What Is Looksmaxxing—and Why Is It Suddenly Everywhere?

Looksmaxxing Explained: Incels, Mewing and Bone Smashing

What Is Looksmaxxing—and Why Is It Suddenly Everywhere?

Looksmaxxing is an online appearance-optimization culture focused on maximizing physical attractiveness. It can include ordinary grooming, exercise, fashion, skincare, and dental care. Its more extreme forms promote anabolic steroids, restrictive diets, unapproved drugs, cosmetic surgery, and dangerous practices such as deliberately striking the face in an attempt to reshape bone.

The term originated in incel and manosphere communities, where appearance was treated as the primary explanation for men’s dating and social problems. It later spread through TikTok, livestreaming, fitness culture, mainstream journalism, and the increasingly common internet suffix “-maxxing.”

In this episode of Network Issues, media scholar Jamie Cohen and marketing strategist Destinee Day explain the history and vocabulary behind looksmaxxing—from involuntary celibacy and pickup artistry to mewing, mogging, Clavicular, body-image pressure, and the ethical problem of turning a harmful subculture into casual marketing language.

Health and safety note: Deliberately striking the face or body does not safely reshape bone. It can cause fractures, nerve damage, eye injuries, disfigurement, and other permanent harm. Anyone experiencing compulsive appearance concerns, disordered eating, steroid use, or urges to injure their body should seek support from a qualified medical or mental-health professional.

What Does Looksmaxxing Mean?

Looksmaxxing means attempting to “maximize” a person’s physical attractiveness.

The practice is often divided into two broad categories.

Softmaxxing

Softmaxxing generally refers to conventional or lower-risk appearance changes, such as:

• Haircuts

• Skincare

• Dental care

• Exercise

• Sleep

• Clothing

• Grooming

• Posture

• Nutrition

• Treating acne

• Developing social confidence

These practices are not inherently harmful. Many are ordinary forms of self-care.

The problem is that even benign advice can be delivered inside a rigid belief system that teaches users that appearance determines their human value, romantic prospects, masculinity, and social status.

Hardmaxxing

Hardmaxxing refers to more invasive, risky, or medically consequential methods, including:

• Cosmetic surgery

• Anabolic steroids

• Hormone misuse

• Extreme dieting

• Unapproved injectable compounds

• Limb-lengthening surgery

• Facial implants

• Unsupervised medication use

• Deliberate facial injury

• So-called bone smashing

The boundary is not always clean. A skincare routine can be healthy, while compulsively analyzing every facial measurement can become psychologically damaging.

Where Did Looksmaxxing Come From?

Looksmaxxing developed within online incel and manosphere communities during the 2010s.

Earlier communities formed around pickup artistry, bodybuilding forums, dating strategy, antifeminist ideology, and debates about whether men could improve their romantic prospects through behavior or appearance.

When pickup-artist strategies failed to produce the promised results, some users moved toward a more fatalistic belief system.

They concluded that dating success was determined mainly by immutable physical traits such as:

• Facial symmetry

• Jaw shape

• Height

• Bone structure

• Race

• Hair

• Eye position

• Shoulder width

• Perceived masculinity

This worldview became connected to black-pill ideology, which teaches that appearance and genetics determine social and romantic outcomes so completely that personality, kindness, and social development have little value.

Looksmaxxing emerged as an attempt to work within—or escape—that hierarchy.

What Does “Incel” Mean?

“Incel” is short for involuntarily celibate.

The term was originally created in the 1990s by a Canadian woman known as Alana. Her project was intended as an inclusive support community for people of different genders and sexual orientations who experienced loneliness or difficulty forming relationships.

The term was later adopted by online communities of men and developed into an identity frequently associated with misogyny, resentment, rigid gender hierarchy, and fatalistic beliefs about dating.

The modern incel subculture should therefore be distinguished from the term’s original supportive meaning.

What Was Pickup Artistry?

Pickup artistry was an early internet and self-help subculture that claimed to teach men systems for attracting and manipulating women.

Its techniques commonly included:

• Scripted conversation

• Status performance

• Psychological manipulation

• Rehearsed confidence

• “Negging,” or disguised insults

• Treating dating as a competitive game

• Reducing women to predictable targets

When these methods did not work for everyone, some users concluded that their appearance—not the manipulative nature of the system—was the real problem.

That disappointment helped feed communities focused on lookism, involuntary celibacy, and appearance rankings.

What Is Lookism?

Lookism is prejudice or discrimination based on physical appearance.

Within looksmaxxing communities, the term is often used more broadly to describe a belief that attractive people receive overwhelming social, romantic, and economic advantages.

Appearance can influence how people are treated. Research on attractiveness bias and appearance-based discrimination supports parts of that observation.

The harmful shift occurs when users are taught that appearance explains almost everything—and that a person who does not meet a narrow standard is permanently excluded from love, friendship, work, or social respect.

That belief can turn a real social bias into a totalizing ideology.

What Does the Suffix “-Maxxing” Mean?

The suffix “-maxxing” means taking something to its perceived maximum or optimizing it aggressively.

It is commonly connected to gaming language such as min-maxing, where players optimize character statistics, abilities, or equipment for a particular outcome.

Online, the suffix is now applied to almost anything:

• Sleepmaxxing

• Healthmaxxing

• Careermaxxing

• Friction-maxxing

• Studymaxxing

• Moneymaxxing

• Longevitymaxxing

• Stylemaxxing

Some uses are sincere. Others are satirical.

The suffix has spread far beyond looksmaxxing, but its popularity reflects a broader cultural obsession with turning everyday life into measurable optimization.

Why Is Looksmaxxing Suddenly Mainstream?

Looksmaxxing is not new. Its visibility is.

Several forces have moved it into mainstream culture:

• TikTok recommendation feeds

• YouTube and livestream personalities

• Fitness and grooming content

• Mainstream reporting

• Viral reaction videos

• Short-form before-and-after content

• Influencer controversy

• The popularity of “-maxxing” language

• Growing concern about boys’ body image

• Brands borrowing internet slang

A niche subculture can appear much larger once journalists, creators, parents, educators, and brands begin reacting to it.

That amplification creates a paradox.

Public discussion can help people understand and resist a harmful trend. It can also introduce the vocabulary, influencers, and practices to audiences who would never have encountered them otherwise.

Who Is Clavicular?

Clavicular is the online name of Braden Peters, a livestreamer and influencer who became a highly visible face of extreme looksmaxxing.

His name refers to the clavicle, or collarbone, which looksmaxxing communities may treat as a measure of shoulder width and masculine frame size.

His content has included discussion or depiction of extreme appearance modification, drug use, steroids, facial striking, and other medically risky practices.

He should not be treated as a qualified health, fitness, or medical authority.

His visibility illustrates an important part of the trend: extreme behavior generates content.

A moderate grooming routine may not produce many clips. A person presenting dangerous behavior as a radical appearance transformation creates shock, controversy, reaction videos, and constant engagement.

What Is Bone Smashing?

Bone smashing is the false idea that repeatedly striking facial or bodily bones will produce controlled microfractures that heal into a more attractive shape.

There is no safe evidence-based method of reshaping a healthy face by hitting it with a hammer, massage gun, or other object.

Possible consequences include:

• Facial fractures

• Eye-socket injuries

• Dental damage

• Nerve injury

• Chronic pain

• Bleeding

• Infection

• Asymmetry

• Disfigurement

• Brain injury

• Damage requiring reconstructive surgery

Bone healing cannot be controlled through random trauma.

The practice should be described as deliberate self-injury—not a beauty routine.

What Is Mewing?

Mewing is the practice of placing the tongue against the roof of the mouth while maintaining a particular jaw and head posture.

The technique is named after British orthodontists John and Mike Mew.

Supporters claim it can reshape the jaw, improve facial structure, correct posture, or make the face appear more masculine.

Normal tongue posture and orthodontic treatment can affect oral function, especially during growth. However, strong claims that an adult can dramatically remodel facial bone structure through tongue positioning are not supported by reliable clinical evidence.

Mewing became especially popular online because it is:

• Free

• Easy to demonstrate

• Visually recognizable

• Presented as a secret technique

• Compatible with before-and-after content

• Possible to perform in public

The gesture also became a meme. Users may point to their jaw or refuse to speak because they are “mewing.”

What Does Mogging Mean?

Mogging means appearing physically superior to another person, especially within the same image, video, or physical setting.

The term is associated with “AMOG,” meaning alpha male of the group.

Someone may claim to “height-mog,” “jaw-mog,” or “frame-mog” another person by appearing:

• Taller

• Broader

• More muscular

• More attractive

• More masculine

• More visually dominant

In livestream and short-form culture, mogging can be extremely literal.

Creators compete for visual dominance inside the camera frame. Shoulder width, posture, camera angle, body size, and proximity become status signals.

This turns social interaction into a constant physical ranking system.

