What Parents Need to Know about Boys and Body Image, part 1: Looksmaxxing
If you need to consult 'incel-wiki', it's not good
This is the first instalment in a periodic series about boys, body image, and social media. We expect girls to have difficulties with body image thanks to patriarchally-influenced diet culture, but we’re ill-equipped to observe, interrupt, and support boys exposed to similar cultural forces. Have a body image-related topic you’d like to see covered? Drop me a message.
If you’re around teen boys who participate in social media or video game chat, I nearly guarantee they will know what looksmaxxing is. It’s fairly simple: looksmaxxing is doing whatever you can to make yourself look ‘better’ and increase one’s so-called ‘SMV’ - aka Sexual Market Value, which is about the grossest way to describe one’s desirability to others. You won’t be surprised that language around looksmaxxing springs from online masculinity cultures like pick up artists and incels. Beyond its annoying spelling, looksmaxxing describes a culture of lookism where young men aspire to a narrow physical ideal that they believe will make them more attractive to the ‘right’ kind of woman.
Social media, especially visual media like TikTok, offer boys and young men the platform to view others’ looksmaxxed transformations and judge their own appearances against influencers. On TikTok and Reddit (the source of very much image-based toxic rubbish), boys and young men can ask for others to rate where they fall on a scale of SMV and what they need to change about themselves to fit the mould.
Some of what looksmaxxing encourages is harmless on the surface: skincare, hygiene and hairstyling (although, coming from a place of judgmental conformity, it’s still infused with lookism and diet culture vibes, and expects the outcome of ‘winning’ women). But looksmaxxing quickly crosses into pseudoscience, critiquing young men’s ‘canthal tilts’ (the angle of their eyes, which is genetic and can’t be changed), ‘mewing’ to change jaw shape, and offering up diet plans that include steroids (SARMs) and grooming techniques like bathing with ‘pheromone soap’. And this is just what aficionados class as ‘softmaxxing’: changes that can be made without surgical interventions. The more radical end of looksmaxxing are plastic surgeries like fillers, jaw reshaping, and risky, painful limb lengthening procedures. These are presented as aspirational to boys and young men, much in the way that fillers or breast enhancement might be to girls.
In looksmaxxing forums1 and on TikTok, the mental health impact on boys of focusing intensively on one’s appearance isn’t mentioned. Despite 64% of men under 35 feeling that stereotypes about men’s appearance are harmful2, looksmaxxing influencers don’t address any impact on mental well-being and often reply to one another with harsh, shaming comments, including suggesting self harm and suicide to vulnerable young men who the communities deem too unattractive to fix. We know that men seek help from mental health professionals at much lower rates than women3, turning to often-toxic guidance from other men on internet forums instead of seeking genuine therapeutic assistance.
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