sigma balls
addie says hi, and an introduction to why "sigma game" is dangerous bullshit
hi there, i’m addie, erstwhile youtube shitposter and now a stacker of subs. i made this geocities page as a way to counteract a particular new blog on this site that’s promoting dangerous, stupid and innately bigoted bullshit, which i intend to do post by post.
the blog in question is a silly little thing calling itself Sigma Game, which i hope you’ll forgive me for not linking to as i don’t want to even passively promote it. it purports to offer dating and relationship advice to a male audience on the basis of its bespoke “sociosexual hierarchy”, a rewarmed and expanded version of the old alpha-beta dichotomy beloved by date rapist jockbros throughout the world. to those categories the creator has added the further, and furtherly tenuous, categories of bravo (formerly beta), gamma, delta, omega, lambda and, most famously, sigma. the author of the blog is in fact point zero for the term “sigma male” in its modern construction, and he fucking meant it lmao.
the said author is the far rightist scamlord and all-around peach of a human being Vox Day, real name Theodore Beale, who in addition to holding an impoverished estimation of male sexual behavior is also a sexist against women, an avowing racist, an antivaxer and general promoter of pseudomedicine, a forced birther, a religious fundamentalist, an election denier, an advocate of marital rape, and a perennial shuteye scam artist who both believes the shit he’s slinging and has lost considerable value and opportunities in his own chosen fields, this on back of an intractable unwillingness to adjust his worldview in the face of facts that run contrary to his own avowed interests. needless to say, his presence on this website should be extremely concerning to anyone who values fact, freedom, justice or just basic amity and fair dealing between human beings.
as to my interest in this man, it grieves me to say that i became aware of him during my eight year stint on the alt right pipeline, during which i was an avid reader and admirer of his work. i read his blog daily and occasionally commented, i was online for his first livestream (called “Darkstreams” because he’s just that fucking obvious), i bought and still own print copies of multiple of his books, and on back of his encouragement from afar i took the sad and predictable side of basically every cultural brouhaha of the 2010s. i was pro-gamergate from day one (i built the audience for my youtube channel on the pro-gamergate imageboard 8chan), i voted for trump in the 2016 and 2020 elections, i thought january 6th was the second american revolution, i read and supported other alt right figureheads during that time, i conscienced and internalized multiple alt right conspiracy theories like pizzagate and qanon, and in all these senses and others i generally alienated myself from the values of progressive society and was a burden to others and especially myself. the seduction such as it is of the alt right is its ability to get disaffected and traumatized young people to fall in love with their own opportunity cost, to love the shit they live in rather than work a shovel, and for eight years i was a pretty far gone hardcase representative of this alarming trend.
of course i had private scruples. i differed from vox on a number of incidental points, like his vaccine denial pre-covid and other trivial matters, which at the time i mistook for a healthy intellectual exchange with whom i assumed to be a serious thinker. on other points, the pain was more acute. i knew i was bisexual even at the nadir of my political life, and vox’s predictably medieval views of sexuality did cause some chafing there, but my dissatisfaction still led to occasional strong emotional relapses which, as a consequence of my rationalization, i was unable to explain or properly manage at the time. suffice to say, i was suffering to no end, and the mistrust i had for others as a consequence of the bad advice i’d taken put me in a spiral no one could get me out of but myself. other people can’t intuit things for you.
as it happens, it was vox’s conduct itself that ultimately gave me the light i needed to see. 2021 started pretty rough for the alt right, with the failure of the insurrection, on which day i watched the mood in the room change from jubilation to denial in a matter of hours. biden’s inauguration was a further axe blow, and vox’s blog post on that day, which features a procession of panicked edits as his foretold trump coup failed to materialize, was a further embarrassment. even still on the alt right at the time i saw election denial as a mistake and hoped vox and others would start looking to 2024 - instead we saw a total embrace and consummation of election falsehood. further small cuts fell here and there, chief among them his full throated endorsement of fellow grifter milo yiannopolous’s entry to the ex-gay canard, and his attempt to launch a meme called the “Day of the Pillow”, which repurposes outright racist rhetoric to “ironically” advocate elder abuse. overall, the fun, such as it was, left in 2021, and i began to see vox in a clearer light - as a frustrated, vain and ill-tempered little man with no great accomplishments and no great thoughts.
needing a release, i started looking at the anti-vox sections of the internet out of curiosity, chief among them the r/gammasecretkings subreddit (the name of which is an ironic appropriation of a voxian insult). not long after i began browsing there, someone posted a picture taken from the instagram of vox’s wife heather, who is herself a fairly toxic public bigot in her own right. the title on the post suggested the picture had been taken in switzerland, and heather’s own caption suggested the location was a frequent stop for the family.
