(Opinion) Manufacturing Masculinity
“Originally, the term LooksMaxxing was limited to relatively obscure internet forums, but has since been popularised on more mainstream forms of social media by groups of young men.”- Michael Bautista
Somewhere between skin care and skull measurements, young men are being sold a dangerous lie that not only can masculinity be engineered, it probably should be.
“LooksMaxxing” isn’t just another internet trend. It’s a rapidly growing belief system reshaping how each generation of typically college-aged men think about their bodies, their self-worth, and chances at finding a potential partner.
Just spend five minutes in the deepest rabbit holes of TikTok or sites like Discord and Reddit, and you’ll hear a strange new dialect of masculinity. Skin care is “skin maxxing.” Cosmetic surgery is becoming “hard maxxing.” Tongue posture is treated like an orthodontic destiny. Everything is being rebranded to sound tougher, sharper, and more clinical to appeal to men. It’s anything but what it actually is.
But with all these terms being tossed around, what really is LooksMaxxing? It’s basically referring to a process of maximizing one’s own physical attractiveness, which originated in message boards and forums of the 2010s, especially those centered around incel culture. “Incel,” in this case, refers to men who self-identify as involuntarily celibate. Originally, the term LooksMaxxing was limited to relatively obscure internet forums, but has since been popularised on more mainstream forms of social media by groups of young men.
The linguistic gymnastics aren’t accidental. Even within these communities, there’s an awareness that caring too obviously about your looks risks being labeled feminine. So the culture codes everything in aggressive, hyper-masculine language to make the obsession feel acceptable.
Calm down, tough guy. It’s still just moisturizer.
But beneath the memes and macho rebranding is something far more serious. It’s a growing pipeline of young men being taught that their romantic fate and their values as men are determined almost entirely by facial geometry.
One of the most visible examples of this is from an online creator who’s been gaining much attention in the media lately, 20-year-old Braden Peters of Hoboken, New Jersey. Though most know him as the arguably famous online streamer and influencer “Clavicular,” whose content dissects male attractiveness with the intensity of a lab report. His messaging, like much of the LooksMaxxing ecosystem, frames physical modification, not as vanity, but as rational self-investment.
Just a few weeks ago, Peters was caught up in the headlines again for walking down the runway at New York Fashion Week. In that same week, he was reportedly involved in an altercation at a New York City nightclub. But that’s not all, Peters is best known for his “in real life (IRL) streaming” where he’ll walk around in public and interact with strangers, hoping to make clickbait content.
The media personality has publicly made quite jarring statements as he once referred to American actor Matt Bomer as one of the current handsomest male celebrities in Hollywood based on what Peters claims is “objective mathematics” and “scores the highest in facial harmony” in an interview with Piers Morgan.
The comments don’t end there, as he’s also said he’d rather vote for Democratic Gov. of California Gavin Newsom over Vice President JD Vance because he prefers Newsom’s look over Vance, whom he called “overweight.”
Peters follows his own advice, too. Last year, he sat down for an interview on the Jack Neel Podcast, where he admits he began taking 300mg of testosterone from 14 to 16 years old, claiming that “natural puberty wasn’t optimized for the natural world.” Had a $35,000 double jaw surgery with full facial implants and takes 7.5 mg of Accutane a day, along with other, more questionable drugs.
It’s this exact optimization culture taken to its logical and unsettling extreme. To understand why this is resonating with young men, you have to understand the psychology of control.
Modern dating feels chaotic, especially to socially anxious young men. Chemistry is unpredictable. Rejection is ambiguous. Social skills take time to build and even longer to master. Take it from someone who is still learning to master the art of casual conversations.
LooksMaxxing offers something seductively simple; attraction is objective. The problem is measurable, but the solution is mechanical.
For analytically minded, young men, particularly those who already feel at home socially, that promise is powerful. It transforms messy human connections into something that looks solvable with enough data and discipline. If dating feels like a rigged game, LooksMaxing hands you what appears to be the rulebook.
Except the rule book keeps changing. In some online spaces, men are ranked on the Pick Up Artists/Slut Hate/Lookism (PSL) scale, graded from “subhuman” to “GigaChad” as if masculinity were an SAT score. Users post photos, asking strangers to quantify their romantic visibility. The feedback can be brutal, not playful roasting, but identity-level dismissal. “Subhuman.” “Genetic dead end.” “Cooked.”
