How Looksmaxxing Pressures Young Men to Be Perfect

Source: AI Generated

We’ve written previously about how the pressure to be perfect increasingly applies to men as well as women. Year after year this pressure is increasing and the ideals that young men are aspiring too are more demanding and unrealistic.

In a recent study from Barclays, just under a fifth of men (18%) “say they feel a pressure to look good”, and “one in eight (12%) have spent money on a cosmetic procedure in the last decade”.¹ In the same study, 18% of men said that “social media now has more of an impact on their beauty purchases”; this is supported by reports that TikTok's shop has become the second-largest beauty and wellness ecommerce retailer in the UK.

Looksmaxxing – a term coined in online incel spaces – has gone viral on social media, particularly among young men and boys. It describes a spectrum of ways to improve your appearance, everything from beauty hacks, or ‘softmaxxing’, including basic grooming and ‘mewing’, to extreme methods or ‘hardmaxxing’ such as cosmetic surgery and even ‘bonesmashing’ which involves intentionally punching jaw bones to restructure them.^2,3

The rise in popularity of looksmaxxing videos and online forums shows that male beauty ideals are becoming more defined and demanding. Young men aspiring to these ideals believe they must be muscular, tall, and chiselled. Importantly, how well they measure up can be supposedly measured through attractiveness scales, jawline angles, and ratios between features.⁴

Strikingly, online incel communities have embraced the term lookism to articulate their objections to how beauty functions in our global world.⁵ On the surface, it suggests an awareness that how we look influences all sorts of opportunities that are available to us, such as jobs, friendships and intimacy. However, rather than understand these experiences within the increasing awareness that appearance matters, incel discourse focuses on women as the gatekeepers of beauty and desirability. This narrative has been largely absent in looksmaxxing discussions on social media, but, as Krista Fisher points out, the popularity of looksmaxxing “taps into an unmet need for boys”.⁶ Men and boys have fewer spaces to discuss body-image concerns and the pressures they experience. Lookmaxxing provides a forum for sharing how they feel and seems to offer peer support. Whilst body positivity, body neutrality, and self-care movements have their pitfalls, they have provided women with spaces to discuss this pressure. Indeed, talking about felt or perceived appearance failures is common, even ubiquitous, in women’s chat, whether online or in person. Men and boys, in contrast, have not traditionally discussed their appearance or their feelings of failure with their peers.

The rise of looksmaxxing is concerning, not least because of its origins in incel culture and the manosphere, and its attendant misogynistic underpinnings, but it also points to the increasing pressure to be perfect that men are experiencing. Whilst beauty ideals have existed throughout history in different forms, these were localised, did not apply to everyone, and were not experienced as required. And rarely have men and boys been subject to beauty ideals as a primary way of measuring their worth – by others or by themselves. This is changing. Men and boys are aspiring to unrealistic beauty ideals, doing body work, engaging in risky procedures from steroid use to surgery and valuing beauty over other goods such as intelligence and health. Looksmaxxing, especially the forms that focus on ratios and symmetry, make attractiveness seem easy to measure and tell young men and boys exactly how well, or badly, they are doing. The rise of looksmaxxing shows us the stark reality of how pressures to be perfect are impacting men and boys. Increasingly they, like women before them, appear willing to do almost anything to have a better, more conforming, more perfect face and body.

Written by Jessica Sutherland and Heather Widdows, University of Warwick.

LinkedIn image: Mahir KART/Shutterstock