At least incels cared about getting with the opposite sex.
The mostly male, mostly heterosexual looksmaxxers — those who have come to dominate social media with their brainrotted vernacular and impenetrably captioned video clips — seem to have dispensed with relationships entirely.
In the late 1990s, self-defined involuntary celibates cared enough about love to define themselves by their lack thereof. They bemoaned the fact that their looks, they felt, prevented them from entering into romantic and sexual relationships.
Earnestness doesn’t last long on the internet.
Today’s looksmaxxers — next-gen incels schooled in Trump-era nihilism, undersocialized because of Covid-19 lockdowns and radicalized by the manosphere — are obsessed with improving their physical appearance through any means necessary. They speak of aesthetics as destiny and attractiveness (ranked, codified and debated in extreme specificity) as the measure of human worth.
Braden Peters, the 20-year-old streamer known as Clavicular, has become the movement’s breakout star. He claims to have started injecting steroids at age 14 to improve his physique, has dabbled in crystal meth to suppress his appetite and promotes the technique of hitting oneself in the face with a hammer (it’s called bonesmashing in the looksmaxxer lexicon, and there’s video of him engaging in it) to heighten cheekbones and create a sharper jawline.
But to what end? In one filmed rant, Clavicular described his life as “hell” but said he had to looksmaxx in order to “deal with the burden that women in today’s hypergamous dating market” had put on him. More recently, he confessed to The Times that knowing he could have sex with a woman was perhaps better than the deed itself. “It’s a big time saver,” he said. You could be forgiven for wondering whether looksmaxxers are obsessed with the opposite sex or scared of them.
In their focus on the self and detachment from real experiences, looksmaxxers intensify Gen Z’s generation’s approach to romance — or the lack thereof.
This generation came of age as the social environment fractured and courtship norms broke down — an environment that made sex scary and unappealing, dating hard to parse and substitutes for intimacy readily available. For many, online porn was an early introduction to sex, setting emotional detachment and gender antagonism as a standard. The #MeToo moment, for all its necessity, seeded widespread anxiety among young men and women both. Covid-enforced social isolation in their formative years made practicing real-world relationship skills (romantic and otherwise) nearly impossible, and the rise of dating apps made sure that Gen Z-ers continued to view all romantic possibilities through the filter of the smartphone screen, even if they might have preferred otherwise.
Parents played a role, too, pushing their children to prioritize education and achievement while neglecting to advise on love. And online, where they spent an ever-increasing share of their time, rage-bait relationship content and polarized dating “advice” filled the gap. Influencers on TikTok, Instagram, YouTube and streaming sites (like Kick, where Clavicular brings in more than $100,000 month) dispense warnings about bops (those with many sexual partners), exegesis on the importance of body count (the number of people someone has slept with) and the dangers of simping (being excessively attentive or submissive to an uninterested love object), constructing entirely new categories by which to sort and judge potential mates.
Layer on top of all this a broader feeling of precariousness and anxiety about the future and their place in it when traditional paths to stability and status seem to be slipping away. By this logic, it makes more sense to turn inward than to make oneself vulnerable, to nihilistically maxx rather than actually encounter the other.
In men, that begins to look like onanistic self-optimization as a means of taking control and a fear-based avoidance of the opposite sex that presents as resentfulness and misogyny. Women are demeaned as mercenary foids (short for “female humanoids,” in looksmaxxer parlance) — better insulted than engaged with.
And women, for their part, are moving away from the corporeal entirely, celebrating yearning rather than in-person relationships, decentering men and solo-romanticizing their own lives. It’s a tendency that made “Wuthering Heights,” Emerald Fennell’s smutty fanfic interpretation of the classic romantic novel, a Valentine’s weekend blockbuster. It’s not a movie to watch with a date. As the review site Vulture put it, “Masturbation on the Moors for the Win.”
In the most recent issue of The Point magazine, the Gen Z writer Mana Afsari recounted meeting right-of-center men with this mind-set in the wild, at a party in Washington, D.C. “They’ve had all summer to pursue opportunities in real life, but the forms of gender-specific discourse that had given them consolation were more gratifying, or familiar, than the opportunity to encounter real and receptive women. Instead, they talked about the abstract women, archetypes they’d read about online, who would always hurt them.”
She continues, “Instead of clarifying standards, raising our aspirations or giving us expectations of dignity in love, the online discourse has built upon decades of gender wars to leave Gen Z-ers largely alien to each other, afraid and alone.”
Multiple studies show that young people aren’t dating, having sex or forming partnerships. A recent survey of young adults from the Institute for Family Studies and Brigham Young University’s Wheatley Institute found that only 30 percent of its respondents were actively dating, despite about half of them indicating that they were interested in finding a relationship. They cited a lack of confidence in what the researchers termed “dating efficacy”: Fewer than 40 percent believed themselves to be attractive to potential partners or felt comfortable discussing their feelings with them. Only around a quarter felt confident in approaching a potential partner or in their ability to stay positive after a dating setback — a rejection, a bad date or a breakup. If trends continue, one in three adults currently in their 20s will never marry, contributing to an epidemic of loneliness that is already generationally acute.
For younger adults, romance has turned into something to be debated, theorized and optimized for but not actually engaged in. As Gen Z retreats into itself while pretending to focus on the other, the delta between the sexes grows wider.
Christine Emba is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
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