What Is the PSL Scale?

The PSL scale is an appearance-ranking system associated with the forums PUAHate, Sluthate, and Lookism.

Users attempt to assign numerical value to facial features and attractiveness using measurements or highly specific categories.

They may analyze:

• Eye shape

• Canthal tilt

• Jaw width

• Midface ratio

• Cheekbones

• Facial symmetry

• Brow position

• Nose shape

• Height

• Shoulder width

The system presents subjective beauty standards as though they were objective mathematics.

That can create a false sense of scientific certainty.

A user is no longer simply insecure about their appearance. They are encouraged to believe that their perceived worth has been calculated and confirmed.

What Is Black-Pill Ideology?

Black-pill ideology is a fatalistic worldview common in incel communities.

It argues that:

• Physical appearance determines dating outcomes.

• Genetics cannot be meaningfully overcome.

• Women select men almost entirely by status and appearance.

• Personality and kindness have little value.

• Society is controlled by rigid attractiveness hierarchies.

• Some men are permanently excluded from relationships.

Looksmaxxing can create a contradiction within this ideology.

If appearance is completely fixed, improvement should be impossible. Yet influencers can make money, gain status, and build communities by offering endless interventions.

The user is told both that their situation is hopeless and that one more product, procedure, protocol, or subscription may finally fix them.

Is Looksmaxxing Just Self-Improvement?

Not exactly.

Exercise, grooming, sleep, dental care, and finding clothing that fits can all support well-being.

Looksmaxxing adds an ideological structure in which improvement is often driven by:

• Shame

• Comparison

• Romantic resentment

• Fear of inferiority

• Masculine status

• Numerical ranking

• Algorithmic attention

• Misogyny

• Fatalism

• The promise of shortcuts

Ordinary self-care asks:

What helps me feel healthy and comfortable?

Looksmaxxing often asks:

What must I change so that other people can no longer rank me as inferior?

That difference matters.

Why Are Shortcuts Central to Looksmaxxing?

Looksmaxxing frequently celebrates the final transformation rather than the gradual process behind it.

The user sees:

• A sharp jawline

• Very low body fat

• Broad shoulders

• Clear skin

• A dramatic before-and-after result

• A highly edited image

• A surgically modified face

• A person using performance-enhancing drugs

The work, risks, genetics, lighting, filters, costs, recovery, and medical consequences may remain hidden.

That creates pressure for immediate results.

Instead of months or years of sustainable health behavior, users may pursue:

• Steroids

• Stimulants

• Starvation

• Unregulated peptides

• Extreme cosmetic procedures

• Deliberate injury

The shortcut is part of the content’s appeal.

How Does Looksmaxxing Affect Body Image?

Looksmaxxing can encourage constant body surveillance.

Users may repeatedly photograph, measure, compare, and rank:

• Their jaw

• Nose

• eyes

• hairline

• shoulders

• body-fat percentage

• height

• skin

• facial proportions

Research and mental-health experts have connected extreme appearance preoccupation with anxiety, eating disorders, social withdrawal, depression, and body dysmorphic disorder.

Body dysmorphic disorder involves intense preoccupation with perceived flaws that may be minor or invisible to others.

Changing the body does not necessarily resolve the distress because the user’s attention often shifts to a new alleged defect.

Does Looksmaxxing Affect Only White Men?

No.

Young men from many racial, ethnic, national, and socioeconomic backgrounds encounter appearance-optimization content.

However, influential looksmaxxing spaces frequently reproduce white or Eurocentric standards of attractiveness, including narrow ideals involving:

• Facial structure

• Skin

• hair

• eye shape

• height

• perceived racial hierarchy

The broader manosphere is also racially diverse while frequently reproducing racist beliefs.

That creates a system in which users from marginalized groups may participate in a culture that treats some of their own features as defects.

Why Is Looksmaxxing Marketed Mainly to Men?

Women and girls have faced intense appearance pressure for generations.

The cosmetic, fashion, diet, fitness, and entertainment industries have long encouraged women to treat their bodies as continuous improvement projects.

Looksmaxxing repackages similar pressure through a masculine vocabulary:

• Optimization

• Competition

• Ranking

• Systems

• Status

• Dominance

• Metrics

• Gaming

• Performance

• “Scientific” analysis

The anxiety is familiar. The branding is different.

For men, appearance work is made to sound less like beauty and more like strategic engineering.

Is Looksmaxxing Really About Attracting Women?

Often, not entirely.

Looksmaxxing communities claim that men are improving themselves to attract women. Much of the actual behavior is organized around competition with other men.

Users rank one another, evaluate male influencers, compare jawlines, measure frames, and decide who is “mogging” whom.

That suggests looksmaxxing is also a performance of masculinity for a male audience.

Women become the presumed prize inside a hierarchy largely designed, enforced, and watched by men.

This can deepen the original isolation.

A user may enter the community hoping to form a relationship but become increasingly focused on male approval, numerical ranking, resentment, and content performance.

What Is the Male Gaze?

The male gaze is a concept associated with film scholar Laura Mulvey.

It describes how media has often been created from a heterosexual male perspective that treats women as visual objects rather than complete participants in the story.

Looksmaxxing reveals a related form of masculine performance.

Men may be evaluating themselves through standards created and enforced by other men while believing those standards represent what women want.

Destinee points out that many women would prioritize qualities such as:

• Emotional availability

• Reliability

• Kindness

• Communication

• Humor

• Shared values

• Basic domestic competence

• Feeling safe and respected

Those qualities are difficult to represent in a before-and-after photograph.

A jawline is easier to turn into content.

Why Does the Clavicle Matter?

The clavicle, or collarbone, has a long visual association with body shape, thinness, shoulder width, exposure, and glamour.

For women, a visible collarbone has often been used in fashion imagery to signal thinness or delicacy.

Within male looksmaxxing culture, clavicle width can be treated as a sign of a broader frame and masculine physical dominance.

That focus turns one ordinary anatomical feature into another measurable status object.

It also demonstrates how beauty standards migrate between genders while being renamed as masculinity or optimization.

How Is Looksmaxxing Connected to Content Creation?

Looksmaxxing thrives because transformation is highly compatible with online content.

Creators can produce:

• Before-and-after videos

• Ratings

• Reaction clips

• Daily routines

• Product recommendations

• Livestreams

• Debates

• Transformation challenges

• Surgical updates

• Diet protocols

• Drug discussions

• Conflict with other creators

Extreme behavior creates more content than ordinary health.

The creator’s appearance becomes a continuous show. If an activity cannot be recorded, clipped, debated, or monetized, it may feel less valuable.

Jamie describes this as a form of content nihilism: life becomes worthwhile primarily when it can generate attention.

What Is Clipping?

Clipping is the practice of extracting short, provocative moments from livestreams or long videos and reposting them across social platforms.

Clipping can create an entire secondary economy around a creator.

The original streamer produces hours of material. Other accounts identify shocking or controversial moments and redistribute them as short-form content.

This rewards creators for:

• Escalation

• Conflict

• Dangerous behavior

• Extreme statements

• Public breakdowns

• Provocation

A harmful subculture can therefore grow even when most viewers do not watch its original source material.

They encounter only its most dramatic fragments.

How Do Algorithms Amplify Looksmaxxing?

Recommendation systems reward content that produces strong engagement.

Looksmaxxing generates:

• Shock

• Curiosity

• Disgust

• Aspiration

• Fear

• Debate

• Before-and-after comparison

• Repeated viewing

People do not have to support a video for their engagement to amplify it.

Commenting that bone smashing is dangerous may still signal to the platform that the post holds attention.

Research on muscularity-focused TikTok content has found that videos rated as more harmful—and videos depicting more muscular bodies—can attract higher engagement, potentially allowing recommendation systems to intensify body comparison and status-based ideals. (⁠arXiv)

Why Can Mainstream Coverage Make the Trend Bigger?

Journalists face a difficult problem.

Looksmaxxing is relevant to body image, masculinity, youth culture, health misinformation, and online extremism. It deserves scrutiny.

But coverage can also:

• Introduce new audiences to the term

• Make influencers appear culturally important

• Reproduce dangerous practices visually

• Provide direct search terms

• Turn fringe behavior into a spectacle

• Reward creators with attention

• Make a niche trend appear universal

The most responsible coverage explains the system rather than merely showcasing its most shocking participant.

It should emphasize context, health risks, ideology, and support—not simply ask viewers to react to a frightening clip.

Should Brands Use “Looksmaxxing” as a Marketing Term?

Usually, they should be extremely cautious.

A B2B company may use “looksmaxxing” humorously to describe rebranding, redesigning a website, or improving visual presentation.

That may generate clicks because the term is timely.

