“I use crystal meth as a stimulant and to leanmaxx. It is much more mild than Adderall, actually, and I’m pretty much using meth for hollow cheek.”
These are the words of Clavicular, the 20-year-old looksmaxxer who has broken the glass ceiling on the austere discipline. Looksmaxxers are those who use any range of measures to maximise their physical attractiveness. If he sounds extreme, it should be noted that Clavicular is a special case. He is a “hardmaxxer”: a rare example of a man willing to partake in anabolic steroids, hard drugs, semen retention (to increase testosterone, naturally), and facial plastic surgery in a monomaniacal pursuit of ascension, a higher score in the eight-point PSL scale of attractiveness, which, so looksmaxxers assure us, is as objective and scientific as the pH scale. In fact, the man who aspires to be the Mozart of mogging is one of the still rarer individuals to embrace the dangerous practice of “bonesmashing”: repeatedly bashing his jaw with hammers and dumbbells, for hours on end, to sculpt his own skull like Michelangelo’s David.
If this language sounds baffling to you, and you have €1,000 to spare, you can “unlock the ascension method” by purchasing Clavicular’s “data-driven framework to surpass genetic potential”. Along the way, you will absorb a dizzying amount of repurposed anatomical lexicon. In the world of looksmaxxing, beauty is not in the eye of the beholder. Everyone has heard of “mewing”, a tongue exercise intended to achieve a pronounced jawline; dedicated looksmaxxers remind us of the other important things in life, such as orthotropic forward movement to prevent a recessed maxilla or the traditional Chinese medicine technique of guā shā to fix a negative canthal tilt.
The crowning scientific achievement here is the aforementioned PSL scale (short for PUAHate, SlutHate, and Lookism: the three online communities where Looksmaxxing was refined throughout the 2010s). At the low end, you have the 1 in 2,000 “subhuman”, including a photograph of Joseph Merrick, the Victorian “Elephant Man”, who endured severe facial and bodily deformities throughout a short and difficult life. At the other end, there is the 1 in 12 billion Terachad/Terastacy, or True Adam/True Eve, with no known examples since the Fall from Paradise.
Looksmaxxers revel in the notion that famous stars like Sydney Sweeney or Zendaya do not, unfortunately, go beyond “High-Tier Becky” (HTB), nor does comedian John Mulaney even surpass the “Mid-Tier Normie” (MTN), representing roughly 50 per cent of the male population.
What is the upshot of all this? Who is this for?
I would counter the trivial answer, though true, that looksmaxxers want to have sex with large numbers of women. Clavicular claims to have had hundreds of sexual partners since his ascension, and there is no real reason to doubt this. He does not worry about accidentally impregnating anyone, since his abuse of steroids (including trenbolone) has induced (temporary) infertility.
But that’s beside the point. “I don’t give a fuck about getting girls… I want to mog people. I’m gonna walk into a room and people are like, ‘Holy shit, holy shit, look at this guy.’” There is a Gatsbyesque drive to triumph over old foes inherent in the looksmaxxer’s perilous race for physical perfection.
An able demonstration of this is Kareem Shami, a refugee of the Syrian Civil War. Upon his arrival in Lebanon, he was mocked by his classmates, spawning his Ahabian fixation on mogging. He founded the “Mogwarts” community, quite similar to the aforementioned “Clav clan”, consisting in a costly membership and ascension program. If you reach Level 9 in the community, you receive a one-on-one call with Kareem Shami himself; however, the prohibitive costs and engagement required have so far prevented even one of his loyalest devotees from achieving those luminous summits.
It would be neglectful to describe the absurd diction and uncanny faces of the looksmaxxers, however, without examining those who are humiliated in their want for status.
“Blackpill” ideology, as it is known in incel forums, is the necessary correlate of their belief in the objectivity and importance of physical attractiveness.
A mother, to raise awareness about bullying, recorded her 11-year-old son Keaton Jones crying in her car about being called ugly at school. The video is used at the start of a “Blackpill edit”: electronic music plays as a black bar (“MOGGED”) covers his eyes, before cycling through clips of male models and looksmaxxers with “hunter eyes” and prominent brow ridges. The most common word among the comments: “Brutal”..
Not all of us are gifted with the potential for ascension. “Many are called, but few are chosen” (Matthew 22:14). Some, like Clavicular, could be saved, if only after purgatorial cleansing. Most men, however, have been predestined to the damned mass. In looksmaxxing forums, those who post the pictures and receive low scores are told to “ropemaxx”, indicating suicide as the sole escape from their unsightliness.
The typical method to avoid responsibility is to claim this is simply how the world is. As Clavicular says, “When you’re not attractive, your life is Hell.” They often compile vast arrays of sociological data to back up this “truth”, exhibiting a perverse desire to protect their faith in their own hopelessness. Mewing itself is the promotion of British orthodontists John and Mike Mew, with the latter now excised from the British Orthodontic Society for misconduct involving child patients.
Maybe not much is new. Much of the looksmaxxing world, strange as it is, may seem to some as a male-branded iteration of the same tendencies observed in Tumblr eating disorder culture, for example, with an insidious façade of “wellness”, a salvific contrast between “inspiration” and disgust, and the promotion of self-harm.
I don’t agree. The looksmaxxers do not rest at consuming their own; their worldview rests on the systematic devaluation and hatred of women. Clavicular frequently degrades women, and opens conversations with egregious salaciousness to demonstrate how far he can go with his looks. “Chad does what Chad wants” is a frequent expression in the community.
This schema was popularly explored recently in the Netflix series Adolescence, exploring a 13-year-old schoolboy who murders a girl at his school who rejects him. The boy, Jamie Miller, reveals to the psychologist that the act was done to exercise his control over her, after she called him an incel. “How can you be involuntarily celibate at 13?” The police officer’s son explains that the term incel means he will be “a virgin forever, basically” and the dad immediately concludes that she was bullying him, although it is male figures who are promoting the ideology.
Looksmaxxing has entered, also, into a Baptist–bootlegger coalition with the new American right. Clavicular has appeared with far-right streamer Nick Fuentes, in a strange conjunction of sexual ethos given that the latter was recently chided by Piers Morgan for his virginity. He was also the guest of an over two hour-long interview with conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, arguing that Vice President JD Vance does not have enough SMV (sexual market value) to face California governor Gavin Newsom. “JD Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom mogs.”
Nor does he contradict the conservative sexual ethic; on the contrary, he is equally condemnatory of what he sees as a “degenerate” and “hypergamous” society. He simply plays the game.
“Eternity is a lot longer than 80 years. Does that factor into your thinking at all?” asked Knowles.
“No.”
Stripped of a traditional and venerated religion, the ethic of the Looksmaxxer resolves ultimately into this-worldly resentment and dissatisfaction. As Clavicular has said: “I am not a well-developed character. This is a fucking horror story.” If the Aztecs, who gave their little children in blood sacrifice to the rain-god Tlaloc, had one spiritual advantage over us moderns, it was that they had the sense to worship something higher than themselves.
