Who are ‘looksmaxxers’? And why are they calling other men ‘sub-human’?

An extreme cosmetic craze is trending on social media with videos of boys and men trading stories of breaking their legs to gain extra inches. Or, “bone smashing”, a practice where they take hammers to their faces to heighten their cheekbones.

These are just a couple of the wild self-improvement measures taken up by those who identify as “looksmaxxers”. The movement has been around for years, but it’s recently gained momentum on social media thanks to an explosion in interest over its poster-boy, Braden Peters. A 20-year-old American influencer who goes by the moniker “Clavicular”, Peters walked the runway at New York Fashion Week last month and has said he’s smoked crystal meth to suppress his appetite.

Some say the trend is evidence of a “moral crisis” among young men. Others are primarily concerned about the “Pandora’s box” of health complications that can arise from injecting peptides – a popular “looksmaxxing” tool used in a bid to get glowing skin – with one endocrinologist from the University of Melbourne recently telling our mastheads that, due to peptides’ cellular-promoting properties, there’s always a concern that it can lead to cancer.

Speaking with host Samantha Selinger-Morris on The Morning Edition podcast, Becca Rothfeld, a feature writer for The New Yorker, says the trend is not just a psychological and physical minefield, but one rooted in a misogynistic and racist subculture. And to top it off? Australians are among the movement’s biggest stars.

Click the player above to listen to the full episode, or read on for an edited extract of the conversation.

Selinger-Morris: Becca, for the uninitiated, tell us what “looksmaxxing” is, and I guess where it came from.

Becca Rothfeld: So this is sort of an evolution of incel ideology. Incel is short for “involuntary celibate”. It’s a misogynistic and racist online subculture that developed in the early and mid-aughts in online forums like 4Chan and Reddit. And so the guiding premise of the incel forums was your looks and your biology are destiny. And so if you are not a conventionally attractive man, you are consigned to romantic loneliness forever.

The “looksmaxxers” take this kind of basic description of the world, this idea that looks are destiny, this reductive, insulting caricature of women; they take all of this on board, but they think, no, you can change your looks. It is true that your looks kind of determine almost everything about your status in the world, but you can intervene and make yourself hot, and that will change everything about your life.

Selinger-Morris: And some really influential “looksmaxxers” are Australian, why?

Rothfeld: I don’t really know. I mean, maybe it’s just because people in Australia are hotter, because it’s nice outside, so the competition is harder… people in America are very pale on the East Coast after being inside for so many months.

Selinger-Morris: What is the goal for these boys and men of “looksmaxxing”? Is it just being as attractive as they can be according to these standards? And what purpose? Is it romantic success? Is it job success?

Rothfeld: They say that this is a rational decision that they’re making because they have observed that people with higher “SMV”, which is sexual market value, get all kinds of benefits from society, their higher status, they get paid more, and they have their choice of women… but they’re actually pretty uninterested in practice, in sleeping with women. There’s a really interesting profile of Clavicular in the New York Times where Clavicular tells the reporter that he’s more interested in knowing that women would sleep with him, and he doesn’t actually feel any urge to consummate any of these relationships. He doesn’t really care if he does sleep with them, as long as he knows that he can.

To hear more about the Australians embroiled in the movement, the extreme methods the cult followers practice to achieve what they believe is ultimate beauty, and looksmaxxing’s relationship with racism and misogyny, listen to the podcast episode in the player above or click here.

Hear the story behind the headlines on The Morning Edition podcast, every weekday from 5am on Apple, Spotify or your favourite podcast platform.