Looksmaxxing, explained

You've probably seen the word looks maxing everywhere lately

Maybe in a meme, maybe in the news, maybe someone said it at brunch. And here's the thing, this word didn't come from nowhere

It came from one of the darkest corners of the internet. Looks maxing crawled out of the incel communities and

forums like looksism.org flourished in the 2010s as men gathered to rank themselves and others

obsessively based on their physical appearance, particularly their face. Now the term itself comes from men maxing, a term that gamers would use

for late 90s RPGs or Dungeons and Dragons where a player would obsessively maximize

and minimize stats to try to win the game as easy as possible

Applied to real people, this means a very specific and rigid ideal

of what it means to be quote-unquote hot. We're talking symmetrical face

rigid jaw, low body fat. Basically, if you've ever seen the meme

of what a chat is, it's like a blonde Ubermitch. And as my colleague Anna Ivini reported from Mashable

this community also has deeply racist roots as well as men of darker complexions have to compete with a very Eurocentric beauty standard So let break down the vocabulary if you trying to understand what your kids are saying or just what going on on Twitter right now

Ascending or ascension is the goal of looks maxing. It is the height of what the insult communities talk about, although they don't believe it is possible

It means to basically become your best physically attractive self and to succeed in your sexual or romantic life

Chads. Attractive, physically dominant, men amongst men. It basically means the most attractive man possible

Foids. Foids is a shorthand of a shorthand, originally meaning femoid, which is a portmanteau of female and humanoid

This is a very derogative term used by incels to dehumanize women

Mog or Moggin is when one person physically dominates another in attractiveness

You can height mog, frame mog, or hair mog. The variations are kind of endless. Mewing

Mewing is a pseudoscience that basically asserts that if you press your tongue to the roof of your jaw you can change the shape of your jaw Relatively harmless but not so harmless as bone smashing which is literally hitting your face with a hammer to chisel your jaw

Speaking of people who do bone smashing, we also have lean maxing, which is to make yourself as thin as possible

Influencers like Clavicular have become famous for saying that they smash their face with a hammer and do meth to be as thin as possible

The black pill is where a lot of looks maxing ideology comes from is the nihilistic idea that physical attractiveness is the way of the world

And to take the black pill is to basically realize that one simple truth

So black pills is more like a philosophy based on like genetic determinism and that, you know, looks are like the highest point in like the hierarchy of what's important as a male in society

Looks maxing, slay maxing, lean maxing, and all these intel terms of broken community, thanks in part to one Clavicular, also known as Braden Peters

Clavicular has become the most infamous face within looks maxing reportedly pulling in millions of views while openly discussing his drug use being caught on stream hitting someone with a car and moving around in far

right circles. He's been profiled by GQ, The New York Times, and we've even reported on him here

at Mashable. And the memes around him, like being brutally framed mocked by the ASU frat leader

and other ridiculous compound words that don't make sense, have all been catapulted in the

mainstream because of him. Here's what gets lost in the memes though. The community this language

comes from did not mean this to be funny. It was built by men who genuinely believed that they were

worthless and that women were valued even less than that. Words like Foyd and Stacey and Chud and

Chad and Jester Maxing, these aren't meant to be funny. These are ways to objectify and dehumanize

other human beings based on how we look. These are ways to strip real people down to objects to be

ranked, resented, and rejected. So yeah, mogged is a funny word. Just know what it was built on

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