The beauty of memes as an ecosystem is that sooner or later, everything merges with everything else. Ideas and images are remixed and repackaged, the layers stacking until — boom — you’ve got a whole new flavor of content. Such is the joy of @SigmaActivity.
This Twitter account, just a few months old but already commanding an audience of nearly a quarter million, fuses two manosphere concepts that had earnest, serious origins and, until now, had no connection to each other. The first is the “GigaChad,” that strikingly muscled figure who only appears in hyper-stylized black-and-white pictures. An artist named Krista Sudmalis crafted his uncanny likeness in her retouched portraits of a model she refers to only as “1969,” and some of her work eventually filtered into incel forums where sexless men complained that they’d never be able to compete for women with guys like this, the apex male or ultra “Chad” figure.
The so-called sigma male, though, was a completely distinct archetype from the one that supposedly sits at the top of the masculine hierarchy. It described a kind of “lone wolf” dude who didn’t fit into the pyramid of “alphas” and “betas” — someone who forges his own path and finds success without the jockish looks or bravado of a Chad. Of course, the sigma label is just self-flattery for men who want to feel unique and cool but can’t claim to be at the top of the heap. It’s meaningless, neither a real identity nor mindset. Yet as it migrated out into the mainstream to be ridiculed, creators found it had satiric potential. What if the alleged sigma quality of defying rules and structure required deliberately doing things wrong, or backwards?
To turn the GigaChad into the face of this ironic sigma-posting is a stroke of brilliance that further undermines the nonsense gender theories that keep producing new fake models of manhood. It’s all social taxonomy laid out by guys who get very little social interaction as is. Only by embracing your inner dumbass and justifying it as “sigma” behavior can you ascend GigaChad status, becoming a guy too strong and sure of himself to ever fail. His steely gaze meets every challenge with unparalleled serenity. He bullshits instead of citing sources. He relies exclusively on circular logic. He refuses to ever elaborate. He cannot be beaten.
With these categories in full collapse, the red pill gang has no choice but to come up with some more junk psychology to explain or illuminate their worldview. But whatever they invent next will also be fed into the content grinder to emerge twice as absurd and totally unserious — the evolution of a meme always strips away its initial purpose, especially if it wasn’t meant to be a joke in the first place. The humorlessness of the manosphere is what makes the appropriation of their terms so funny. If they want real power and influence, they’ll have to play a different game.
Miles Klee
Miles Klee is MEL’s resident tank-top dirtbag, shitposter and meme expert. He’s also the author of the novel ‘Ivyland’ and a story collection, ‘True False.’