It can also:

• Detach the term from its harmful origin

• Normalize incel vocabulary

• Turn self-injury into a branding joke

• Introduce the term to new audiences

• Reward trend-chasing over responsible communication

• Make extreme optimization sound aspirational

The broader suffix “-maxxing” has become common internet language and can sometimes be used harmlessly.

Using looksmaxxing specifically carries more cultural weight because it directly invokes the appearance hierarchy and subculture from which it came.

What Is Friction-Maxxing?

Friction-maxxing is an example of the “-maxxing” suffix being repurposed more constructively.

It generally means deliberately slowing down or adding effort to activities that digital platforms have made frictionless.

Examples might include:

• Reading a physical book

• Writing notes by hand

• Waiting before reposting

• Calling instead of texting

• Cooking instead of ordering

• Verifying information before reacting

• Choosing a slower, less optimized process

The term demonstrates that internet language can be reappropriated.

However, using the suffix does not erase its history. Context determines whether the result is critical, ironic, or careless.

What Are the Soft Entry Points Into Looksmaxxing?

People rarely begin with the most extreme content.

Common entry points include:

• Fitness videos

• Skincare

• Dating advice

• Men’s self-help

• Entrepreneurship

• Productivity

• Hustle culture

• Confidence coaching

• Fashion

• Hair-loss content

• Testosterone discussions

• Jaw exercises

• “Become the best version of yourself” messaging

Most of these topics are not inherently harmful.

The risk comes from the pathway.

A user may move from:

1. Wanting clearer skin

2. To evaluating facial proportions

3. To receiving a numerical attractiveness rating

4. To black-pill content

5. To believing they are genetically inferior

6. To drugs, surgery, or self-injury

The first video may not be extremist. It can still open a recommendation path toward increasingly rigid content.

How Is Hustle Culture Connected to Looksmaxxing?

Hustle culture teaches that every part of life should be productive, optimized, measurable, and monetized.

Looksmaxxing applies that logic to the body.

The face becomes a startup.

The body becomes a collection of performance indicators.

The user becomes both the product and the manager responsible for continuous improvement.

This worldview leaves little room for:

• Rest

• Acceptance

• Aging

• disability

• ordinary variation

• uncertainty

• pleasure without productivity

• a body that does not need to become a project

It also makes failure feel personal. If every outcome can supposedly be optimized, any dissatisfaction becomes evidence that the individual has not worked hard enough.

Why Is Looksmaxxing Compared With an MLM?

Jamie compares the manosphere’s self-improvement system with a multilevel marketing structure.

Users are promised transformation, status, confidence, and access to a hidden truth.

They may then be encouraged to:

• Buy courses

• Subscribe to communities

• Promote influencers

• Recruit other users

• Sell coaching

• Repost clips

• Purchase supplements

• Repeat the ideology

• Blame themselves when the system fails

The promise is always slightly ahead.

One more product, protocol, surgery, measurement, or level of commitment may finally produce “ascension.”

What Is “Ascension”?

Ascension is looksmaxxing language for moving upward within a perceived attractiveness or social hierarchy.

A user may believe that changing their appearance will allow them to escape involuntary celibacy, gain status, or be recognized as a more desirable class of man.

The word gives the transformation a spiritual or totalizing quality.

The person is not merely changing a haircut. They are supposedly becoming a different category of human.

That framing increases the emotional stakes of ordinary appearance concerns.

Why Does Media Literacy Matter?

Media literacy helps users recognize that looksmaxxing content is not simply neutral health advice.

Viewers should ask:

• Who created this?

• What qualifications do they have?

• What are they selling?

• Is the before-and-after image verified?

• Is the creator using drugs, filters, surgery, or lighting?

• Is the practice medically supported?

• Is the content trying to make me feel ashamed?

• Does it blame women or another group?

• Does it promise a shortcut?

• Is the most extreme behavior being rewarded with attention?

A viral word can look harmless when removed from its history.

Understanding the history gives users the ability to decide whether they want to participate in its worldview.

What Should Parents and Educators Watch For?

Possible warning signs include:

• Constant mirror checking

• Repeatedly photographing facial features

• Sudden restrictive dieting

• Obsession with jaw or eye measurements

• Using terms such as mogging, PSL, black pill, Chad, or sub-five

• Unexplained bruising

• Interest in steroids or unapproved drugs

• Withdrawal from friends

• Hostility toward women or girls

• Belief that appearance determines all success

• Sudden spending on secret protocols or coaching

• Extreme shame about ordinary features

One term alone does not prove that someone is in danger.

The goal is not to interrogate or ridicule a young person. It is to create enough trust that they can explain what they are seeing and why it appeals to them.

How Should Adults Respond?

A useful response begins with curiosity rather than humiliation.

Consider asking:

• What does this term mean in the videos you see?

• What result is the creator promising?

• Do you think the before-and-after images are real?

• What happens to people who do not meet the standard?

• Is anyone making money from the advice?

• How does the content make you feel afterward?

• What would healthy improvement look like without injury?

• Who could help us verify this claim?

Simply telling a teenager that the trend is stupid may reinforce their belief that adults do not understand online culture.

The better goal is to restore context, agency, and connection.

Key Takeaways

• Looksmaxxing is an appearance-optimization culture that emerged from incel and manosphere forums.

• Softmaxxing includes conventional grooming and fitness, while hardmaxxing involves invasive or dangerous interventions.

• Bone smashing is deliberate self-injury and can cause permanent damage.

• Mewing is unlikely to dramatically reshape an adult face.

• Mogging means appearing physically superior to another person.

• The PSL scale presents subjective beauty standards as objective mathematics.

• Black-pill ideology teaches that appearance and genetics determine romantic outcomes.

• Looksmaxxing is often performed for male status and approval—not only to attract women.

• Algorithms may reward the most extreme, harmful, and visually dramatic content.

• Mainstream media and brands can amplify fringe terminology even when they intend to criticize or joke about it.

• Ordinary self-care should not be confused with a hierarchy that treats physical appearance as human worth.

• Young people need community, media literacy, health guidance, and meaningful alternatives—not ridicule.

Questions Answered in This Episode

What is looksmaxxing?

Looksmaxxing is an online culture focused on maximizing physical attractiveness through grooming, fitness, products, drugs, procedures, or other interventions.

Where did looksmaxxing originate?

The term developed in incel, black-pill, lookism, and manosphere forums during the 2010s before spreading into mainstream social media.

What is softmaxxing?

Softmaxxing refers to lower-risk practices such as grooming, skincare, clothing, exercise, sleep, and dental care.

What is hardmaxxing?

Hardmaxxing refers to invasive or high-risk methods such as surgery, steroid misuse, extreme dieting, unapproved drugs, and deliberate injury.

Is bone smashing real?

No evidence supports deliberately striking the face as a safe way to improve appearance. It can cause serious and permanent injury.

Does mewing change your face?

Healthy oral posture may matter for function and development, but claims that mewing dramatically remodels an adult jaw are not supported by strong clinical evidence.

What does mogging mean?

Mogging means appearing more physically dominant or attractive than another person, often within the same image or video.

What does incel mean?

Incel means involuntarily celibate. The term began as an inclusive support label but was later adopted by misogynistic male online communities.

Is looksmaxxing part of the manosphere?

Yes. Although the term is now used more broadly, it developed within manosphere and incel-adjacent spaces.

Why is looksmaxxing popular?

It combines self-improvement, visual transformation, male insecurity, gaming language, measurable goals, influencer culture, and algorithmically rewarded extreme content.

Is all looksmaxxing harmful?

Ordinary grooming and healthy exercise are not inherently harmful. The danger lies in shame, rigid ranking, pseudoscience, drugs, disordered eating, self-injury, and extremist ideology.

Episode Chapters

00:00 — What is looksmaxxing?
Jamie introduces the trend as a niche incel culture that has recently moved into mainstream conversation.

00:23 — The basic definition of looksmaxxing
Appearance optimization ranges from ordinary self-care to dangerous physical interventions.

01:00 — Clavicular and the influencer era
A livestream personality becomes a highly visible representative of the trend.

01:47 — Why bone smashing is pseudoscience
The hosts establish that deliberately injuring bones is not a safe beauty practice.

01:56 — Looksmaxxing vocabulary
Destinee asks for definitions accessible to people outside internet subcultures.

02:27 — What does incel mean?
Jamie traces the term from an inclusive loneliness project to misogynistic online identity.

03:52 — Pickup artistry and early internet masculinity
Dating manipulation communities become part of looksmaxxing’s cultural foundation.

05:00 — Bodybuilding.com and self-improvement culture
Early forums demonstrate why transformation content works so well online.

06:13 — Pickup artistry fails
Disillusioned men move toward incel identity, lookism, and black-pill ideology.

07:12 — PUAHate, Sluthate, and Lookism
Jamie explains the forums associated with the PSL appearance hierarchy.

08:00 — Where “-maxxing” came from
Gaming and optimization language merge with appearance culture.

