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Of the many idioms and bastardized buzzwords putzing around the internet these days, “ascension” has a welcome legibility to it. In the looksmaxxing community, an online subculture of mostly young men attempting to enhance their attractiveness and in turn increase their “sexual market value,” ascension describes the process of lofting into a different stratum of beauty, of elevating from a nobody to a somebody (a subhuman to a Chad, if you will). From the Latin ascensionem, “a rising,” this newfangled application of the abstract noun mostly makes sense: You begin at the bottom of the male hierarchy and, through determined optimization, rise to the top. For anyone even modestly familiar with orthodox Christian teaching, this repurposed concept has obvious resonances with its etymological roots—the Ascension of Jesus, adapted for our absurdist and self-absorbed times.
How does one ascend, anyway? Lifting weights and eating healthy are sensible starting points, but looksmaxxing influencers often employ more extreme measures to accomplish their goals: smoking methamphetamine to suppress their appetites; injecting black-market steroids and peptides to build muscle; “bonesmashing”—as in smashing the bones in your face with a literal hammer—to chisel their jawlines. If these methods don’t suffice, or fail to address more stubborn genetic defects, cosmetic surgery and limb-lengthening procedures may be necessary. Whatever it takes, it seems, to mutilate yourself to the point of rebirth, to become perfect in the eyes of others.
The looksmaxxing movement purports to provide a scientifically sound and research-driven framework for helping its adherents achieve ascension. There are “objective measurements” to “properly rate an individual’s attractiveness,” per Clavicular, né Braden Peters, one of looksmaxxing’s most visible evangelists of pseudoscientific self-optimization. The measurements he refers to consist of anatomical ratios (the ideal upper arm circumference to waist circumference is 1:1.4, for example) and facial calculations like the desired distance between the pupils and the middle of the lips. By understanding the “mathematics” of attractiveness, a looksmaxxer aims to metamorphose himself from a normie to a True Adam, wielding his newfound sexual irresistibility for social, professional, and perhaps even political gain.
It’s unclear whether looksmaxxers like Clavicular fully reckon with the religious origins of their new favorite word, or whether, for a self-proclaimed Catholic like him, that lineage is hiding in plain sight. The biblical concept of ascension can most explicitly be traced to the Acts of the Apostles 1:9–11, wherein Jesus, after his resurrection, is beamed up to the sky and vanishes in the clouds. The scene is rich with metaphor: The rising represents a status shift, a transition from earthly life to eternal glory. In attaining immortality through rebirth, Jesus’s ascent to heaven affirms his divine authority, his unequivocal identity as the Son of God. The Ascension narrative also fuels the notion of the Second Coming—that Jesus will return to his disciples the same way he left: in a descent back to earth to fulfill God’s mission. Although theological interpretations of ascension vary depending on one’s penchant for literalism and which verse one analyzes—in the Hebrew Bible, for example, Enoch and Elijah are “taken” by God, presumably upward, into the realm of immortality, sans resurrection—the metaphor of an upward rise to glory has become hardwired into not only our colloquial rhetoric but our fundamental conception of reality.
It should come as no surprise that young, marginalized men lurking on misanthropic forums have repurposed the traditional notion of ascension to fit their own warped ideology. Looksmaxxers, after all, are a natural outgrowth of incels, that cohort of sexually frustrated, or entirely sexless, men who believe society is organized around an attractiveness hierarchy that unfairly advantages women. (You know, because girls can wear makeup and get Botox without fear of societal castigation.) Incel culture is naturally fatalistic: If you are born below a certain beauty threshold, the thinking goes, your pathways to increasing your social status or sexual market value are limited, perhaps even fixed. Looksmaxxing provides salvation for men trapped in a body they feel they were cursed with, offering self-improvement strategies that can fundamentally reshape their experience of being alive. Clavicular describes his own ascension in language that defies any sort of natural process; taking testosterone, steroids, and fat dissolvers is, to him, “a cheat code.” He almost coincidentally reaffirms the theological notion that ascension requires intervention from a higher power. Just as Christians credit God for raising Jesus from the dead and spiriting him up to heaven, looksmaxxers worship pharmaceuticals and aesthetic medicine for their transformative and physiologically distorting properties.
Because that’s really what we mean when we talk about ascension, isn’t it? Our boundless desire for transformation, to be anything but what we already are, forever climbing and peaking and apexing and mounting and reaching for the thing that may have been within us all along, anyway—or maybe not. Looksmaxxing provides a home for young men hoping to escape their bodies, to evolve into people worthy of being seen. It’s a forgivable impulse, if a misdirected one. Some parts of us, it seems, cannot be improved through steroids and bonesmashing. Some parts of us may be just fine as they are.