Young men involved in the manosphere — an online movement that promotes toxic masculinity and misogyny — are being sold the idea that improving their appearance, or at least appearing more attractive, will give them a better life and raise their “sexual market value.” The trend, known as looksmaxxing, comes with its own jargon, large financial costs and sometimes painful or dangerous procedures.
Influencers targeting isolated young men, including involuntary celibates (incels), push a range of strategies: extreme dieting (“starvemaxxing”), heavy weightlifting and steroid use, plastic surgery and even violent-sounding practices such as smashing facial bones (“bonesmashing”) to change bone structure. Some promise better jobs and more sexual partners if followers can transform or fake an attractive look.
Looksmaxxing culture prizes becoming a “chad” — an archetypal alpha male — or deceiving others about attractiveness (“chadfishing”), and often emphasizes “mogging,” the act of looking down on men considered inferior. One prominent figure in the scene is Clavicular (real name Braden Peters), a 20-year-old US influencer who posts on TikTok and streams about his claimed alpha-male transformation. He says he takes high doses of amphetamines and testosterone — which he believes may have caused sterility — and has publicly described smashing his cheekbones to make them more pronounced. Reports say he earns roughly $100,000 a month from live streams on the Kick platform. “When you are not attractive, your life is hell, I’ve experienced it,” he said in a TikTok post. “Then when you start to get a little bit of good looks, everything changes.”
Racism and misogyny underpin looksmaxxing
Looksmaxxing has grown from corners of the MAGA-aligned and misogynistic manosphere and often overlaps with racist ideas, including “whitemaxxing,” a drive to change skin tone. Clavicular has been photographed alongside extremist figures such as Holocaust denier and white supremacist Nick Fuentes and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate, and has been seen at events where extreme slogans were sung. The extremist fringe of this world is examined in Louis Theroux’s Netflix documentary Inside the Manosphere, which explores ultra-masculine influencers.
Political figures have courted influentials from this space; former US president Donald Trump famously dined with Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago, illustrating how politicians sometimes seek ties with young men who express anger toward feminism, immigration, queer people and democratic institutions.
Researchers say looksmaxxing taps into broader currents of male anger and hyper-masculinity. Ozan Felix Sousbois, an associate researcher in sociology at the University of Stavanger who studies incel culture, says looksmaxxing emerges amid a convergence of the manosphere, incel subcultures and more traditional men’s-rights movements. Jordan Foster, an assistant sociology professor at MacEwan University, has described looksmaxxing as “a potent form of bait” for vulnerable young men already anxious about their futures.
The rhetoric reaches institutions
Manosphere language has even begun to appear in official communications. In February, a Department of Defense post on the platform X used the term “Lethalitymaxxing” alongside the phrase “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing,” over an image of a square-jawed marine. “Low cortisol” in this context refers to avoiding puffiness associated with stress hormones to achieve a more chiseled facial look. The post borrowed manosphere jargon to convey military strength, and appeared weeks before US and Israeli strikes on Iran.
Observers say the administration has used subcultural vocabulary to reach corners of the internet that mainstream politics previously did not engage. Foster noted efforts to draw stark contrasts between an idealized “manly” archetype and those who do not fit it, as part of wider attempts to mobilize military sentiment and bolster agencies such as ICE. Sousbois warns that the incel-aligned emphasis on control, hardness and readiness for conflict has moved closer to the mainstream, and that normalizing this language could magnify risks.
Potential harms
Experts warn that looksmaxxing can cause direct physical harm from risky procedures and substance use, and social harm as its misogyny and racism translate into hostility toward women, gender and sexual minorities, and ethnic and religious groups. What begins as a promise of self-improvement may accelerate anger and exclusion, with real-world consequences for both individuals and communities.
Edited by: Cristina Burack