The sigma male is perhaps the most ubiquitous internet image born from the online right wing ‘manosphere.’ And despite the fact that this online milieu appears to no longer have much control over how the meme is represented in popular culture, losing to a group of people who have distorted the phrase to parody the manosphere’s worst tendencies, this has paradoxically only led to it becoming an even more effective mechanism to recruit young men into their patriarchal right wing vision of masculinity. The whole point of such memes is to invoke the phrase “he is just like me,” presenting various figures in popular culture meant to embody the archetype as role models for the viewer to admire. Yet even memes parodying this format to the extreme of depicting chainsaw wielding serial killer Patrick Bateman from the film American Psycho as a sigma male have, to varying degrees of semi-irony and sincerity, been used by online right wing posters as a recruitment mechanism for their ideology. However much one points out the neurotic, narcissistic, and even sociopathic traits that these hyper-masculine subcultures condition, the only response they must amount in order to continue to amass adherents is some flippant, semi-ironic affirmation of such accusations akin in tone and seriousness to the ‘chad yes’ meme.
I think the Broderick reading of Homelander is good... I haven't read the piece you cite, and I haven't been on the subreddit for The Boys, but part of me thinks it risks a misread if we assume that characters are seen as characters. I get the (uhm) vibe (?) that many people consume media as always-already politics. That is, they assume that some left (though truly just soft lib) group of writers has drawn it out as "1. Homelander is bad 2. Connect to alt right and/or Trump" and so, maybe, the topography of their desire is never about the character as he (or she) is given on the screen, but almost an act of watching and waiting for disaggregated moments that confirm edges of their own ideology. Homophobia, racism, etc. It's almost like they've gone and Sontag'd us before we knew it... In place of a hermeneutics of sigma males in media, they've erected an erotics of sigma males in media.
Phew good read.
I think the Broderick reading of Homelander is good... I haven't read the piece you cite, and I haven't been on the subreddit for The Boys, but part of me thinks it risks a misread if we assume that characters are seen as characters. I get the (uhm) vibe (?) that many people consume media as always-already politics. That is, they assume that some left (though truly just soft lib) group of writers has drawn it out as "1. Homelander is bad 2. Connect to alt right and/or Trump" and so, maybe, the topography of their desire is never about the character as he (or she) is given on the screen, but almost an act of watching and waiting for disaggregated moments that confirm edges of their own ideology. Homophobia, racism, etc. It's almost like they've gone and Sontag'd us before we knew it... In place of a hermeneutics of sigma males in media, they've erected an erotics of sigma males in media.