The Boys We Are Losing to the Mirror

“You can improve yourself. You can be more”. “There are techniques, routines, tools that will sharpen the version of you the world currently cannot see”.

And he watches. Of course, he watches. Because that is precisely what the algorithm was designed to ensure.

What follows is not a single moment of radicalisation. There is no clear before-and-after. What follows is something far more insidious and far more difficult to reverse. What follows is the slow, algorithmic reframing of a boy’s entire relationship with his own face, his own body, and eventually his own right to exist in the world with ease.

The movement has a name, or several names, depending on which corner of the internet you find yourself in. "Looksmaxxing" is perhaps the most widely misunderstood. The word sounds almost clinical, almost harmless, the way the worst ideas often do. At its surface, it is the practice of optimising one's physical appearance through every available means. Skincare. Posture. Sleep. Diet. So far, so ordinary. But the philosophy underneath it is not ordinary at all.

Underneath it sits a belief system that, in its architecture, is nothing short of medieval.

The idea that human worth is biological and fixed.

That attraction operates as a hierarchy as strict and measurable as a caste system.

That the distance between being loved and being invisible can be calculated in millimetres of bone structure.

There are forums dedicated to the precise grading of faces. There are men, some barely past adolescence, who have submitted their photographs for strangers to rate and rank them with the detached efficiency of livestock assessors at an Australian regional agricultural show.

This is not fringe behaviour, and it isn’t new, but there has been a lot of coverage of it in the media this week. 2025 Research documented the scale at which these communities have migrated from the dark corners of forums like 4chan and Reddit into mainstream platforms, embedding their ideology into the visual grammar of TikTok and YouTube in ways that evade content moderation because they do not appear to be extremist. They look like self-help.

The most effective ideological packaging in the digital age does not look like ideology at all. It looks like advice. It looks like care. It reaches a boy who is already struggling with his place in the world and offers him something that feels like solid ground. A framework. A reason. An explanation for why he feels invisible, and a promise, implicit or otherwise, that the invisibility can be fixed. But the fix keeps moving. The exercises give way to harder techniques. The harder techniques give way to online communities where the language grows darker, where “blackpill” philosophy, the belief that genetic determinism renders most men romantically hopeless, circulates as received wisdom rather than radical nihilism. In these spaces, women are discussed not as people but as selection mechanisms. The hostility is not always explicit. Sometimes it is wry. Sometimes it is presented as clear-eyed realism, as though resenting the humans who did not choose you is simply the honest response to a brutal world.

The boys most vulnerable to the deeper layers of this world are not the ones burning with rage. They are the ones who have quietly concluded that they are not enough, and that this is not their fault, and that the world has decided this for them in advance.

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This conversation is one I have been bringing to schools, leadership teams, parent communities, and policy forums for some time now. My work sits at the intersection of technology, human behaviour, and what it actually means to lead with clarity in an age of digital chaos. If your organisation is ready to move beyond the headlines and into something that shifts the room, I would love to hear from you.

Bookings and enquiries direct via kirra@safeonsocial.com

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That is a particular kind of grief, and it deserves to be named as such because here is what we have not said clearly enough, and what the algorithm will never say at all. The suffering underneath these belief systems is real. The loneliness is real. The desire to belong, to be wanted, to be seen, these are not symptoms of weakness. They are the most fundamental human needs. What looksmaxxing culture does, with extraordinary efficiency, is take that legitimate pain and redirect it. Away from complexity. Away from growth. Toward measurement. Toward rank. Toward a story in which a young man’s failure to thrive is the result of cheekbones, and not circumstances, not systemic failures in how we raise boys, not the near-total absence of spaces where male vulnerability is welcomed and held without shame.

We did not give our boys a language for tenderness before someone else gave them a language for resentment. We should not be surprised that they took it. The path back is not complicated, though it is long. It begins with understanding that the boys drawn into these communities are not lost causes or future threats to be monitored and contained. They are young people in pain, navigating an information environment that was not built with their wellbeing in mind, in a culture that has consistently failed to tell them that their worth was never located in their face.

It continues with the kind of presence that cannot be automated. A parent who does not flinch. A teacher who stays after the bell. A community that makes room for a boy to be confused and young and struggling without requiring him to perform certainty he does not have. It ends, perhaps, with the simplest and most radical act available to us. Telling a boy the truth. Not the truth of the forum or the algorithm or the jawline video, but the older, harder, more durable truth that his right to be here was never up for debate, was never a matter of angles or measurements or the votes of strangers on a screen.

Getting a boy out of these spaces is not a rescue operation and it should never be treated as one. The moment he senses he is being managed, the door closes. A conversation at the kitchen bench. A drive somewhere with no particular destination. The kind of proximity that asks nothing of him and therefore costs him nothing to stay in.

You do not argue him out of these beliefs. Ideology absorbed through loneliness cannot be dismantled through debate, and trying will only confirm his suspicion that the people around him do not understand what he is actually carrying. What you do instead is stay close enough, and curious enough, that he begins to feel the contrast. Between the cold hierarchy of the forum and the warmth of someone who shows up without an agenda. That contrast, experienced consistently over time, is more powerful than any counter-argument you could construct.

It also matters enormously what we put in front of boys before they go looking. Male mentors who speak openly about their own uncertainty. Stories, in books, in film, in the casual family conversation, in which men are allowed to be confused and tender and unfinished without that being coded as failure. Sport and physical challenge that builds a relationship with the body rooted in what it can do rather than how it compares embedded as a culture, quietly and persistently maintained by the adults in his orbit who have decided, without fanfare, that his full humanity is non-negotiable.

None of this is fast. None of it is satisfying in the way that blocking an app or confiscating a phone feels satisfying. But the algorithm is patient, and so we have to be too.