…some have responded by seizing the female obsession with looks, already rooted in misogyny, and rebranding it with maximum toxicity—in other words, by becoming looksmaxxers.
Looksmaxxing is a product of the men’s-rights movement, whose adherents previously gathered in fringe corners of the internet, where they solidified their reactionary community around the conviction that women do not deserve equal rights. Now much of their thinking has infiltrated nu-conservatism, and the rest of us have been forced to learn about Braden Peters, better known as Clavicular—the king of the looksmaxxing sphere. Peters, who is twenty, looks like a hot guy in a fraternity; his most remarkable traits are his obsessive commitment to achieving this beauty—he’s used peptides, supplements, meth, hammers—and the total lack of joy it seems to bring him. (“I have, like, no regard for, like, my happiness,” he said recently, on a podcast. “Like, that seems like a very immature idea.” A few months later, he collapsed at a club after a suspected overdose.) The table of contents on the message board looksmax.org enumerates every aspect of the male physique and life style that can be quantified and improved: more than a dozen sections (Eye Area, Craniology, Penis, etc.) broken into even more arcane subtopics (“Limbal Rings Influence Facial Attractiveness,” “The Falio of a Recessed Anterior Nasal Spine”). It goes without saying, or perhaps can be gleaned from the word “craniology,” that looksmaxxers view race, sexuality, and disability from roughly the same vantage point as that of an early-twentieth-century eugenicist…
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/our-plastic-surgery-nightmare