Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Say hello to the all-new Alexa Plus, our smartest, most proactive AI assistant yet. Chat naturally about anything, and watch your to-do list disappear. Planning date night? One conversation handles everything, from dinner reservations to entertainment. Alexa Plus learns your style, anticipates what's next, and puts thousands of services at your fingertips. Experience AI that's all yours. And now, Alexa Plus is free with Prime on your Amazon devices like Echo and Fire TV. amazon.com/alexaplus.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (0:31)
From The New York Times, I'm Natalie Kitroeff. This is The Sunday Daily.
There's a corner of the internet where young men spend hours rating each other's bodies. They evaluate the length of their midfaces and the distance between their pupils. They take testosterone and inject fat-dissolving compounds into their jaws. They hit themselves in the cheekbones with hammers. They call what they do looks-maxing. And their community, which started as a subculture, is now bursting into the mainstream. Their particular way of speaking popped up at last week's Oscars and has been used by the Pentagon. They even made it to Saturday Night Live.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:09)
No offense, but you're sitting there jestergooning like a subhuman beta cuck. Meanwhile, I'm out here aura-maxing like an S-tier gigachat.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (1:20)
The rise of this movement has a lot to do with the ascendance of its biggest star, Clavicular, a 20-year-old influencer whose most deeply held belief is that looks are genuinely all that matters. Today, I talk with my colleague, Joe Bernstein, about why the ethos of looks-maxing appeals to so many young men and what its resonance says about our culture. It's Sunday, March 22nd. Joe, welcome to The Sunday Daily.

**Joseph Bernstein** (1:59)
Great to be here.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:00)
So we are about to embark on a conversation about looks maxing, which we should acknowledge is a made up word. It is an internet meme community turned cultural phenomenon, inspiring dozens of articles in every magazine and newspaper that you've heard of, including ours. And all of that attention, as far as I can tell, essentially boils down to everyone trying to understand what exactly this trend actually is and what it means about our culture. So let's start there. What is looks maxing?

**Joseph Bernstein** (2:41)
So looks maxing is a community of mostly men on the internet who are dedicated to making themselves more attractive by any means necessary.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (2:52)
And what does that mean exactly?

**Joseph Bernstein** (2:54)
What I mean is that there's almost no end to what they'll do to make themselves more attractive, according to their standards. From things that most people do, like showering and getting a good night's sleep, to ordering experimental chemicals from China, to taking hormones, to getting surgeries, to— and this is one of the most sort of noteworthy things that they do—they tap their facial bones with a hammer on the theory that by causing lots of microscopic damage to the bone, it will grow back bigger and more attractive.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:24)
Just so wild. Okay, so who are these people, these bone tappers?

**Joseph Bernstein** (3:33)
Right, so to understand looks maxers, we have to start with the internet community of incels. These are young men who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate. These guys believe because they aren't conventionally attractive, because they weren't born with the right genes. We're talking tall, broad shoulders, strong jawline, all of the above, that they'll never be capable of attracting and getting a mate.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (3:58)
Right, and incels are known for being a sometimes violent, often very hateful group of people, especially toward women.

**Joseph Bernstein** (4:07)
Right, yeah, it's a pretty nihilistic subculture. The idea is that if you aren't attractive enough, your life is over. Looks maxers are an offshoot of that ideology that is slightly less fatalistic. They're very, very harsh about their appearance and about the role that attractiveness plays in life outcomes, but they also think it's possible to move past physical shortcomings by going to extreme lengths to improve their physical appearance.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:33)
To hammering your face.

**Joseph Bernstein** (4:35)
That's right, and it's important to say that they're all aiming for a very specific ideal of beauty.

**Natalie Kitroeff** (4:43)
And what is that ideal? Define it for me.

**Joseph Bernstein** (4:46)
Well, the ideal is a white guy. I mean, there's no getting around that. This movement has been accused of being outright racist. There's no room in this sort of subculture for a face that isn't white in its standards of what's beautiful. In fact, last year, Wired had a story about a black guy who tried to make looks maxing content and he was sort of racially harassed out of the subculture.