Your bag is empty.
This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
I am 28 years old, born in 1997. That puts me on the knife’s edge between Millennial and Gen Z. I am both and neither: optimistic and nihilistic, too young to remember 9/11 and old enough to remember a pre-iPhone world. I care about Lena Dunham and Clavicular. But as a Zillenial, I was right on time for one phenomenon: The Body Image Revolution.
In the Aughts, the negative effects of mass media on girls’ self-esteem became a public health crisis. During my schooling, from 2002 to 2015, protecting and improving girls’ body image was a well-understood priority. I recall health classes devoted to anorexia and bulimia and how to identify them in your peers. My tenth grade English teacher once explained the mathematical rarity of the standard proportions for Victoria’s Secret Angels. Another teacher once showed us how magazine airbrushing made people look impossibly perfect. I remember another student revealing that she had photoshopped her Instagram bikini picture to make herself look skinnier.
My school’s curriculum reflected just how seriously body image was taken back then. In 2004, Dove and Ogilvy launched an advertising campaign called “Real Beauty,” inspired by a survey which said that only 4% of women considered themselves beautiful. It was one of the most successful campaigns of the new century, spawning one of the first viral videos on YouTube and the Dove Self-Esteem Project, which today is lobbying for social media legislation. President Obama talked about making sure his daughters saw that their father “appreciates” his wife’s “curves.” A subgenre of Body Image Pop took over music: “Just The Way You Are” by Bruno Mars, “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera, “What Makes You Beautiful” by One Direction, “Try” by Colbie Caillat.
This was all a happy development. At my most Millennially optimistic, I’d call it a society-wide response to a public health issue. At my most Gen Z-jaded, it was a masterful Bernaysian gambit to sell soap.
But what about the boys?
This year, I found myself on the media interview circuit after beginning to cover looksmaxxing for GQ. The questions I was asked boiled down to three things:
1. Is looksmaxxing real? (Answer: Yes, but probably not as widespread as you think.)
2. Is it right-wing or MAGA? (Answer: Most looksmaxxers are under 18, so a partisan political lens doesn’t work.)
3. Why are they doing this?
That last question was always a thinly-veiled way of asking: Why are boys doing this? Aren’t girls the ones who do bizarre things to their bodies out of self-hatred?
Boys were omitted from the Body Image Revolution. In a 2019 British government study, heterosexual men said that they felt that negative body image was a “woman’s issue” even when they were struggling with it themselves. But they were correct: for the past 20 years, body image was a woman’s issue. In my classrooms, it was explicit that this was for the benefit of girls, and boys’ role in the conversation was to listen and learn how to respect women.
But boys have cameras in their pockets now, too. Boys also went to Zoom school and stared at their own faces all day long. Some boys also believe that being a YouTuber or streamer is their most viable path to wealth, and are leaving the workforce to chase that dream. Just as my generation’s girls had Victoria’s Secret models to bodycheck themselves against, today’s boys have cosmetically-enhanced chads. Vanity Fair recently named the 6’3” streamer Marlon as “The Face” of American style. Boys are living through the same digital self-esteem disintegration, but with none of the defenses their female classmates were taught. And we wonder why they’re struggling.
What could a “Real Beauty” for boys look like? Right now, the vacuum is being filled by looksmaxxing and the philosophy behind it, lookism. Lookism teaches that society rewards physical beauty and punishes ugliness, not just romantically, but in every aspect of life. To make more money and more friends, boys are optimizing their appearance for the digital world where their life actually takes place. Our message to boys can’t be the same as it is for girls—not “You’re amazing just the way you are,” as Bruno Mars once sang. Those most in need of this intervention are too blackpilled for that.
Instead, we must design an entirely new approach for the body image crisis in boys. We must rewrite the curriculum, based on the new media, new messaging, new celebrities, and the new ways of manipulating your appearance that boys are faced with. In a small way, today’s boys might be more ready for this type of education because caring about your looks is no longer seen as exclusively feminine. We’d also have to figure out who would teach it to them, given that the percentage of male public secondary school teachers has declined to just 36%. But above all, we need to ask what boys are missing—and why they wind up hating themselves in the first place.
