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"Looksmaxxing" pressures men to meet an unrealistic physical ideal, risking their health.

Excessive focus on appearance has been linked to anxiety, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders.

Parents and caregivers should discuss values, self-care over appearance with young people.

Of all the times that I’ve been burnedBy now, you’d think I’d have learnedThat it’s who you look like, not who you areYou all keep that in mind

—Jackson Browne (1977)

Social pressures on physical appearance are not new. Girls and young women have sustained a thinness imperative from the flappers in the 1920s through the present. Social media compounds the ideal of thinness for women by associating it with beauty, wealth, success, and belonging.

Boys and young men have been influenced far less, though for some not insignificantly. Witness the bodybuilding and action figure dominance from the 1960s to 1980s, as exemplified by superheroes and the V-taper focus of The Terminator. And now, for boys and young men, the emphasis on physical appearance has been captured and promoted by social and streaming media. Witness the ultimate extreme—looksmaxxing.

What Is Looksmaxxing?

Looksmaxxing is an online trend used by young men to “maximize” their appearance according to prescribed, mathematical metrics that follow a prescribed paradigm. The sole emphasis is on modifying one’s physical stature to achieve self-improvement.

It has all the earmarks of a cult, led by Braden Peters, known as Clavicular, an online streamer who posits that the ideal of male attractiveness and “sexual market value” is appearance. Clavicular has developed a series of looksmaxxing words and phrases that capture who you are—“subhuman” (totally inferior), “normie” (normal), “Chad” (white, muscular, affluent). And during streaming, he has conducted “mogging,” the process of comparing an individual who's clearly out of line with the “ascendant” metrics with one who is close to “perfection.” This kind of humiliation, narcissism, and toxic masculinity is a notable feature of looksmaxxing.

The techniques to achieve predetermined physical appearance, such as precise metrics for waist size, muscularity, jawline, and “hunter eyes,” angled slightly........

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