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This is The Manthropologist, a column by Charlie Sosnick about the Internet and the male mind.
Teenagers today are lonely, anxious, shy, risk-averse, socially-stunted, not drinking, not smoking, and not having sex.
This phenomenon is now so widely-discussed that it feels cliché to bring it up. Rather than pontificating and carping about kids these days, I’m more interested in how actual teenagers view their situation and what they want to do about it. Like it or not, looksmaxxing is one solution that teenagers have developed for themselves.
Looksmaxxers view ruthless self-improvement as a way out of these modern frustrations. To them, looking better is the first step out of their bedrooms and into the world. While looksmaxxers are primarily concerned with aesthetics, they also develop systems to ascend in every aspect of their lives. In terms of social skills, they use the term “low inhib” (short for low inhibition) to describe their goal.
Being low inhib means saying and doing what you want, without self-censoring. A low inhib person is entirely unafraid of rejection and does not care what others think. Psychologically, it might be described as a combination of low conscientiousness, high agreeableness, and low neuroticism. Clavicular says he was being low inhib when he asked the hosts of the Red Scare podcast if they ever hooked up.
From its earliest uses on incel forums, low inhib has been associated with mental disability. Intriguingly, low inhib theory frames neurodivergence as an asset (at least in the always-half-joking way looksmaxxers talk.) In one of the earliest posts I could find from 2014, a user wondered if damaging their left frontal lobe would reduce their capacity for logical thought and “potentially kill the inhibition inside us.” Recently, after meeting someone who was so “genuinely oblivious to social norms” that he seemingly couldn’t feel fear, the looksmaxxing streamer Hexumlite posted that the “key to having low inhib is just being ND” [neurodivergent].
This type of devil-may-care bravado shares DNA with pick-up artistry. Both looksmaxxing and pick-up artistry developed in the same primordial ooze of online bodybuilding, incel, and male-centric communities in the 2000s. Figures like Neil Strauss, author of The Game, Mystery, and Vince Kelvin popularized pick-up artistry as a form of social engineering. The baffling, amorphous challenge of connecting with women could be solved, they thought, like a math problem, reduced to a set of strategies and decision trees that would tell you what to say next. In order to succeed, you had to “cold approach” (talk to) as many women as possible. Some pick-up artists recommended “peacocking,” or wearing a crazy outfit to get attention. All of this—walking up to strangers in weird clothes and negging them—obviously requires extremely low inhibition.
But low inhib is ultimately not the same as being confident, chivalrous, or comfortable in your own skin. After all, the people modeling low inhib behavior to young looksmaxxers are not demonstrating how to socialize, but putting on a show. Streamers like Clavicular and Hexumlite, pick-up artists like Mystery, and early bodybuilding influencers like Zyzz and Zherka all needed genuinely low inhibition in order to play their roles on camera. The confrontational waggishness that defines low inhib comes from their exaggerated public personas. But for a normal man, some healthy amount of inhibition will be necessary and useful: low enough to talk to a girl, but high enough to not embarrass yourself in the process.
Today, looksmaxxers have discovered myriad ways to become low inhib. The most basic techniques, what one guide calls “social callusing + larp” are benign: stop jacking off, lift weights, “exposure therapy” like talking to the cashier at CVS, and “micro-interactions” like saying “excuse me” when someone is in your way. Another common method, often seen in YouTube “charisma” tutorials, is studying and copying characters from TV shows. Like billions of other people, they have discovered that “controlled alcohol pacing” can be helpful when socializing. They have also explored more extreme ways, such as taking peptides like Selank and drugs like pregabalin, baclofen, and phenibut—these are looksmaxxers after all. But the vast majority of ways to “low inhib max” are things you’d tell any shy kid to do: achieve something, look people in the eye, stand up to bullies, and take care of yourself.
A low inhib maxxing guide is not a perfect method for teaching a kid to cultivate confidence. But where are we offering him a better one? When I was a tween, I had questions about how to be a person. How do you know if a girl likes you? How are you supposed to dance at a school dance? In the early 2010s, I found WikiHow articles and “How To Grind” tutorials on YouTube. I also found The Game and pick-up artist lessons. Teenage boys still ask those questions, but today, many get their answers from looksmaxxing. Is that a problem? Are they all screwed?
Only time will tell. In the comments of one Looksmax.org low inhib maxxing guide, a poster offered a tip of their own: “[G]et older. Childhood and adolescent shyness is real. How many old people do you see who are very shy? Not many, it just fades away as you grow older.”
