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Why should we care about looksmaxxing?
This is a question I hear from people constantly, and one I often ask myself. I have researched what looksmaxxing is, the lifestyle it entails, and where it all comes from. But I have no personal interest in using any of their techniques myself. I would even warn a young man away from looksmaxxing because of how it can harm your body and mind. It can feel like every bit of ink spilled on looksmaxxing exists only to amplify content creators trying to boost their own profile.
But I do think looksmaxxing is worth understanding, for a few reasons.
First, it is generally accepted by now that young men in America are in crisis. They seem lonely, hopeless, confused, perhaps dangerous, and looksmaxxing is a particularly salient and visible symptom of their alienation. The images that made looksmaxxing infamous—teenagers injecting each other with peptides, or smashing their chins with a hammer—amount to livestreamed self-harm. I think that, at least for some looksmaxxers, this is a cry for help, and we should respond to it. Instead of issuing scornful judgments or descending into moral panic, we should make a good-faith effort to learn about what they’re doing and why. That’s what adults owe to children.
The second is simply that looksmaxxing is youth culture, like it or not. It has its own music, style, icons, and vocabulary. And the youth culture of today is the world we live in tomorrow. Rap, skateboarding, EDM, Ivy Style, jazz, graffiti, Mod, punk, K-pop, surfing, dancehall, the Arab Spring—everything important starts with kids. Rejecting new forms of expression because they’re bizarre, unsavory, offensive, or dangerous is a guaranteed way to stay lame forever.
For the most part, looksmaxxers strive to act older than they are: serious, stoic, and cynical. But every once in a while, the kids remind you they’re still kids. On a recent livestream, Clavicular, perhaps feeling a bit awkward while dancing with two blonde women, jumped up and touched the ceiling to impress them. Clavicular is college-aged, but these things take a long time to outgrow. (Clavicular, at 20, is already older than many people on looksmaxxing forums, who tend to be well under 18.)
There was a post on a Looksmaxxing forum this month about Massai jumping (as in the East African tribe) as a way to train the fascia. But it’s more likely that Clavicular was just jestermaxxing, a social strategy he popularized, which essentially amounts to dancing, acting silly, telling jokes, and doing other fun things to get girls’ attention. In my own research, I have found it works better than blankly staring at them until they notice your facial harmony.
Later, Clavicular explained his motivations, saying that the NFL combine tests vertical jump because it is the “least fakeable athletic marker there is” and can’t be “easily frauded” like other exercises. “These girls know beyond a shadow of a doubt I’m ideal for mate selection now,” he wrote. For the most part, that explanation is a shitpost by an extremely successful entertainer playing his character. But it also shows the third reason why looksmaxxing merits our attention. Looksmaxxing was created by incels, and its popularity has grown alongside a broader mainstreaming of incel though, including once-fringe ideas about sex and relationships.
When Clavicular says that women are judging his jump for purposes of mate selection, he is making reference to the idea of intrasexual competition. Intrasexual competition refers to how animals of the same sex compete for mates. It’s why moose headbutt each other, birds do courtship dances, and white-spotted pufferfish make beautiful sand nests. This idea looms large in incel theory. At the heart of lookism, the underlying philosophy of looksmaxxing, is the belief that people prefer attractive people in every aspect of life, even if they don’t admit it. The theory holds that women are intensely judging men on their looks, so you must do everything to maximize those looks. The nature of intrasexual competition is that women (or potential employers or Instagram followers or stream viewers) will compare you aesthetically with other men to determine your worth. That’s why mogging—derived from alpha Male Of Group—is the goal. In the simplified, often pseudoscientific worldview of incels, they have not been unlucky in the confusing, mystical art of human connection. They have lost in biological competition, more the way an animal would than a man.
Any man can remember jumping to touch a doorframe, sprinting at recess, carrying a large amount of folding chairs at once, bringing the groceries inside in one trip, hitting a devastating Four Square Cherry Bomb, and showing off with other feats of childhood physical prowess. These are early forms of intrasexual competition, when young boys first get the inkling that nearby girls are worth impressing. That’s Clavicular’s joke: grown-up forms of intrasexual competition in Miami clubs (rounds of shots, sports car, Kick follower counts) are barely more than seeing who can jump higher.
But, like many jokes for kids, old men come along and ruin it. The next day, Bryan Johnson, the fintech guy who is trying to live forever, posted a photo of himself jumping and touching the top of a doorframe. Johnson is an important counterexample for looksmaxxing, as are other health hackers like Andrew Huberman or Dr. Sean O’Mara, who has the White House on a steak and sauerkraut diet. They too offer heterodox, esoteric medical and lifestyle advice to a male audience to help them look and feel better, but their cures are for middle-aged men facing intrasexual competition at the office and on the golf course. They could never understand the life-or-death stakes of the looksmaxxers, who fight each other on the battlefield of love.
