The Russian brainrot coming for your children How the viral hit ‘Sigma Boy’ won over online audiences and galvanized politicians

Last fall, Russian singers “Betsy” and Maria Yankovskaya released the song “Sigma Boy,” a viral hit that grabbed millions of views on social media and inspired yet another glut of young people recording themselves in synchronized dance. The tune has made enemies both at home and abroad, provoking calls for censorship from groups as disparate as the European Parliament and Russian Orthodox traditionalist activists. Meduza explores what we know about this “brainrot” success and its creators.

How we got Sigma Boy

The performers behind Sigma Boy are 11-year-old “Betsy” (Svetlana Chertishcheva) and 12-year-old Maria Yankovskaya. This isn’t Betsy’s first rodeo; she scored her first viral hit three years earlier with Simple Dimple Pop It Squish, another bubbly earworm with more than 8 million views on YouTube. Her Sigma Boy costar, Yankovskaya, also has an impressive entertainment resume, hosting a show on Russia’s STS Kids channel while also blogging and singing.

Sigma Boy appeared on YouTube on October 4, 2024, and within a few months, it had amassed nearly 70 million views. It’s not even a proper music video; all you see are 2D cutouts of Betsy and Maria swaying under fake snowflakes.

The song belongs to the Internet’s growing supply of “brainrot content,” a universe of trash memes, perhaps most infamously Alexey Gerasimov’s Skibidi Toilet series.

Betsy’s father, composer Mikhail Chertishchev, wrote the lyrics and music for Sigma Boy alongside musician Mukka (Serafim Sidorin), who’s best known for the song Devochka S Kare (“The Girl With a Bob Cut”). The two released Sigma Boy through the label Rhymes Music, which specializes in content for teenage audiences and works with artists like Dora and Maybe Baby. Rhymes Music previously collaborated with the artists Morgenshtern, Soda Luv, and Tima Belorussky.

Chertishchev, 38, is a music producer and composer-arranger. He started out creating ringtones, which he claims “went viral nationwide.” Later, he composed music for video games and films. His work is featured on dozens of episodes of the cartoons Barboskiny and Luntik, and it appears on soundtracks for popular films about Russian bogatyrs by Melnitsa Animation Studio. One of his best-known compositions is Vasilisa’s song in the 2013 animated film Ivan Tsarevich and the Gray Wolf 2, which contestants on the singing competition show The Voice often performed.

In an interview with Kinopoisk, Chertishchev said he wanted to write a song about “an incredibly cool guy that everyone likes, but where the girls should be even cooler.” His co-writer Mukka researched teenage Internet slang and wrote the lyrics. “I didn’t know about the ‘sigma’ meme, and honestly, I still don’t really get it,” he admitted.

Sigma Boy’s path to virality

After Betsy and Yankovskaya shared Sigma Boy on their social media, fans quickly took to the song. The track became a legitimate Internet success when young people started using a soundbite of the chorus in dancing videos posted on TikTok and Instagram. Soon, influencers began copying the girls’ dance moves, christening the song as a viral hit.

Some adults also joined the Sigma Boy craze. Older content creators remade the song, cited it in memes, and featured it in “edits” (modified or remixed versions of existing images, videos, or audio clips). The song is technically in Russian, but the abundance of borrowed foreign words and brand names (“sigma,” “boy,” “back,” “bankroll,” “Skittles,” “Snickers,” “bitcoin”) make the lyrics more universally accessible. 

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the song went viral, but one key factor was German TikToker simon.bth (1.5 million followers). His schtick is walking into public places with a large speaker and blasting music at full volume while doing backflips. Simon released a series of flip-filled videos featuring Sigma Boy, the most popular of which has 27 million views. (Others have racked up between 1.2 and 20 million views.) Maria Yankovskaya even makes guest appearances in some of these thrilling videos.

In January 2025, Sigma Boy reached seventh place on the Billboard Hot Dance/Pop Songs chart, trailing behind Charli XCX, Ariana Grande, and Billie Eilish but surpassing Kesha and Katy Perry. Before the track briefly topped Spotify’s Viral 50 Global chart, it trended in Germany, South Korea, and other countries.

