So, You Want to be Beautiful: The Politics of Looksmaxxing

Livestreams depict young men sitting in fancy cars and standing in bustling clubs, smiling awkwardly while steroids course through their bodies. If you turned the lights on, you would see red marks on their cheeks and jaws from hammers, the stubble barely starting to fill out their young faces.

"Looksmaxxing" has entered the public zeitgeist as the newest form of self-improvement. Young men take extreme measures to increase their attractiveness, often pursuing dangerous practices with little to no proof of effectiveness.

This movement has taken hold primarily through livestreaming and other online platforms. News outlets have attempted to make sense of these extreme beliefs, but the coverage often misses the mark on what exactly is happening.

The Politics of Beauty

In TV interviews, one of the most common questions asked of prominent figures in this community concerns their political ideology. The answer is always the same: the movement is apolitical, and they stay out of those things.

The truth is that the movement is inseparable from the political sphere, both in cause and effect. These men are, at least to some extent, products of a particular belief system, just not in the way they think. They also perpetuate it: the act of placing beauty, wealth, and status above all else carries inherently conservative and misogynistic outcomes.

The Role of Women in the Manosphere

In each video or livestream, these looksmaxxers are surrounded by women who serve as props in their performances. Scroll through the comments and it becomes clear there is no correct way for these women to act. Give these men attention, and they are labeled promiscuous. Reject or ridicule them, and they slip easily into the role of the evil, cruel woman: the supposed architect of the so-called male loneliness epidemic.

Looksmaxxing is the product of incel ideology and manosphere politics that have been slowly migrating from fringe corners of the internet to mainstream talking points over the past few years. These streamers openly discuss ideas that at one point could only be found in the depths of Reddit or 4chan. Phrases like "mogged" or "foid" have crept into everyday conversation.

The founding idea of looksmaxxing is rooted in the belief that women are shallow and that physical appearance is the only thing of value when finding a partner. The embedded argument is that it is harder to be a man than a woman in today's world. What gets missed is that women already participate in this culture of looks and always have.

Historically, the way a woman looks has been the primary factor shaping the contours of her life, and that has not changed; it is simply so normalized that these men cannot see it. Women are now affected by looksmaxxing ideology from every direction. They are victims of the same social structures and are being villainized for a system they did not build.

The Point of Looksmaxxing

The primary goal of looksmaxxing communities always traces back to status and wealth. Yes, these men want to attract women, but they also want dominance. This hyperfocus on accumulation orbits the same capitalistic and conservative logic that measures a person's worth by what they own. Looksmaxxing has never been about self-improvement in any meaningful sense; it is about being better than other people.

That desire to place oneself above others may seem extreme in this context, but it is not far from the same social hierarchies that have always existed in Western culture. The American Dream has always involved social climbing, and that climb always means someone else moves down.

Looksmaxxing sits in direct opposition to any idea of community or mutual care. The closest these men have to friendship is others in the movement: people they are inherently in competition with, because that is how the culture is designed to work.

The Failures of Aesthetics

The biggest issue with these beliefs is straightforward: they do not work. These men are still fundamentally unhappy, cycling through controversy, arrests, substance abuse, and assault allegations.

These men remain lonely, not because of women or lack of social status, but because those things were never the point. Looksmaxxers disprove their own hypothesis through their own continued misery, their failure to build stable lives, and their inability to form real relationships. The ideology does not collapse from external critique. It collapses under the weight of the people living it.