09:34 — Why looksmaxxing became visible
The trend moves from forums into TikTok and mainstream media.

10:12 — What is mewing?
Jamie explains the viral jaw-posture technique and its role as internet performance.

12:08 — Chad, Stacy, Wojak, and GigaChad
Meme characters provide visual models for incel appearance hierarchies.

13:34 — Should brands use the term?
Destinee questions a B2B article that treated corporate rebranding as looksmaxxing.

15:43 — The ethics of reappropriating internet slang
The hosts distinguish the broad “-maxxing” suffix from the specific history of looksmaxxing.

17:07 — Friction-maxxing
A more constructive adaptation of the suffix encourages slower and more deliberate living.

18:23 — Why looksmaxxing is about shortcuts
The final appearance is celebrated while time, risk, drugs, and recovery remain hidden.

20:34 — Who gets excluded?
Destinee asks how racial and gender hierarchies shape the trend.

21:44 — Whiteness and mainstream media bait
Jamie discusses which influencers are made visible and why.

24:06 — Content-maxxing and constant livestreaming
The creator’s life becomes valuable only when it can produce content.

24:45 — Women have always faced appearance optimization
The conversation compares looksmaxxing with cosmetics, dieting, and heroin-chic beauty culture.

27:14 — Appearance without the male gaze
Destinee considers how women might present themselves if self-expression were not filtered through male expectations.

28:39 — Looksmaxxing as performance for other men
Male competition and approval become more central than attracting women.

29:50 — Masculinity and the male gaze
The hosts examine who creates and enforces masculine appearance standards.

32:22 — What many women actually value
Emotional availability and basic partnership skills rarely appear in before-and-after content.

33:50 — The manosphere as tactical media
Jamie describes the system as a shame-management structure that prompts users to take action.

35:16 — How self-improvement becomes radicalization
Fitness and confidence can become openings for resentment and misogynistic explanations.

37:12 — Self-improvement that deepens isolation
The promised solution may reinforce the user’s original alienation.

37:26 — The PSL scale and quantifying the face
Subjective attractiveness becomes a false mathematical certainty.

38:21 — Soft entry points into the rabbit hole
Fitness, hustle culture, self-help, and productivity can lead toward more extreme systems.

41:58 — Why the clavicle became aspirational
The hosts connect shoulder width and collarbone visibility with glamour, thinness, and status.

45:31 — Appearance, femininity, and masculine anxiety
Looksmaxxing reproduces beauty labor while refusing to call it beauty.

46:12 — Pop stars and gender fluidity
Prince, Mick Jagger, and other performers complicate rigid ideas of masculine attractiveness.

47:16 — Mogging inside the camera frame
Online creators compete for visual dominance rather than commanding an entire stage.

48:49 — How widespread is the danger?
Jamie emphasizes that it remains a niche but highly accessible participatory trend.

50:00 — Warning signs and community response
Eating disorders, vocabulary changes, bruising, and misogyny may signal deeper involvement.

52:30 — Is there reason for optimism?
Mainstream visibility may represent the trend’s peak, but harmful ideas can also mutate into new forms.

About the Hosts

Jamie Cohen

Jamie Cohen is a media scholar, professor, writer, and expert on internet culture, online extremism, memes, media literacy, and the manosphere.

Website: ⁠jamesncohen.com
Substack: ⁠New Media Homework

Destinee Day

Destinee Day is a marketing strategist and founder of Rudy & Company. Her work focuses on branding, digital strategy, communications, online influence, and responsible marketing.

Website: ⁠rudyandcompany.com

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When does healthy self-improvement become compulsive optimization? Should brands and journalists use terms such as looksmaxxing casually—or does that help fringe ideologies enter mainstream culture?