this was surprising. vox has never made a secret of the fact that he’s an american expat to europe, but for years his representation to his inner circle was that he lived in north italy. given his own words and his oft-cited fixation on italian culture, along with a presentation on his blog of switzerland as just another country, i became curious. together with my best friend - also, by his patience, the chief architect of my deradicalization - i dove into the information myself.
i can’t go into specifics about precisely what we did except to state that we violated no laws and made use of no confidential information, but after about an hour’s effort, i was able with extreme geographic accuracy to pinpoint vox’s home. i published that information a few days later, and subsequent swiss press coverage has made it a matter of public record that he lives in the interlake region of western switzerland, in the canton of vaud - deep in french switzerland, nowhere near italian switzerland much less italy, and closer to paris than to rome. my best friend has walked the property, and one day i hope to walk it myself.
in any case, june 18th 2021 was my final day on the alt right. i’m aware, given vox’s many moral and intellectual failings, that his simple deceit regarding his country of residence is a fairly trivial reason to upend my own prior bigotry, but i hope you can understand this fact was simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. it was a lie, an obvious lie, a stupid lie, and an entirely self-serving lie, whether to deflect criticism or to maintain a private existence that to a public bigot is an unearned luxury, or some other reason wholly private and so trivial that any effort to understand it would demean the observer. it exhausted my patience and severed my final ties with a political worldview that in countless other tiny ways had been falling away from me.
when i left i knew the change had to be absolute. i had some advantages in my favor, namely that i came from a family of chicago liberals (i had flattered myself as being an ex-lefty defector), so my onboarding to political responsibility would skip a few of the usual pitfalls. the one i made a conscious effort to avoid was the risk of falling once more into the conspiracy pit. i knew the risk was real of simply playing musical chairs with my preferred flavor of bullshit, and decided that from that point on, i would be a fundamentalist for empiricism and testable fact as a foundation of public policy and my interaction with it. voxlogic came in handy here - any time i had one of the old markass reactions to a news article or a political issue, i took it for true south and immediately looked to the opposite.
my improvement was swift, in leaps and bounds. i started enjoying media i had foresworn for years on flimsy political pretexts. i clarified my own stance in regards to politics and landed a progressive, no longer encumbered by the assumption that all leftists are savages lying in wait to Destroy Our Culture™. most significantly, without the ghoul of hypermasculinity as a virtue hanging over my head, i was able to finally do a deep dive on my sexuality and my relation to gender, and on the far side of that learning process, i finally affirmed myself as a trans woman. the usual suspects will respond to that in ways that are 100% unsurprising and 100% uncompelling, and i can say with some safety that i honestly don’t give a shit as far as it applies to me.
in the abstract, it’s vox’s schizophrenic relationship to sex that has stuck with me the most. i had initially been attracted to his writing, like a lot of hormonal 20-somethings, on back of his promise to offer forbidden insights into the nature of sexual relations - insights that, as it turns out, are just heavily brainwormed D/s fetishism repackaged as a putative ontology of sex itself with a heaping helping of christian fundamentalism thrown in the mix. i was struck a decade ago by his willingness, unlike most fundies, to acknowledge sex is fun and people like to have it whether they’re married or not. the shine wore off on that assumption as well, not least of all because i’ve since learned a good scammer sells the cheapest shit possible at the highest markup possible, and nothing’s cheaper than being horny.
and now here we are - myself seasoned, out from under silent dysphoria, looking down the barrel of a life of affirmation and potential still to be claimed - and vox, now in middle age, repackaging decade-old blog posts for a new audience, title changed from “alpha game” to “sigma game”, in a vain effort to catch the wave of his meme’s success, notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of sigma memes are taking the piss out of the concept for its utter uselessness.
but the risk is still real. it was a vox devotee, miles sonkin aka “iggy semmelweiss”, who constructed the PR campaign for andrew tate, directly enabling his trafficking and the spread of new fascist propaganda in the guise of dating and life advice to young men. and it was a business associate of vox, josiah litle, who culminated a procession of domestic abuse when he murdered his wife in front of their children with a hammer, on no more provocation than her asking him to stop drinking. vox’s effect even on men near him is disastrous, to say nothing of the alienation he has promoted in the world at large.
there is no discipline in vox’s words, godly or otherwise. he is a living hazard by his own design, selling discord and pain, and while not himself the most urgent or attractive object of scorn, his reach has nonetheless exceeded his grasp.
i plan to use this blog, at least for a time, to answer and address his public falsehoods on the topic of sex, specifically his efforts to promote his false hierarchy on the sigma game blog. as said, i will not link to him, but i will quote verbatim where possible, and offer corrections and observations. i have no special training, i’m a high school graduate, and i have no doubt i’ll make many mistakes, but i’m no longer scared of correction or how i’m perceived in the eyes of others, and if i can offer any value at all from my perspective and my small efforts, i’ll consider it all worthwhile.