Y ou are a lone wolf. You are an independent thinker who makes his own rules. You are confident and competent.

Women are drawn to you, but you don’t really care about them. Your day begins at 4.30am with a cold shower, followed by a punishing workout and an even more punishing skincare routine.

You shun conventional career paths and run your own business, probably in crypto or real estate or vigilante crime fighting. You are that rarest of males – you are a sigma. Either that or you’re a bemused bystander who has had a hard time avoiding content about sigma males and the “sigma grindset”.

In the past few years, sigma masculinity has blown up. It’s all over social media – and it’s helped define what could be a masculine archetype for our times, supposedly exemplified by characters played by the likes of Keanu Reeves, Cillian Murphy , Bryan Cranston and Christian Bale, plus the manosphere influencer Andrew Tate as well as actual, real life wolves. All of these and more have gone into the meme-culture blender when it comes to the sigma phenomenon, which could well be an indication of how deep it has seeped into the mainstream, and by extension into the minds of our impressionable, smartphone-addicted youth.

It has been described as “ extremist thinking ” and “ a new kind of toxic masculinity ”, although as we shall see, these fears may be overstated. Either way, YouTuber Lily Simpson probably summed it up best in a viral post on Twitter/X from January 202.