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• Full Episode Transcript

  Destinee Day (00:01.262) Okay, welcome back to Network Issues. Today's episode, we are going to talk about the word that you're seeing everywhere, looksmaxxing. What is looksmaxxing? Why are we seeing it everywhere? And let's jump in, Jamie, with what is the 101 of looksmaxxing? Jamie (00:23.285) The 101, the basic level of understanding this word that is now everywhere. And I'm talking like not just the term looksmaxxing, but the suffix -maxxing is like being added to everything. The 101 on this is that it's a current trend. And I'm talking like a 2026 trend that has become more well-known because it's been uplift into the mainstream. the trend, the looksmaxxing trend is about a 15 year old, maybe a bit longer trend of in-cell culture. that has now found its influencers. And so the trend itself was basically a very underground trend of basically in the most 101 sense, self-improvement. Let's just call it that. It isn't that, but that's what's called at the 101. And it now has this very strange influencer who's become very popular, at least in the mainstream, this guy named Braden Peters, who goes by and named Clavicular with his... his nickname, which refers to his clavicle width. That's why he's called clavicular. In which he attempts to fill the frame, that's the term, the actual frame by widening his clavicles by doing something known as bone smashing, which is the subtle fracturing of his bone so it heals to make the width larger. To be clear, before we go forward, that is a pseudoscience. So that's. Destinee Day (01:35.79) I'm some video editing. Jamie (01:47.829) That's what looksmaxxing in is at its outset and it's very 101 is that it's an in-cell trend that has become mainstream. Destinee Day (01:56.64) Let's go through a few vocabulary things before we dive deep. So I know you have a few definitions of just the -maxxing, what that means. Could you define really quick what incel means? know, things like that, I know that if I sent this to my mom, she would have no idea what any of those. Jamie (02:12.617) Yeah. No, this is all important. No, this is. Destinee Day (02:24.75) terms mean in order for us to move forward in the conversation. Jamie (02:27.155) Right, and I think what's even more important is that no matter who you speak to, you have to take a gamble of whether somebody's heard the term looksmaxxing by accident, they've come across through the mainstream, through the New York Times, through the news, through some sort of thing about bone smashing, or if they just simply don't know. Some people who I meet that are what I would consider like chronically online or extremely online, I've told them like, I've got this story I wrote about looksmaxxing, or I've got call from this news agency that wants me to talk about it, and they go, what's looksmaxxing? And I go. my first reaction is always like, my brain is just like, how lucky are you? Like you live a life that's so much more wonderful than my life that has to be in the depths of this. Because looksmaxxing itself is technically a subculture, like a hyper niche subculture that is only well known now because it is something that's been uplift by the mainstream media. But to begin with the terms, if we want to go to the etymologies, the first one is incel. Incel is short for involuntarily celibate. It is a derogatory term that men paste on themselves about their inability to have sexual relations with women. And what they do is they consider themselves unable to, that's why it's involuntary. I'm gonna give a bunch of color here that's really interesting. The term incel, can you hear the truck before I get to that? No, okay, huge truck just one moment. The term incel is actually not from the incel culture. Destinee Day (03:45.43) lightly. Jamie (03:52.224) The incel culture when I refer to that as like the forums or the 4chan based group of young men who are maybe would we we would have considered them an acronym known as neat before this neat is not an education, employment or training. Those are basically terms that are like deemed on themselves for like basement dwellers and like people who have no enfranchisement. But the term incel actually comes from a woman comes from a woman named Alana in the 1990s, part of the queer community. And the term was about inside of the queer community, the lesbian community, she was unable to get a date in her Canadian town and basically consider herself involuntarily celibate. And the original acronym was InVCell, like InVCell. And it was re-coined in the early 2000s by young men into InCell, which is, I guess, more marketable. So it basically was rebranded. Now the rebranding actually occurs due to a very interesting reactionary movement that leads to looksmaxxing. In the early 2000s, there was a period of time in in-cell culture known as pickup artistry. It is a branch or a tangent off of the original form of looksmaxxing, which is bodybuilding.com. And this is some internet culture here that's really important. The first really big successful forum was bodybuilding.com in the 1990s to early 2000s. And it was like a five. hundred million dollar industry, like a website that basically like was a forum for bodybuilding. And you know, it's even crazier. This is a side note here. But bodybuilding.com like around 2004 and five ish, they used to use this phrase when they'd self improve because they'd get like bigger, they'd use a phrase that says feels good, man. And that phrase was also the phrase that was shared by Pepe the frog, which is the term feels good, man. That's how it got embedded into right wing culture. They basically attached each other that way. which is so fascinating, right? It's also even more fascinating is bodybuilding.com success is because internet-based language, content-based language is DIY, self-improvement. When you build something, people want to watch something happen, which is why Get Ready With Me is still like one of the most effective forms of content, as is MUA, makeup artistry, because they are DIY processes. For men, it's bodybuilding. Jamie (06:13.781) It's self-improvement because you can actually show the body improving. Anyway, in the early 2000s, this pickup artistry was done by a very strange group of, I would call them influencers now, but they were basically a bunch of chuds that like came up with a strategy they called the game, which was to pick up women. And it was basically a manipulation tactic. When I was radicalized, I was trained under these tactics. Neil Strauss wrote a book about this in 2005 called The Game. in which he radicalized himself by simply researching these guys. And then just explaining that this is why it's so hard to explain looksmaxxing because you're like, well, how much do you want to know? And then when you really break it down, you realize you're talking about the internet. You're not talking about just looksmaxxing. actually talking about the culture of the internet itself built on top of the spine that is looksmaxxing, which is sort of depressing. Destinee Day (06:53.954) You Jamie (07:12.137) To sum this up, PUA didn't work for everybody. It is a tactic, it is a game, it's not really usable. And so a forum appeared called PUA Hate. And PUA Hate is a forum that was basically for young men to be angry at pickup artists, basically say this doesn't work. And so the incel vocabulary came from that, which is that, if pickup artistry doesn't work for me, then I must be involuntarily celibate. It then branched off into two other parts of this called slut hate. which I don't think I have to explain. And then lookism. And lookism is a form of self-improvement around the early 2010s, in which men started getting into the self-improvement features of in-cell behavior. It wasn't until 2022-ish, the 2020s, when the term looksmaxxing became a thing, when -maxxing, the suffix attached itself to lookism. Maxing most likely comes from video games, which is a shorthand for min-maxing. Min-maxing meaning like -maxxing out all your gear. You know, like when you're in a game, you can max out, you know, or min out, you know, like, so those terms as video game culture mixes with looks at lookism, the terms get there and it creates the new term looksmaxxing. Destinee Day (08:26.658) What a fascinating etymology. Jamie (08:30.965) There's really no way to do a social clip on that, by the way, because it's just too big. But that is. Destinee Day (08:36.43) I don't know, remember being in whatever grade English where like they teach you word etymology and how to figure out based on the Latin, the original Latin, how to figure out what a word means or close to what a word means. And that was just such a opposite of Jamie (08:51.735) yeah. Destinee Day (09:02.732) what I was taught, it's entirely internet-based culture. And so that's just, it's fascinating to see where we are nowadays. Jamie (09:09.127) It really is. And you know, when you say that it is fairly detached from original etymologies, because a lot of the reactionary culture that develops this specific culture does come from the digital world. It, you, I mean, you could argue that it attaches itself to disenfranchisement of young men throughout the history or whatever the performance of masculinity since the 1500s. You could do all that, but really let's just stick to the present. Destinee Day (09:34.72) Okay. Okay. So now that we know what those terms mean, I think we should get into why people are seeing this term a lot right now. I know based in my research that I've done for this conversation, the earliest terms that I recognize go back to mewing. What was that? 2023, 2022, 2023 of? Yeah. So Jamie (09:58.486) Post a little right during the pandemic and a little after, yeah. Destinee Day (10:04.992) Is this, it seems like it's a trend that is continuing to grow and getting even more extreme. Is that an accurate statement? Jamie (10:12.115) Yeah, I have to throw a little plug here to live agar. She did a special on this about the new age spirituality of Gen Z on the podcast QAA. Just if you want to get a deeper dive, then we'll do here. mewing is an older tactic. It's another pseudoscience. It's actually made by a doctor, dentist named Dr. Mu and his son, Dr. Mu. So sometimes etymologies are just the last name. The mewing is a performative tactic less than a reusable tactic and viewing is a new age spirituality. It's similar to the during the pandemic and just following it a lot of TikTok had shifted into like well shifted as a term they use. They moved into a lot of manifestation new age spirituality type of stuff which is like numerology and manifestation and shifting. Shifting was like if you think hard enough you could shift into another reality. All of this is just woo woo. You know it's like it's or delulu, however you want to think about it, which is like, you can, you can. I my students hate when I say this, but it's like, you could just set goals and do them, you know, like that's basically what it is, you know, so that's, that's goal setting. So they, the goal setting thing was also in the self improvement part of basically being very online. And so mewing was a performance. Mewing is the act of, I can't really talk while showing it, but sticking the tongue to the top of your palate and clenching your teeth really hard. Destinee Day (11:20.333) Yeah. Jamie (11:40.51) And then when people ask you like to talk, it was a way of young men getting out of conversations too, because they would turn to the side and go and basically show I can't talk right now I'm mewing, which is like a jaw exercise. You know, it's more effective. If you remember big league chew, like when we as a kid, you get that bubble gum with the strands and you stick in your mouth you put but you put too much in your jaw would hurt. That's it. Okay, so you can do a jaw exercise that way. If you want. Destinee Day (11:57.283) Yes. Jamie (12:08.071) It's the same tactic except a little more extreme because it actually does hurt. So that's where Mewing comes from, which is like this very self improvement-y square jaw thing. But it is fairly mimetic because why do these young men want this square jaw? And they wanted it because of the incel cultural memes that came from that. So there's these characters that come from incel culture or just online culture. The Chad, the Stacey, the Wojak. Destinee Day (12:13.623) Awesome. Jamie (12:35.285) all these different characters of the internet that are hand drawn line characters. And the Chad is this very blonde Aryan looking Nordic dude, big, big hair and big blonde beard and his jaw is super strong. Then came the gigachad, which is like this model slash edit of this huge dude with his very square jaw. And it became a competition to who could get that jaw so they could get the Stacy because Stacy's typically went