A small but curious sign of the deepening gender divide in our politically fraught times: Male beauty standards are getting really weird.

In the latest salvo, young boys on TikTok are shaving off their eyelashes, ostensibly because long eyelashes are girly. This new phenomenon joins a number of other perplexing masculine trends from the last few years, including doing tongue exercises known as “mewing” in order to achieve the squarest jaw possible, and “going to Turkey” for hair transplants. Somewhat relatedly, a Republican congressman bragged recently that he refuses to drink out of straws because that’s “what women do” (not quite a beauty standard as much as a sort of inscrutable new gender norm).

To be clear, we don’t know how many people are actually participating in these practices: enough for a few viral TikToks and mystified trend stories, not enough for an academic study. But it does seem that male beauty standards, infected by the ethos of the newly ascendant manosphere and incel-adjacent spaces, are evolving to focus far more on being masculine for its own sake than to attract and appeal to women. The point, it seems, is to impress other men, and a certain amount of ambient misogyny is part of the package deal.

There’s long been a divide between what men consider admirable on another man and what women consider attractive on men. That’s why actors who show off rippling muscles on men’s magazine covers

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