Injections, Bone Hammering and the Pursuit of Peak Male Beauty

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 reading each other's bodies. They evaluate the length of their mid faces 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. No offense, but you're sitting there and gesture gooning like a subhuman beta cuck. Meanwhile, I'm out here aura maxing like an s tier gigachad. 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 looksmaxing appeals to so many young men and what its resonance says about our culture. It's Sunday, March 22. Joe, welcome to the Sunday Daily. Great to be here. So we are about to embark on a conversation about looksmaxing, 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 looksmaxing? So looksmaxing is a community of mostly men on the Internet who are dedicated to making themselves more attractive by any means necessary. And what does that mean exactly? 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 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. Just so wild. Okay. So who are these people, These bone tappers. Right. So to understand looksmaxers, 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 the above, that they'll never be capable of attracting and getting a mate. Right. And incels are known for being a sometimes violent, often …