after Chad's and never went after the beta males. And so pseudo competitions for pseudo worlds and pseudo imaginaries that are playing themselves out in classrooms when young men decide to push their tongue against their palate. Destinee Day (13:20.662) I just don't have a response to that. I just don't have a healthy response to that. Okay. I feel like. Jamie (13:21.073) I'm assuming there's gonna be a lot of sighing in this episode. Destinee Day (13:34.804) man. I saw an article the other day and I want to know your thoughts on it. sent it to you. I don't know if you read it, but it is the title of it is Are B2B brands looksmaxxing. And let me tell you why it me furious. I'll wait for you to finish drinking. Destinee Day (14:01.804) It upset me greatly because in my time spending time with you, I have an understanding of looksmaxxing and I feel a responsibility for using the term in a responsible way. This was written by a brand that calls itself a newsroom, but really it's a subsection of a PR. industry. So their their their whole job is to drum up views for things like this, right. And I know they focus on b2b. And so they positioned, they did a brief little thing on what looksmaxxing is, and then positioned rebranding as looksmaxxing. And I understand the point they were trying to make it's in the age of AI, everything essentially looks the same. And if you go on to any startup, everything kind of looks and feels the same with the copy, with the design, all of that. and they're saying that that is performative. however, I did not feel like it was a responsible use of this term and it was just a way to get views. So I would like to know from your perspective, what responsible use of the term looks like, because I also feel like if we use it, We are also giving spaces like the Manosphere, Clavicular, even more momentum and fuel that fire. Jamie (15:43.44) Yeah, I highly agree with your ethical wonder of that. that's, I do agree. don't, wow, that's, this is important because there's part of me that feels it's okay to reappropriate terms because that's kind of like the far right often reappropriates terms anyway and like weaponizes them. So it's like, what if we reappropriate it and like, don't use it in the dangerous ways. But then when you apply to like LinkedIn broetry, you're also like, kind of not outside the space of it anyway, because like it's still within that hustle culture, because look looksmaxxing is part of the grind set. That's a term for the grind mindset, or hustle culture and hustle culture is often mimicked or irony, irony spoken through the idea of B2B, which is just a meme at this point. But B2B exists B2B is real, like all this is real work. Just using these terminologies are often done for the clicks. It's designed specifically for the funneling of the current hype monster, happens to be around the term looksmaxxing and brought in there. That said, the term -maxxing, the blunt suffix that comes from that has been used on everything. And honestly, I don't see that as so bad. I think it's important to recognize that it is attached to at least online culture, if not, at least Manusphere culture, but it isn't really a derogatory term. It just means like going to the extremes or going to the farthest edge of something. Destinee Day (16:52.928) and it's important to recognize. Jamie (17:07.349) One of the best articles I've actually seen about this, and I think we should include this, I'm doing it this summer as my talk in Salzburg, is this in 2026, we're going friction-maxxing. And it's from the cut in, let me get the article up real quick. Friction-maxxing. Friction Maxing, let me just bring, let's start this byte over. Yeah, it is a cut, okay, just double checking and I've already made it past this thing, so I have to, you can't like read this because the stupid border wall on it. Okay, Catherine Jesir-Morton, okay, cool. Okay, so there is a useful term of this, so there was an article by Catherine Jesir-Morton in The Cut that was called, in 2026, where we are friction-maxxing. Destinee Day (17:38.446) Thanks. Jamie (17:54.766) And friction-maxxing is basically slowing down. It's the thing that you and I have been calling for. Like when we're using the internet, it's not approaching it. It's what we talked about in our media literacy thing, which is like, be right rather than first. That's friction-maxxing. Slow things down. Don't use the Silicon Valley mentality of frictionless architectures. Try to do something that makes you have to think to add some grit to the work. So when I hear friction-maxxing, of course my mind is like, god, we're going to using this -maxxing term for this. But then I'm like, Destinee Day (18:04.462) Thank Jamie (18:23.945) That appropriation isn't completely unuseful because it happens to be at the time in which it's being spoken about. And I think that's a bet that the cut made and the writer made, which is that the term itself might be longer lasting than looksmaxxing. But I think when you approach or attach looksmaxxing directly to anything, you're speaking specifically about young men doing rapid forms of self-improvement. And so that's a little bit more. important to understand is that you shouldn't be using looksmaxxing unless you're really acknowledging the fact that this comes from the shortcut looksmaxxing also isn't great for b2b or sales or anything because one thing I left out in the description and the one on one of looksmaxxing is that looksmaxxing is a shortcut looksmaxxing isn't the months in the gym of working out the protein shakes though the the amount of time it takes to tear muscle and rebuild it looksmaxxing is the shortcut one of the main characters the clavicular guy, his shortcuts aren't just working out. It's actually testosterone injections, methamphetamines, what he calls a pentastack of drugs. Basically, he's a drug addict with a disorder, an eating disorder. And so that's a shortcut to looking good or looking like clavicular does, which is fairly dangerous, especially to young men and young women. We talked about this in previous things. We talked about social media addiction, like When young women are using the internet, they're seeing versions of women that are the final form of women. They're not the work in progress. They're not the way that it gets there. So they're presented a reality that isn't healthy to them. And they assume that reality needs to be now rather than worked for. Looks -maxxing is the celebration of the end product. And so that type of thing becomes very dangerous. So repurposing that term aside from its original usage, which is like, be careful with this term is like kind of inappropriate. Because we do have to like, in my opinion, I think we should like not be celebrating looksmaxxing. I just don't think that's something, it's a very bad sign. Cause the more we celebrate it outside the context of young men, young men think, well, if they're celebrating, then I should participate in this as well. Destinee Day (20:34.766) So that brings me to my next question to you, which looksmaxxing as a term that is specifically aimed at young men, right? It's not in terms of the internet used as a term toward young women and even more specifically just white young men, right? It's not like it's an inclusive movement. So I have two questions. What is left for the young men that this leaves out? It leaves tons of young men out. And I guess that's my first question is what happens to them? I would imagine that there's a variety of young men that want self-improvement and are looking for shortcuts. And if this community, which is incredibly popular and has now seeped into even B2B, what is there for them? Jamie (21:44.958) This is a really great question because it's very strange and interesting that Clavicular of all of the guys becomes the popular one. This white, to be honest, very average looking male. He's a guy. If you didn't know he was a looksmaxxer you'd just think he was a guy, know, so he was, he doesn't really have it, but the market, the idea of looks-maxxing reproduces the market of hegemony that is like the white male as the prime thing. And to get to your thing about like why it's exclusive in gender and in race. So let's start with race. First is that the internet is racist. Okay, so that's as easy as it gets. There are, I would almost argue saying that like black men tried out looksmaxxing before white men did in some cases, but often leaned into eating disorders or a performative version of influencer that leaned into flamboyance. And that often doesn't sit well with the Manosphere. Also the Manosphere itself, which is very interestingly diverse. Nick Fuentes is half Mexican, Myron Gaines is black. Andrew Tate is a ball of races that are all racist. And then you have Clivicular who hangs out with these guys who calls himself apolitical, but really is inside of this space, who's a very white male and kind of represents the GQ version of this. So it's exclusive by its hegemony. It's almost like looksmaxxing is mainstream media bait. That's my argument here when I wrote this piece of the media literacy of looksmaxxing. It's like, why did the New York Times choose Braden Peters, who they refer to as clavicular throughout, which I think is fascinating because his name is Braden Peters. But why did they choose him of all the different looks maxers that exist out there? And it isn't And it's two reasons that I can glean from this. One is that looksmaxxing is a content creation. That's super important. Looks -maxxing exists because content exists. Braden Peters streams or did stream. He's kind of taking, allegedly might take a break now because he overdosed on methamphetamines. He streamed between like eight and 12 hours per day. And so I think his popularity came from the fact that he spent this whole day capturing it. Jamie (24:06.549) He is also somebody who's mentioned that unless it's worth streaming or content creation, it's not worth doing. So it's other words, if it's not worth recording and broadcasting, then it's not worth it. It's a form of nihilism really, or content nihilism, which Aidan Walker calls content -maxxing, which I think is a great term. And so that's exclusive to who would do that. So that's an exclusive department for men, specifically white men who have the privilege to do that. It also creates a secondary market called We've talked about this clip -maxxing clipping, you know, so he's job to stream also supports a whole cadre of younger men. I don't want to, I don't even know if they're younger, just other men whose job it is to clip. So his support system is a structure. He has a structure which makes him exclusive just in structure. Now the question about women is fascinating because arguably women are under the pressure of looksmaxxing all the time. And so men are expressing themselves through looksmaxxing because it's novel to what the cosmetics industry has done to women for, I don't know, 100 years. Yeah, or if you want to get it from a patriarchy, 6,000 years, depending on how you look at it. So. Destinee Day (25:11.822) hundreds of years. I mean, all the way back to the Egyptians. Destinee Day (25:20.95) Which yes, because in some of our prep for this episode, I had mentioned to you this idea of looksmaxxing and especially some of the more dangerous aspects of it remind me a lot of heroin chic in the nineties and the dangers of that, that the high fashion magazines at the moment were to be seen presenting, right? And then it created a just so many eating disorders that a lot of women my age are still dealing with. Like that's never something that they have been able to get over. And now we're in the era of Ozempic and the shortcuts and all of that, but women have never really let go of that idea. then, you know, I think I watched a clip of Stephen Colbert comparing women's experience to this experience. And he was like, wow, this is just men. having to do the same thing that women have been doing for ages only to be told that they look tired. And it's like, yes, the work of it is exhausting. Destinee Day (26:37.806) But. Jamie (26:38.794) Good. Destinee Day (26:40.974) It feels like, you know, welcome to my life in some aspects of it, because women have to go through and do all the self-improvement and the skincare and the hair and the makeup to get the date, you know? And then you have to go through that awkward part when you're dating where, you know, when is it okay to show up without makeup on or your hair done? You know, like, will they still like me when I present my real self? as opposed to the designed self. Jamie (27:14.709) So this is the most important part of this because yes, the hegemony of the male gaze is part of how women present themselves. But I heard this phrase, and let me know if this is true, I heard this phrase once which is like, in the absence of men, women