This is where the concept of masculine demoralization becomes critical. When users write someone off as fundamentally unattractive, they aren’t just commenting on appearance. They are effectively telling that person you will never be desired and, therefore, you will never be a real man.
That’s an extraordinarily potent psychological weapon. And here’s the dark irony: the people delivering these judgments often gain a sense of status from doing so. In these forums, declaring someone else inadequate becomes a way to position yourself as the authority on masculinity. Gatekeeping becomes power, and cruelty becomes currency.
Users themselves frequently admit that the space is damaging their mental health, yet many keep returning, sometimes for hours a day, because ideology doesn’t actually promise relief, only progression. There’s always another tweak, another measurement, or another perceived flaw that just needs to be fixed.
It’s not self-improvement. It’s a never-ending treadmill.
At the end, the consequences become genuinely alarming.
Take bone smashing, for example. I know what you’re thinking. Are we smashing bones? Close, but not entirely. It’s one of the extreme and controversial methods that LooksMaxxers like Clavicular take to achieve Greek god beauty status.
Bone smashing is literally striking the face to supposedly stimulate growth; many medical experts say this carries numerous medical risks, from nerve damage to vascular injury.
Even unsupervised hormone use can disrupt developing bodies. Many of these hormonal drugs are either illegal or often being sold and distributed at unreasonable prices in black markets.
That’s not all, though; there are even people who’ve booked a flight and travelled as far as Taiwan just to have height-lengthening surgeries. These surgeries are a risky process that requires breaking the femur and months of painful recovery.
And still, young men are signing up, oddly enough. Because the deeper hook isn’t vanity. It’s a sense of belonging.
Listen closely to many of these LooksMaxxers testimonials, and you’ll see a pattern emerge. There are often young men who feel socially adrift, former kids who never quite found their group.
In another timeline, many of them might have simply needed time in a community and just some confidence-building experiences. Many of those could’ve been acquired through college clubs, sports, or creative spaces, where they have the freedom to flourish. Real-world social friction, the kind that teaches you that attraction is far more elastic than internet forums claim.
Instead, men are finding their first sense of structure inside algorithmically amplified insecurity.
The danger isn’t just individual. There is growing evidence that hyper-deterministic thinking about attractive us can bleed into broader world views. If you come to believe romantic success is dictated purely by biology, it’s not a huge leap to start viewing society through the same rigid lens. Historically, this kind of thinking has dovetailed uncomfortably with pseudoscientific hierarchies, the same intellectual neighborhood that once produced eugenics.
To be clear, most young men experimenting with skin care and gym routines are not on a path toward extremism. Basic grooming and fitness are normal, healthy pursuits. The problem is the ecosystem that tells vulnerable users that human value can be plotted on a facial grid.
Because here’s what gets lost in the obsession with jaw lines. Real attraction is stubbornly human. It’s shaped by humor, timing, proximity, confidence, shared experiences, and variables that fit neatly into a spreadsheet.
Most college students already know this intuitively. You’ve seen the couples that make no statistical sense. The campus heartthrob dating a theater kid, the quiet guy who becomes magnetic once he starts talking about something he loves, or perhaps the friend who just had that summer “glow up” not because his bone structure changed, but because he finally felt comfortable in his own skin.
Confidence compounds socially. Isolate compounds digitally.
If there is any real antidote to the LooksMaxxing spiral, it probably isn’t another thick piece about masculinity theory. It’s rebuilding the kinds of environments for young people to actually interact offline, the so-called third places that have been quietly disappearing for years now.
It’s the clubs like Chub’s Lounge at Landmark Americana, Cheap hangouts like Rowan After Hours events weekends at The Chamberlain Student Center, or cozy communities like High Grounds Coffee Roasters. Spaces where young men and women can mix without the pressure cooker dynamics or apps, and personality has room to matter.
Because the uncomfortable truth is this, the more life moves onto screens, the more appealing facial scorecards start to look. An algorithm reduces people into profiles, and dating apps turn interaction into swipe metrics, which they have already been doing. In that environment, it’s not surprising that some young men start treating their faces like software that needs patch updates.
But human connections have never been fully programmable. And the sooner young men hear that, the better.
Otherwise, we risk raising a generation that knows its canthal tilt by heart but has no idea how to hold a conversation across the table.
And that would be far more damaging than any imperfect jawline.
