Looksmaxing, a movement that has its origins in niche online communities and incel forums but has recently gained mainstream traction with the popularisation of terms like “Mogging”, is the practise of maximising one’s appearance or “looks” to the highest possible potential. Looksmaxers approach the human figure with a clinical absurdity that has lended the movement its viral potential as something to be laughed at for its immanent ridiculousness. However, this ideology, which has enough of a systematised set of beliefs to rightly be called an ideology, has been able to gain a stronger foothold than most systems of belief in the neverending gyre that is cyberspace in its ability to speak to the disenfranchised teenage boy in terms he understands and relates to. 

Looksmaxing or the “Blackpill” community has been able to encroach on ground lost by the online left to teenage boys in its ability to seamlessly comport the counter-cultural piquancy of the modern day right wing within a neoliberal framework that values self-optimisation and self-reliance above all else. If one is willing to forgo the natural scepticism so often attached to online movements when they are treated as serious forces in shifting culture, than looksmaxing should not be disregarded as simply the misanthropic cries of average-looking teenage boys into the cyberspace abyss, but rather the inevitable perfection of neoliberal ideology.

“Looksmaxers” are fundamentally optimistic fatalists. They believe that their quality of life is genetically determined at birth but that something can be done “to ascend” past one’s genetic fate and increase their value on the sexual marketplace. This metaphor of the marketplace is fundamental to understanding the “blackpill” community and its resonances with neoliberalism. Neoliberalism began as an economic ideology in the 1930s that favoured free-market capitalism and government de-regulation. In neoliberal societies, where every person must be their own entrepreneur, the only cultural centre left is one that values growth, autonomy and self-reliance. These ideals have been transposed onto almost every imaginable cultural arena. Most notably, the world of reality tv and the logic of shows like Squid Game which epitomise this self-reliance in that only one person can be a winner and they must do so completely by themselves. 

This deeply-embedded cultural logic of self-reliance has led to the “Entrepreneur of the self”. In neoliberal society, the self cannot be understood as simply one’s essential inner being but rather a brand or a business which needs to be created and sustained as one would create and sustain a business. No cultural movement embodies this pernicious neoliberal rationality more than the world of “looksmaxing” where the body is conceived not as the seat of consciousness or the foundation of all pleasure but rather as a project for which one is responsible in improving. 

This is evident when looksmaxers obsess over the surgeries they could get to resolve their negative orbital vectors or imperfect bigonial angles and move from a ‘sub-human’(ugly) to a mid tier normie (average). 

The transfer by which an economic rationality of optimisation penetrates the neoliberal self similarly reoccurs in this realm of looksmaxing where the logic of aesthetic enhancement is remapped onto one’s deepest inner flaws that ostensibly make a life unlivable for them. For example, several forum posts and tiktoks under the looksmaxing tag share homemade methods of curing one’s autism, a condition that seems prevalent within the community. One disturbing video even shows a boy who looks to be no more than twelve years old claiming he used a mixture of raw bovine meat and spring water to cure himself of autism. The apparent freedom of middle-class life under capitalism deludes the neoliberal subject and these optimistic looksmaxers into believing that no aspect of themselves cannot be razed and rebuilt.

Similarly, in a video tier ranking the various methods of looksmaxing with almost a million views on youtube, a looksmaxer by the name of ‘K Shami’, who has reached celebrity status among the community transferring his online fame into a supplement business that sells formulas to help you debloat your face, interestingly ranks ‘Statusmaxing’ as the most effective mode of ascension to get girls. What is statusmaxing? Making as much money as possible. Here, the logic of looksmaxing loops back into itself and we see it for what it truly is: another unwitting instrument of capitalist culture that affirms money as the only possible signifier of worth. Arbitrary standards of beauty must be reinforced to affirm that some things are better than others and only money can describe this difference. One would hope that any precocious looksmaxers watching this video would see the charlatanic irony in that this K Shami has effectively statusmaxed off the backs of their juvenile desperation.

Whereas the 2010’s socially liberal but fiscally conservative who progressively patted themselves on the back for voting in Obama not once but twice, epitomised an ideology of radical but surface-level equality, the new neoliberal of the 2020’s that is taking shape has stricter ideas of what’s the ‘in club’ and who’s allowed entry and Looksmaxing is just the beginning. You may rightfully think that I’m outstretching my argument in this connection but just cast your mind back a few months to one of the more boring days to be on social media when an American Eagle ad with Syndey Sweeney and her “better jeans” was released and look at the conniption it caused.

So if money, surgery and raw meat are the methods by which looksmaxers seek to cure themselves of their greatest ails, then what is the cure for what is obviously their most pressing flaw which is their obsession with themselves and looksmaxing. Well, you guessed it: Love! 

As cultural theorist Byung Chul Han observes in his study of love ‘The Agony of Eros’, in ‘achievement society’ “where everything is possible and everything occurs as an initiative or a project”, individuals are immunised to the wounding passion of love. But what love affords, according to Han, is a rare encounter with the Other; a euphoric trip into the fold of another person’s consciousness but into which we are only welcomed through an act of utter self-negation that demands recognition of life as perhaps more than one’s own hero’s journey. Contrary to looksmaxers fundamental edict, true love and companionship does not demand a perfection of the self but rather the annihilation of one’s self in the humility that life might be about more than just you.