On the surface, the latest Netflix documentary Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere looks like a dive into the fringe corners of social media. Muscular men rattle out advice to young men about women and wealth — thinly veiled misogyny dressed up with Lamborghinis and swanky condos as ‘evidence’ that the methods work.
It would be fringe if it lived in tucked-away corners of the internet. But Samuel Tanner, a criminology professor at the Université de Montréal, warns it’s already in the bedrooms of Canadian boys. The entry point to this content isn’t the loud, spectacular influencers Theroux profiles. It’s something far more subtle and easier to miss: sigma male content.
Tanner (along with PhD student François Gillardin) analyzed nearly 1,000 TikTok videos of speeches that spread harmful ideas about women. The content is mainly directed to men and promotes a version of masculinity where men have control over women.
Tanner says ‘sigma male’ isn’t really a personality type. It’s more of an idea that gets talked about and shared online. He adds that it “is defamatory towards women, the LGBTQ+ community and promotes a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ that signals dominance of men over women.” It spreads through algorithms and meme culture — getting shared, remixed and evolving as it goes.
Tanner says young boys “appropriate this kind of discourse,” meaning they take the content, change it slightly, but use the same hashtags, format and music.
What sigma male content looks like
Tanner got interested in this topic because of first-hand experience. He and Gillardin noticed a common pattern in videos that popped up on their TikTok and Instagram feeds: videos expressing varying degrees of harmful attitudes towards women, ranging from disinterest and rejection to hate and humiliation.
“When I say humiliation, they were kind of silly videos. You see three young girls seated on a bench and then there’s this guy coming with a rose, giving one of them a rose. The girl reacts, ‘Oh, wow.’ And then you see the guy kneeling, lacing up his shoe, and then he takes the rose back and leaves. And these videos always had this image of Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, laughing, nodding … as if to say: this is how you have to behave towards women.”
The humour (and meme) trap
Tanner says the real issue is how these videos end. Usually with humour and a nod to popular meme culture. That humour makes the content easier to share, without people stopping to think about the harm it can cause.
“Humour is a homosocial currency,” says Tanner, meaning it’s a big part of how young men connect. He says it allows harmful ideas to be shared without much pushback and over time it lowers the bar for what feels acceptable when talking negatively about women and other communities.
Another problem with sigma male content is that not all of it is harmful — or at least not at the outset. Tanner explains that some of the content under the Sigma umbrella is about self-improvement. He shares typical reactions from young boys who participated in his research.
“The more they watched it, the more they could relate to it at some point. They were like, if we consider white men in society right now, it seems that we are the cause of all the harms in society, after #MeToo, EDI politics, all of these things they refer to as ‘progressivism’, ‘modernity’, ‘woke culture’. And they were like, at least in Sigma we can focus on ourselves. This is a communication that helps us become the best version of ourselves, by going to the gym, taking care of our body, our diet, our discipline, telling us that we should not spend too much time with girls because it’s an obstacle.”
This kind of “self-help” content quickly shifts into messages that tell boys to distance themselves from women or dismiss their experiences. These ideas can have a big impact on teen boys who are still learning to understand what healthy relationships look like.
Tanner warns that it can make it feel normal to distance yourself from certain groups.
“And we know through history that when people came to that point, it doesn’t bring good things to humanity.”
So after watching close to 200 sigma male videos and interviewing 15 young boys, what did Tanner make of the Netflix documentary? He has mixed reactions.
What the Netflix documentary got right, and wrong
Tanner says host and executive producer, Louis Theroux, did a decent job of challenging the influencers and their controversial (sometimes contradictory) narratives. But he has two main criticisms: one, that it didn’t show the consequences on women, and secondly: the documentary focused on the most spectacular, dramatic and loud voices from the ‘manosphere’ which failed to capture the broader problem.
Tanner says sigma male content is an ‘entry’ point to more harmful ideologies because it’s an entry point into the shadowy alleys of the manosphere.
“This is where we should be careful and use all our precautions for young boys that are interested in sigma male content, so that they don’t get into more radical ideas because it shifts very rapidly.”
What parents can do about it
So why are boys seeking this content out at all? For Tanner, the answer lies in a deeper struggle. He says many young boys carry an existential void and struggle with a fractured sense of their own masculinity.
“Young boys today are struggling to understand what it means to be masculine, how to behave with girls, how they feel about their own identity. And the masculinist discourse has become so big that when they search for answers on the tools they’re using, this (sigma content) is the information they find.”
Tanner has simple advice for Canadian families: Talk about it.
“Why not watch the Netflix documentary with your 14-year-old boy and ask, ‘What do you think about that? The guys have nice cars, they seem to have nice girls … but is this thing appealing to you?’ We have to go with the flow. And at least establish a link so kids know they can talk about these things with their parents. Whatever the resources, just do it.”
For parents who feel unqualified to have that conversation, Tanner has a reassuring message: “It’s not about knowledge, it’s about good sense.”
“I think we owe that conversation to our children.”
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