would still wear cosmetics because they like it. Like, is that true? Is that still part of that? Destinee Day (27:37.006) I think it would, it would be done differently. I think it like style and all of that. It's a form of self-expression. If we didn't have to worry about men's perception of us, which is goes far beyond dating that goes for your job. It goes for, you know, how you market yourself. It's, it's a lot of things we would present ourselves for ourselves and not Jamie (27:40.358) interesting. Yeah, okay. Destinee Day (28:06.382) through the male gaze like you're saying. you know, I, I might cut my hair off because I don't need to have this idea of long hair to show, you know, whatever. I not wear foundation every day because I need to have a flawless skin. I would just really like some cool eyeliner. I don't know. Maybe we would get tribal tattoos. I don't know, but it would not be, it wouldn't be what everybody presents now. I think it would be way more colorful. Jamie (28:39.669) Right. And so this, it makes me wonder, that's what helps me rethink what this is because I think one of the most misunderstood parts of looksmaxxing is that it isn't for women. It's for the male gaze. Like looksmaxxing in particular is about impressing other men. This is why the biggest term in looksmaxxing is mogging. Go ahead, it again. What you saying? Destinee Day (29:08.022) It's fascinating to me that it looksmaxxing is for men looking at other men. in a culture that is involuntarily celibate. That seems highly counterintuitive to the fact that it seems that the root of their issue is that they are involuntarily celibate, therefore they want to have these sexual relations with whoever, I don't care who it is. Jamie (29:20.243) Yes. Jamie (29:23.987) Yes. Destinee Day (29:40.578) But then why are you performing for other men? Wouldn't you go out and perform for the mate like the red-bottomed monkeys do in nature? Or like the penguins with the pebbles? Jamie (29:50.646) Yep. This is exactly the question that should be asked, because this comes down to the question of performance of masculinity. And this comes down to where even the male gaze comes from. academic terms, the male gaze, that term is made by Laura Mulvey in an essay from the 1970s about how film was made because it was made by men. And so typically there was this character in horror films, the final girl, which not only did she make it to the end of the movie, but by the time she made it to the end, she was nearly naked, you know, so. Destinee Day (30:09.922) Mm-hmm. Jamie (30:20.155) It was about making sure that you understood that she was performing for the man, not performing for her survival, but performing for the look. Men is the performance of masculinity is literally the performance that is the vacuum opposite that's not paid attention to because women don't have the space of directing men in their masculine roles like that as much as they often could. You do get to see it now in the 2020s and like much more movies that are more open minded toward that performance. But in that performance toward other men, it is the idea that reminds me of the question of like, in the absence of women, would men wear cosmetics? And I think, look at just the idea of facial hair. I mean, you would see that as like the idea of stressing up, of choosing a style, of care, of performing the idea of identity to others. The difference of course, is that men, because the hegemony, the patriarchy allows them to get away with whatever bullshit they want, it is that they don't have to be judged the same way as women. Now the idea of, the performance of looksmaxxing for in cell culture where it's like, well, allegedly they're performing for like the way, you know, gathering rocks and pebbles to build a beautiful nest. And they're not doing that. They're actually doing it for other men because if they really, really wanted to like learn how to get with women or get with somebody who they want to sleep with, they should learn to cook. It looks like that's. That's really like where the trick is. So it isn't really about the aesthetic appearance. It's really about the performance of this. And so that question is the least asked question that should be asked all the time, which is that they're really the performance of masculinity is the weakness of men that has to express itself constantly to retain the process of power. So it's a never ending performance that men believe they have to do. They don't have to do this to keep that in mind, but they believe they have to because the system Destinee Day (31:53.592) Thank Jamie (32:18.707) Requires and that's in square quotes. Destinee Day (32:22.35) Okay, to your point on if women were directing men, right? It would be have a cooking skill, be emotionally available, ask me how I'm doing, know, basic things. would not be how many times did you hit your jaw today to get a square jaw? Like it would never be those things. And I think trends like this are exacerbating the problem. I've said this before on the point for women, because I mean, now most of my friends are married, but it used to be like, do you find someone that is emotionally available, healthy, would ask you those things, would be a benefit to your life, not in this... muscular jawline beard Viking guy, but would just be someone you'd want to spend time with that makes your life better. And so then I always think to my stars that I met my husband in person at work and not online because I felt like I was one of the last people in my friend group to meet my spouse. Thank God. Jamie (33:50.664) It's one of the things that I remember specifically about when I, one of my students actually brought this up because oddly this conversation is directed our tactical media course my whole semester. Tactical media is a form of media that encourages people to take some sort of action. It tells you something, but it isn't just media you watch. It's media that you participate in in one way or another, mentally, physically, activist wise. And it's harder to do than you think because how do you... get somebody to watch something and then be like, I need to do something. And so very often when people think of tactical media, they think of like people putting those projectors and protesting, like broadcasting banners, like the Epstein files on the Trump hotel, it doesn't like those things do things, but they don't really do much. But the Manosphere is the biggest form of tactical media ever created because it is a shame management system. It is a large management system for young men's inability to talk to a therapist. And so they find this is a conscious act of not talking to a therapist and they basically find brotherhood within this thing, but it's not marketed as brotherhood. It's marketed as like a consensual strategy of figuring out how to have sex. And so that marketing is really what it is. And when you really should take a step back and zoom out, you can see it looks more like an MLM than it looks like a culture in any way. It is a multi-level marketing scheme, which requires the men to bring in other men. So it's there. Destinee Day (35:08.824) Yeah. Jamie (35:16.253) When I was in college, I understood this in a very different way because I remember when I met my friend who basically saw me as this lonely, self-esteem, shallowed self-esteem person. I had really no sense of self at a certain point. I had no way of understanding it. I felt very lonely. And he basically said, you got to start doing these simple tricks. And one of them was working out. And the working out makes you feel good. And the one thing that's very strange about working out is you get to become very cynical. And the reason you become cynical is because you discover what pretty privilege is. And you start figuring out that in the improvement, actually do, your confidence increases, but your looks do, and people don't mistake their confidence for their looks, their aesthetics. And they start understanding the world works better because of the patriarchy for people who are more aesthetically pleasing. So that it's a self-repeating feedback loop. The manosphere or groomers will then lean in and basically reinforce that over and over again. by adding in these little dabs of things like misogyny, this isn't your fault, this is women's fault, they take the easiest answer. The reason things aren't working out for you isn't because you're disenfranchised from a system that has basically systemically excluded you for your entire life because the gerontocracy operates it, it's women. Like it's such an easy, simple answer and it's so wrong and yet it's one of those things where... If taken at face value, you get the answer by just doing the act. So by doing the looksmaxxing, it gets the answer as it pops out. So you must, it's self-fulfills, it's self-fulfilling prophecy. But it really, when it comes down to it, is pimping, right? It's self-pimping, okay? They are basically figuring out how to self-pimp. And in doing that, they are performing for themselves and then performing for other men. Women are a byproduct of that, maybe, because even when you watch videos of Clavicular, he is not really interested in women. You know, it's like, there's, it's, you know, it's so, it's fascinating when you see that. Destinee Day (37:12.384) Yeah. It just seems like a, like you're saying, a self-fulfilling prophecy of men who want to self-improve to get women, but by the way of self-improvement, they're continuing to alienate themselves even further. Jamie (37:26.953) Yes. Yep. And even worse, the terminologies, we're not even going into the darker, terrible terms, but like, they have a mathematical, remember I was talking about like, there's PUA hate, slut hate and lookism, they have a frame for that, it's called PSL. And they create a mathematical equation for like, your can't fulfill, the eyes and where they land and the shape of the jaw and they have math, it's numerology or phrenology. And they basically figure out like the most mathematically acceptable person, but what they're doing is technically quantizing themselves. they're becoming the algorithm, they're becoming a machine, they're cyborg, it is cyborg ology, you know, they are basically entering the matrix themselves by being told they have to destroy the matrix, which they believe is the success of feminism. And that's their model of entry. And so yeah, you're you're you're right. Like, this is what we know as looksmaxxing isn't really what it is when you really delve down into Destinee Day (38:21.632) Are there, what are the soft entry points for looksmaxxing? I know that I feel a lot of it with like hustle culture is very like the founder mentality or, know, Gary V did it for a long time, just constantly working and he played into that. It burned me out massively. But I mean, what are those soft entry points that, pull you down that rabbit. Jamie (38:52.821) Quick, before we go answer, before I answer this, how much comments are you ready for? Because there is a couple answers to this, but one of the answers is going to piss people off. So, all right, okay. It's true though. It's what I feel. Okay. There are a lot of soft entry points for this type of subculture and this niche. And the most basic of it is self-improvement. So health, it's all through gym work. Destinee Day (38:54.766) Yeah. Destinee Day (39:05.934) I don't Jamie (39:21.471) But you were right, hustle culture, grindset, the grinding or founders mentality, the grinding mindset, which is just basically it means take your second job, take your gig and make it your full-time job. And that's a lot. It's a lot of work. That grindset mentality is a mental switch that puts you into the mode to engage you with all other shortcut methodologies. But other soft entry points are actually like men who give advice. Scott Galloway, the professor, his advice often is about self-improvement and working out rather than seeing a therapist. So a lot of these things are like, they seem like very easy entry points of like, we're gonna dissuade you. But sometimes just men trying to talk about this often become the entry point. They open the door to the rabbit holes themselves. And so his aesthetic look, his width, his shoulders, like just that could become an entry point. So sometimes the men we look up to, the role models end up becoming our soft entry points because they don't seem threatening by any means. They seem to be doing some self help. And that's a soft entry point because it always seems positive. It always seems like a framework of improvement when it could actually be a framework of danger because we don't, we can't control, we could open the rabbit hole, but we can't control where you go inside the rabbit hole. We don't know what you're looking for. So giving the context and awareness and also like inspiring young men