males dislike sigma males because sigma males effortlessly succeed while alpha males have to work hard to achieve their status. He singled out actor Clint Eastwood’s movie characters as examples of sigma males. The sigma male is introverted and shuns mainstream society, yet still manages to be a successful man who is popular with women.īeale described sigma males as “lone wolves” and likened them to introverted alpha males. While a so-called alpha male is aggressive, sociable, and outgoing, the sigma male is constructed as succeeding in life and in relationships without actively engaging in social interaction. Why Beale chose specifically sigma (as opposed to other letters yet untaken in masculinist discourse) is unclear. Beale began using the term as early as January 2010, when he defined it on his blog. The term sigma male seems to be a creation of far-right activist and writer Theodore Robert Beale, who goes by Vox Day.

Sigma follows the pattern in masculinist subcultures of using (often sequential) letters of the Greek alphabet to create a social hierarchy of masculinity, e.g., alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and omega males. In fact, the English letter S develops from the Greek sigma. Sigma is transliterated as the English letter S and s. Sigma is the name of the 18th letter of the Greek alphabet, Capital sigma is written as Σ lowercase sigma is written as σ and ς at the end of words.

The Oxford English Dictionary by John Andrew Simpson