The Boys We Are Losing to the Mirror
- Kirra Pendergast
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
“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. A 2023 analysis published in the journal New Media and Society 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.