to go talk to somebody professional, like go talk to a a therapist and actually do the self-help necessary for your mind as well as your body is really, really important to making sure that you don't fall into these soft entry points. But the soft entry points are just, I mean, not to overplay the generalization here, but the internet by being online, just like women when they, this whole court case that we talked about, the social media addiction, happens to do with overuse. It happens to do with content consumption at extreme manner. And we've also spoken about this, that yes, Most young people don't use the internet to do that. They're more using it pro-socially, but still they're being exposed to a lot of content that we would consider harmful. And like back to your heroin chic point, like Kate Moss in the 1990s, who's probably weighed under a hundred pounds, which is wildly unhealthy or unrealistic, depending on which way you look at it. Yeah, and trying to emulate that like causes disorder because to achieve that, whether through lookism or through... Destinee Day (41:37.038) both. Jamie (41:46.483) work is damaging to your body. Like you will do some sort of harm and that harm is really difficult to get out of because like we said, like it's a loop. Once you see it, you can't get out of that. Destinee Day (41:58.602) Do you know what it is about the clavicle that makes it a weird aspirational feature of the body? Because I know they're talking about clavicular there's like for men, it was the width. remember in the 90s early 2000s. For women, it was showing like being able to see your clavicle bones. which doesn't have anything to do with, you know, your nose, your mouth, your ears, your weight, how long your legs are like normal things that I think that a lot of us get weirdly insecure about. What is there something about that? That. Jamie (42:42.427) Yeah, that's another under asked question. The clavicle is in the history. this is John Berger is a great look here. should the book Ways of Seeing or the documentary series from the 1960s. It was about advertising and how advertising used the art history as an approach to basically manipulating our psychology into buying shit. And the clavicle was a big part of this, especially why in the history of art, why are women more nude than men? Like, what is that about? Like, why did that happen? And so he brings up the idea of glamour, that glamour is an invention. It's a very recent invention from the 1950s to present, which is the performance of a higher status than you are. The clavicle is wildly sexual. So it is because it appears above the bust. That's why, because in a traditional art form, you would only have the bust and up and is the most sexual part because it is insinuating nothing underneath as in nothing. And it also insinuates your width. It is a mathematical literally shape. that is sexual in its output because it is bearing skin and shape, but it is not something that is a sexual body part. You know what I mean? It's the provocative moment of artist sickness. So it's similar to when we talk about harms on Instagram, that Instagram is still the biggest portal to OnlyFans and yet Instagram bans nudes. It's because the actions are pornographic yet they are not pornography. And so... The clavicle itself is that sexualized part of the body that's from the glamour period of revealing. In other words, the open shoulders was very provocative for women. that is, even from a religious standpoint, you go to a church in Italy, you still have to cover your shoulders, cover the clavicles. It's like that part of the body is too revealing. It's a revealing part without saying anything else. It's also the thing that can be acknowledged as a body part without having to go into the weird sexual parts that are necessary, necessary to discuss sexuality or like attractiveness. And so that like in the 1990s, that's so funny you bring that up because 1990s really did focus on bearing that more than anything else and also the sharpness of it. So it's almost like you could like bring back the idea of like clavicular, who's what is he 20? So he was born in 2005 or six. So he's like, he missed that whole period, but he is a representation of that 1990s culture. He really is like that where he Destinee Day (44:51.971) Yes. Jamie (45:09.609) his expression of that. And again, bone smashing may or may not make that clavicle bigger. Okay, that's not what it is. It's an eating disorder will reveal that because it draws the skin back and pulls the clavicle out. But it is it's a provocative part of a human body that insinuates bareness is the best way to describe that. Destinee Day (45:29.504) Interesting. Jamie (45:31.987) Yeah. And that's, again, like John Berger went into that. And it's either part three or part, I think it's part three of Ways of Seeing. And he basically describes how advertising uses the female body as more marketable than the male body. Which again brings us back to the idea of the looks maxers being feminine. This is like a feminine output for them, which they should lean into by the way. They should be confident in the idea that there is a fluidity to their gender rather than being leaning into the idea of masculinity as a normative necessity. Destinee Day (45:55.566) Yeah. Destinee Day (45:59.16) First. Destinee Day (46:12.172) I mean, look at some of the most, this may or may not be a good example, but look at the most successful pop stars. Prince, I would make an argument, Michael Jackson, even Justin Timberlake to a certain example. Who is the rock star one? Harry Styles, that's not, Harry Styles reminds me of him. What's the rock star one? had the long hair, he's British. long face. Do you remember? Yes, Mick Jagger! Jamie (46:45.129) Mick Jagger? yeah. He was like skinny heroin chic Destinee Day (46:51.726) It's they're all kind of feminine male pop stars and women throw their underpants to these men on stage and so that is kind of the opposite of what this whole situation is which is Jamie (46:56.725) Mm-hmm. Yeah. Destinee Day (47:13.26) me feel how women spend money. Jamie (47:16.149) But if you just take that example of like, if you took Mick Jagger and reshaped him into just a content creator, he wasn't a rock star, he wasn't on stage, he didn't do his Mick Jagger things or his kicks, his dances and his shuffles, and you just put him in the screen, he'd have to compete completely differently. So these guys are competing for screen time. They're not competing for the concert arena scenario. They're not competing for the... underwear and bras being thrown at them on stage, they are competing for clicks. They're competing for views. They're competing for the literally when they say mogging that which comes from alpha male of the group, which is just like a fake term, pseudoscience about what alpha males actually are. The term mogging is about the amount of space you take up in a frame. And when they mean the frame, they literally mean the box. So when other men enter that space for them, they are competing physically for this amount of limitation that's there. Not the entire stage that Mick Jagger gets to like prance down and like Steven Tyler with his scarves coming off these things like or Prince with his beautiful flamboyant outfits like these. This this isn't this is about the limitation of space. Plus disenfranchisement. That's what looksmaxxing is. Destinee Day (48:31.246) So, uh, mogging is, uh, being as big as you can, impressing other men and because you're bigger, they are less than. Destinee Day (48:48.194) That's disappointing. Jamie (48:49.397) It's disappointing. And it is disappointing. And to sum this up, it is disappointing that we have to like kind of like do a full breakdown on this that took us quite some time to talk about because this is the context necessary when we're talking about a trend like this. And to be clear, it is still a hyper niche trend. isn't. This isn't affecting a lot of boys. I do know two friends, two that have young younger sons or young teenagers or preteen. that are affected by looksmaxxing content and have developed eating disorders. And it is extremely sad to me. Like that it is hard to hear. It is hard to understand and know and not to downplay that at all because I'm very sad about that. But it is too of hundreds of people that I know. So it's like, there's, it's a small micro niche. It is an accessible micro niche. And that's a problem because it's participatory. It doesn't take a lot of tools. And I mean that literally bone smashing part of looksmaxxing is extremely niche. because when you hit your face or your body with a hammer or a massage gun, you cause bruising. People can see that, all right? So oftentimes the presentation of self requires recovery time and that requires privilege. You need to be able to be away from people while you recover. So very often you won't see bone smashing except for the performance of it. People are doing it to get clicks. They're not really doing it to break bones. It is dangerous. It's extremely dangerous. You can literally break a bone by accident. You could shatter your eye socket. You can... damage something where you can be immobile. The clavicle is an extremely important part of your body. So it's so interesting because the way we know looksmaxxing is through its trend and its uplift, but really is like a very sad subculture that really requires the screen to operate. And until we enfranchise young men, I mean like, basically like the answer I often give people is it takes a community. It's not about parents and pastors and people around and like teachers, it's about like whole groups of people reminding young men and young women, especially young women that they matter and that their parts are their parts. And they can, that's their agency that controls whether or not how they want to share those with other people. And by giving them the self-confidence to make sure that they're not giving away their body parts to the internet is like something that has to be explained in context and in values, you know, and that's, that's harder to do because again, like we talked, talked about this has to do with the Jamie (51:14.271) the system, the systemic issues of entrenched patriarchal values that basically push men and women into these spaces rather than say, you are okay how you are. That's it. That's it. It's very, it's honestly too simple. And that's what makes it really strange. Cause you're like, that can't be the answer. And yet it is. And so it's like, have to, we have to just engage with communities when we do this. And this has to be as we talk about in every episode. This has to be a constant conversation. This can't be just like, it happens on the internet because this just happens. This is your young neighbor maybe looksmaxxing without you even knowing it. So you have to keep an eye out for eating disorders, changes in their behavior, different vocabulary that they're using, derogatory attention towards women or even derogatory attention towards their teachers. Australia has a large problem with young men being extremely mean to female teachers. And so it's... You have to be aware that sometimes these things are extensions of the performance of the internet in real life, but they're really just performance. Destinee Day (52:21.612) Okay. Well. Ending on another horribly depressing note. Jamie (52:30.901) Yeah, it's depressing right now, but it's not like I have optimism. Okay, I do. You know me. I have hope. I have hope that these are trends and these trends fade out. And I also do believe that when trends become mainstream, you're seeing the end of them. So now you're gonna watch the exhaust come out, which sometimes is dangerous, sometimes not. Destinee Day (52:38.126) Thank you. Destinee Day (52:48.366) Yeah. Sometimes it evolves into an even more dangerous one and sometimes people just get over it and go away and, you know, eat a bagel. Okay. Jamie (53:00.245) I guess we'll see. Until then, keep mogging. Destinee Day (53:06.83) That doesn't work for women because when I do that, just makes, yeah, it's gonna work for me. I've been trying it throughout this whole thing to see if I noticed a difference in myself in the screen. I can't tell the difference, so who knows? Jamie (53:11.957) Yeah Jamie (53:21.173) It's back to our media training thing, which is just like, that's it. You're just media training. Destinee Day (53:26.414) Well, thank you for joining us on this episode of network issues. Like share and subscribe. Follow us on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, the TikTok. Follow either of us on our LinkedIn. All of that information is linked below and we will also link a to Jay to whoa. We will also link to Jamie's sub stack with his media guide to looksmaxxing. Tune in next week for our next episode. Jamie (53:56.096) Thank you.