The origins of the ‘sigma’ meme

The term “sigma male,” as it’s known online today, emerged in the late 2010s on forums that cultivated pseudoscientific ideas about male psychology and social roles, dividing men into alpha, beta, and other archetypes. Like other “manosphere” theories, the sigma male paradigm is considered an example of toxic masculinity. 

But what is a “sigma male”? According to the theory, he’s masculine, like an alpha, but he doesn’t rely on the validation of others. The sigma is a lone wolf living by his own rules and not seeking recognition. Unlike alpha males, his motivation is self-expression, not power. Recent pop culture examples include Keanu Reeves, Yura Borisov’s character from Anora, and Soviet rock legend Viktor Tsoi.

However, time has blurred the distinctions between alphas and sigmas to the point that the word “sigma” can function as an emphatic endorsement of virtually anything. For example, Christian Bale’s character in American Psycho is often labeled a sigma, even though he’s an egocentric maniac. In fact, the dance Betsy and Yankovskaya perform for Sigma Boy begins with a reference to Bale’s signature smirk in the film.

Last December, Betsy told the newspaper Argumenty & Fakty that the idea behind the song “is that Masha and I are so cool, and the Sigma Boy is trying to win us over, and we are trying to win him over, too.”

As its adult creators acknowledge, Sigma Boy was engineered to resonate with fans of existing viral trends like “fluffy hair” and “mewing” (a junk-science oral posture training technique popular in “looksmaxxing” subcultures), as well as the popular online game Roblox. Typically, these videos involve rating people’s or characters’ appearances in percentages — for example, “100000000% sigma boy.” 

Sigma Boy’s detractors

The first significant critique of Sigma Boy came last December from the left-leaning German newspaper Die Tageszeitung, which expressed concerns that young fans are idolizing a song that “glorifies sexism and outbursts of violence.”

A month later, in a speech to the European Parliament on January 26, German politician Nela Riehl advocated banning the song. “‘Sigma Boy’ is a viral Russian trope used on social media that communicates patriarchal and pro-Russian worldviews,” Riehl argued, describing the tune as an “example of Russian infiltration of popular discourse.” The E.U. must “target even these subtle infiltrations and falsifications,” she said.

Surprisingly, Riehl found an ally in the radical Orthodox movement Sorok Sorokov, whose activists complain that Sigma Boy sexualizes teenagers. The group, which says the song is “obscene and harmful to children,” has formally petitioned Russia’s Prosecutor General to investigate the track for violating the country’s media laws.

In response, composer Mikhail Chertishchev has suggested that Sorok Sorokov’s activists are bringing their own sexual baggage to the song if they “see something” in two preteen girls dancing. He also maintains that there’s nothing “patriarchal” about the lyrics and insists that the song is merely about “lighthearted relationships between girls and boys” without any politics.

On February 7, the Center for Countering Disinformation (a subsidiary of Ukraine’s National Security and Defense Council) tweeted that Sigma Boy is “part of Russia’s information warfare” and called on audiences to reject “Russia’s return to the global information space”:

Russia’s political mainstream has embraced Sigma Boy. The song has received support from politicians in major political parties, most notably LDPR faction leader Leonid Slutsky, who denounced Nela Riehl’s speech in the European Parliament as an example of “cancel culture repression.” Slutsky argued that “the soft power of Russian culture is winning on the global pop scene” and that “our girls, talented schoolgirls, are advancing, crushing the corrupt foundations of LGBT fascism.” (Safe Internet League head Ekaterina Mizulina, Russia’s most prominent censorship-advocate, has criticized State Duma members for devoting too much attention to Sigma Boy, “as if there are no other problems in this country.”)

Talk of suppressing the song at home and abroad doesn’t seem to worry Chertishchev. “If they want to, I actually think that kind of thing only makes people more curious to find out what’s being banned. Forbidden fruit is always the sweetest… So let them ban it if they want. It kind of works in our favor,” he said in January.