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Sigma grindset: TikTok's toxic worshipping of Patrick Bateman is another sign young men are lost
The incel 2.0 group has been dismissed as a parody of hustle culture. The trouble is, we've been here before
Sigma grindset: TikTok's toxic worshipping of Patrick Bateman is another sign young men are lost
The incel 2.0 group has been dismissed as a parody of hustle culture. The trouble is, we've been here beforeBy Ruchira Sharma
7 November 2022
American Psycho's Patrick Bateman has been a problematic poster boy ever since Christian Bale's take on the Wall Street murderer hit cinemas in 2000. For two decades plenty of men have been keen to copy his workout, Seiko watch, or suit collection, but now, thanks to a new subset on TikTok, his hustle mindset and hatred of women are being put on a pedestal too. Welcome to the ‘sigma grindset’.
TikTok has seen a proliferation of trends based on mindsets or personality types that supposedly offer a way through the dilemmas of modern capitalism, so long as you dress and act in a certain way. The reclaimed bimbo saw mostly self-aware women embrace hyper-femininity and materialism as a source of agency, while tradwives rejected contemporary feminism and to claim empowerment came from adhering to rigid gender roles.
The concept of sigmas comes instead from the much-discussed manosphere, a loose collection of websites, blogs, and corners of Reddit and 4chan where disenfranchised men gather to promote various forms of misogyny and bemoan their belief they have been unfairly left behind by society. Sigma grindset merges this existing extremist thinking with posts about grind culture motivation, internet nihilism and workout content, creating a fusion of subcultures that alternates between shitposting memes and glorifying a dubious male archetype. The phrase has 2.8 billion views on TikTok (‘sigma’ has 13 billion) and individual videos tagged with these terms routinely hit millions of views. Accounts devoted to the trend collectively have hundreds of thousands of followers. Many of the TikToks offer short lists of the characteristics that a ‘sigma male’ has over the top of scenes of Fight Club's narrator, Euphoria's Nate Jacobs, Thomas Shelby in Peaky Blinders or the unnamed main character in Drive, played by Ryan Gosling. Images of Christian Bale as a sneering Patrick Bateman, however, are by far the most popular choice.
Roughly speaking, according to the app, sigma males are self-sufficient loners; they attract extremely good-looking women but aren't interested in them, and, in keeping with society's growing fixation with productivity, they're capitalist hustlers. Devotees encourage other users to live a stricter lifestyle and adopt self-care practices like going to the gym and drinking water more often. This, they argue, will make them more attractive and alpha-like, which will equate to more money.
LIke many TikTok trends, sigma grindset isn’t something entirely new. Far-right activist and writer Theodore Robert Beale – who goes by the pen name Vox Day – has been described by the media as a white supremacist, misogynist, and part of the alt-right. He first coined the ‘sigma’ on a fringe blog in 2010. The sigma male is an introverted alpha who likes to play by his own rules, according to Beale – who in 2015 also said that women shouldn’t have the right to vote in a representative democracy (as “they are significantly inclined to vote for whomever they would rather f***”) and that Black men are “500 times more likely to possess a gene variant that is linked to violence and aggression than white American men".
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Sigma males share much with incels in generally believing themselves to be too intelligent for this world and that the rest of us live in ignorance. But, instead of succumbing to this depressing reality, sigmas lean into outdated gender expectations of men around fitness and wealth and they not only reject attractive women, but treat them with contempt.
Tim Squirrell works at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue combating online extremism and disinformation. He says the links between 2010s manosphere content and sigma TikTok is clear. In fact, it can be traced back even further: the advice shared in the community on how to treat women echoes the infamous manuals used by pick-up artists in the 2000s. “The difference is this ideology is filtered through the lens of hustle culture,” he says, adding that sigma content is misogynistic at its core by portraying women as "broadly interchangeable people with predictable and manipulable psychologies”.
Just look at the pop-culture icons glorified in sigma grindset posts. Euphoria's Nate Jacobs dominates his girlfriends emotionally and physically; Patrick Bateman picks off women to kill in sadistic ways. “The fact that [Bateman] is a satire of the emptiness of materialist consumer capitalism is apparently lost on those promoting him as [hustle culture] inspiration,” Squirrell says.
History shows there is real danger in content that targets disillusioned men and offers them the chance to change their life instantly. “Sigma content promises men success and fulfillment if they adhere to certain principles of self-mastery,” Squirrel explains. When those things don't materialise, “some of those men will become embittered and cynical”. We saw this, he says, in the early 2010s, when men and boys “who felt let down by the red pill" became further radicalised and "turned to incel-like culture and the nihilistic ‘black pill’".
“Incel communities are much larger now, and there is an easier funnel for disillusioned people to move from sigma grindset content to suicidal black pill content, with misogyny the common theme between the two,” he warns.
On the surface, sigma grindset is perhaps an unsurprising amalgamation of TikTok's most popular trends, packaging together self-care and self-help for men with buzzy pop-culture references. Part of the appeal of sigma grindset, like the revolving TikTok personalities that gain traction every few months, is how fun it is to ascribe a label to yourself and feel validated – like an online personality quiz allows people to identify as part of a club. Sigma grindset offers men the chance to change the narrative on their feelings of loneliness and alienation, as well as the illusion that a fulfilling life is just a push-up or paycheque away.
But while sigma grindset might be dismissed as shitposting and a parody of hustle culture, the messages and language behind it aren't a joke and should worry us all. The sigma mindset's sexist view of society as a fight for dominance, and women as capital, has worrying echoes of other male-dominated corners of the internet; secret clubs that we know all too well have invaded the real world too.
