Braden Peters first started injecting himself with mail-order testosterone when he was 14 years old. It wasn’t due to any legitimate medical reasons and it wasn’t exactly an act of gender-affirming care in the typical sense; Peters, more widely known as “Clavicular,” was engaging in a practice called ‘looksmaxxing.’ The term means pretty much exactly what its name suggests: maximizing one’s looks in an attempt to be as attractive as possible. The name ‘Clavicular’ itself refers to the clavicle, or the collarbone— a body part associated with the wide, masculine shoulder build idealized by the looksmaxxing community. The concept of looksmaxxing was not invented by Peters, however. Its origins can be attributed to an online subculture of individuals who refer to themselves as “incels,” though they are best described as a group of involuntarily celibate heterosexual men who blame women for their inability to obtain romantic relationships. Often these men express intense resentment in the form of misogyny and possess or develop extremist views against women, including self-isolating from the gender altogether. So why try to ‘ascend’ to the highest standard of male beauty if women’s opinions are out of the picture? 

For these anti-women incels, the goal of looksmaxxing is not to win the eyes of prospective female suitors— it’s an effort to appeal to the “peer gaze,” or to work their way up the ranks of an imagined hierarchy of ‘manliness.’ Some practices promoted by the community are bone-smashing, or the hitting of one’s facial bones with a hard object in order for them to grow back more prominent, the self-administered injection of anabolic steroids and lipodissolve products to artificially enhance one’s build and even risky cosmetic surgeries aimed at achieving a more masculine appearance. The perceived efficacy of most of these treatments, disturbingly, is based on unsubstantiated pseudoscience. What I found most interesting about ‘looksmaxxing’ discourse, though, is that most of these procedures focus on altering bone structure—which is entirely hereditary—rather than muscle mass, which can be built through diet and exercise. In fact, it appears to me that the looksmaxxing community doesn’t really center itself around self—improvement at all—it hinges on the belief that there are simply “good” and “bad” genetic make-ups. In other words, modern eugenics. To no one’s surprise, the intended end result of all looksmaxxing practices adheres strictly to Western male beauty standards. And, when broken down, if the ultimate goal of looksmaxxing is to gain social status and the desired end result resembles the Western male beauty standard, looksmaxxing starts to look a lot like a well-disguised form of modern white supremacist ideology. It sounds extreme, I know, but even if not stated explicitly, the implication that certain genetic features are superior to others is the very ideology that legitimized eugenics in the past and can continue to fuel other racist pseudoscience in the contemporary. 

Despite being the practice presented as a new, male-centric trend, I would like to point out that women have been “looksmaxxing” for centuries. The notion of chasing an unattainable beauty standard is hardly foreign to girls and women worldwide; socially constructed concepts like thigh gaps, hourglass figures and hip dips have been placing higher feminine value on certain bone structures over others since the beginning of time. Many of these features have to do with a woman’s biological ability to bear children, hence the male-driven pressure for women to possess them. Male “looksmaxxing,” on the other hand, feels largely self-inflicted. In an attempt to appeal to the “peer gaze,” male incels have created a subculture that subjects them to the same kind of appearance-based scrutiny that women have faced forever. Evidently, the practice is more so a testament to male insecurity than it is to female dating preference at all. After all, incel culture is built on the belief that women’s opinions are irrelevant and it’s apparent that ‘looksmaxxers’ value the approval of their male peers over that of any woman. 

Ironically, in an aggressive attempt to ‘ascend’ a male social hierarchy, these men have effectively imprisoned themselves within an internet echo chamber of self-hatred. Thus, so long as the looksmaxxing community continues to expand its reach, the beast of toxic masculinity is encouraged to dig its claws even deeper into the flesh of modern society.