The Oddity of "Looksmaxxing"

The term "looksmaxxing" recently entered into the popular lexicon, apparently by way of the "manosphere." Apparently it refers to members of this culture's efforts to "look their best" in order to improve their chances with women.

This is hardly a new concept, such that it may appear unworthy of a new coinage. Yet those who speak of it relate it to a fairly specific conception of going about this rooted in the especially brutal, bleak take on men's lot that it is common to identify as the conventional wisdom of the manosphere, and the extremes of behavior it produces--like, we are told, smashing themselves in the face with a hammer as a do-it-yourself form of plastic surgery for the cash-strapped man intent on a Derek Zoolander "Blue Steel"-type look.

Once again it is incumbent upon me to say that I suspect the influence of the manosphere is greatly overrated by the news media, and that its intensive attention to it is a diversion from other, more consequential matters, as was the case in the "analysis" of the presidential election of 2024--the quality of which thinking on the part of the Democratic Party's house (pseudo)intellectuals and the mainstream media was frankly equivalent to what comes out of that part of the body referred to by the first four letters of that word, "analysis." For the millionth time: if the exit polls had young men going for Trump the far stronger evidence of the Validated Voter Tables (see them for yourself) had males 18-29 voting for Kamala Harris over Trump by a margin of 51-46 percent, completely mooting the claim that some huge lead with this demographic singlehandedly gave him the election, let alone did so because he sat down with the guy who played a handyman on Newsradio, or had the endorsement of that ex-Disney sitcom star who thought he would show us what a tough, brute man he is with the lamest (talk about cheat codes!) live-action recreation of Mike Tyson's Punch-Out ever. But the talking heads-with-no-brains-in-them, for which elementary school mathematics are simply too much to handle, continues to propound its narrative, because it is not just stupid, but terrified of acknowledging the neoliberal-neoconservative-centrist Democratic Party's decade-on-decade giving the middle finger to working people and their desires for prosperity, peace and justice as they urged them "Hold your nose and vote" until millions just couldn't take it anymore.

Still, there is something to be said about the disgusting and depressing phenomenon on which they are reporting all the same, and not least how bizarre it all is. After all, consider what it entails, an extreme enjoinment to on males to "make themselves pretty" on the part of what is supposed to be the ultra-macho, ultra-traditionalist-and- reactionary-on-gender manosphere. After all, the traditionalist view of what made a man successful with women may never have discounted looks, but always emphasized power, money, status as the ticket. Enough power, money, status and a man has his pick of women, even when he is ugly, old, etc., the combination of "power and beauty" the male and female contributions, respectively, and the male gaze what the woman indulges rather than the other way around, in that way epitomized by Howard Marshall in the decrepitude of his extreme old age marrying Anna Nicole Smith. Manosphere looksmaxxing can seem to fly right in the face of that, its exhorting men to regard themselves as sex objects for the female gaze in a profound reversal of roles as men behave in a way that by traditional standards would seem feminine, feminizing, effete, emasculating, castrating (the more in as, to go by a Susan Bordo, the female gaze of recent times is in significant part borrowed from a male gaze, and not the heterosexual one). That the manosphere should be pushing such courses seems all the more dissonant because of the manosphere's reputed high regard for evolutionary biology and its conceptions of the high-status "alpha male" as the winner of the mating game; the rhetoric of a "crisis of masculinity" supposed to be insistent upon ultra-traditionalism as a corrective; and the view that the changes in the relations between men and women have gone far past being more equitable to simply being onerously, degradingly, exploitative of the man; all as it is also the case that the prospect of moving up power-money-status-wise is as much a part of the self-help-flogging manosphere, where, for example, the prospect of crypto as their way to the "something for nothing" of the American Dream is very, very big indeed.

Why then do the hucksters of the manosphere not focus on that? I suspect there are two reasons. One is that the hawking of get-rich schemes, and even get-rich-quick schemes, depend on their audience not being too critically-minded--in a flexibility of expectations, or less generously, haziness of mind, about how much richer they will get, how fast, to gain and hold their credulity. By contrast a frustrated young man anxious for "success" with women is less susceptible to such manipulation. Biology itself makes him less patient, a man in a hurry, for whom talk is very cheap indeed, enough so as to make even the stupidest of them more critically-minded than the self-help hucksters would find good for business. The result is that there is a good deal of room for seemingly quicker, surer, roads than the grow-rich scam of the aspirationalist (which of course they exploit for a profit, selling other people grow-rich scams their own grow-rich scam, which seems to be working pretty well for some of them).

The other reason is what it would mean for the right-wing manosphere to direct their attention to the power-money-status aspect of male "success with women." For them the issue is not sensitivity to feminist hostility to discussing such facts of life (which is enormous, and so inhibiting for others), but rather their sensitivity to what it means for how a highly unequal social order looks, few things as quick to drive home the inequities of a class system as the eagerness for success in this area of life, with this easily turning into hostility toward those inequities. That, as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in This Side of Paradise, the son of the richest man gets the prettiest girl, is much less likely to make young men "work harder" the way conformist simpletons imagine (even those buying into the claptrap about aspiration know it'll be a long time before it makes a difference in their lives) than to make them furious that they live under such a system, and rather than ultra-conformist anti-capitalist the way Fitzgerald and so many of his peers in that era of American literature were. The overlords of the manosphere avoid encouraging that at all cost--and so rather than admit what even the stupidest of males has likely figured out on some level no later than the age of fifteen, they sell them looksmaxxing, as they decide to only worry later about what might happen when they catch on to how they have been bamboozled.