A few summers ago, my housemates and I got into a post-party discussion. We were remedying our hangovers with glasses of cold white wine, rehashing delicious tidbits of gossip from the final shindig in our black-mould splattered, rat-ridden East London townhouse. Call us shallow, but we were discussing our guests: which of our acquaintances had something about them. The idea was that someone who had something about them wasn’t necessarily conventionally handsome or beautiful, but they had a quality, or a constellation of qualities, that was irresistibly yet ineffably hot. Maybe it was the timbre of their voice. Maybe it was the intensity of their eye contact. Whatever it was, the people on our list were incredibly sexy, in ways that we couldn’t quite pin down.
Recently, I’ve been wondering what Clavicular, the 20-year-old looksmaxxing influencer, would have said had he been sipping pinot grigio with us that August. How do looksmaxxers explain the type of hotness that can’t be quantified? Clavicular has accrued fame on platforms like TikTok and Kick by promoting the idea that their aesthetic value can be reduced to a score, based on quantifiable things like jawline definition, muscularity and facial feature ratio. According to the looksmaxxing lord and his acolytes, men can increase their “sexual market value” by radically (and often violently) transforming their physical appearance. Clavicular claims he’s smoked meth to suppress his appetite, performed “dick-ups” by putting weights on his penis, smashed his jawline with a hammer. The result of this masochistic pursuit of perfection? Men who resemble Greek gods with bulging biceps and six packs.
The idea that attractiveness should be numerically quantified can be traced back to Ancient Greece. Aristotle regarded beauty as something that existed objectively in the world, writing in Metaphysics that “the chief forms of beauty are order and symmetry and definiteness”. But in the 17th century, early modern philosophy would challenge this idea, as thinkers began exploring subjectivity and the role of individual perception. “Beauty is no quality in things themselves,” the philosopher David Hume wrote in 1757, “it exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty.” Over a century later, the writer Margaret Wolfe Hungerford is said to have coined the maxim “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” crystallising the idea that beauty was something that was experienced rather than innate.
Now, our digital world has pixelated beauty. A major turning point in our collective compression of beauty was the birth of the selfie, when Apple launched the first iPhone with a front-facing camera in 2010. By 2014, 93 billion selfies were shot each day on Android phones alone and every third photo taken by an 18 to 24 year-old was a front-facing picture of themselves. Selfie-taking (and sharing) made us obsess over our faces, and in turn, made us more insecure. Facetune launched in 2013. Snapchat introduced face “lenses” two years later and Instagram followed suit with its own line of filters soon after. Tap your phone and you could have sky-high cheek bones, a skinny nose and giant, plump lips.
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Today, the average Gen Zer spends an average of three hours a day on social media, swiping through photos of “perfectly” symmetrical faces, rewarding flawlessness with metrics like follows and likes. In 2019, Jia Tolentino presciently identified the emergence of an “Instagram Face”, arguing that social media algorithms had flattened beauty into a “composite of greatest hits”. This “single, cyborgian face” was notably Euro-centric, Tolentino wrote in the New Yorker, “distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic”. That year, Instagram banned filters that explicitly depicted plastic surgery, but similar augmenting and enhancing filters still exist. Recent research from City University revealed that 90 per cent of young women report using filters on their photos – smoothing out their skin tones, reshaping their jaws, brightening their teeth.
What’s concerning is that the gradual symmetrification of our faces is happening outside of our phones, too. Plastic surgeons are now reporting that patients are referencing social media filters in consultations, while female celebrities, rumoured to have had expensive cosmetic enhancements, have started looking increasingly similar. Is anyone surprised that a digital culture that reduces beauty to a mathematical formula has bred such an ugly aesthetic ideology as looksmaxxing? Or that boys are now feasting on it, too?
Clavicular famously claims that he doesn’t care about getting laid, but for anyone who is interested in romantic attraction, I’d caution against overinvesting in his singular body ideal. A homogenised view of beauty isn’t just dangerous, but misguided. When I think back to the people I’ve fancied most, it’s things like a twisted front tooth or a soft stomach or a twitching bottom lip that I’ve found the most sexy. Because hotness is affective. It lingers in the asymmetrical, the unusual and the off-kilter. It creeps up on you. It metastasises. It’s enacted and interpersonal and exponential.
The digital world saps us of these quirks. The things that make us attractive to each other in the real world can make us less appealing to each other online. Thankfully we do exist outside our iPhones – and a perfectly harmonious face can quickly lose its charm in real life. We’ve all met someone who is conventionally gorgeous but we don’t find attractive, or someone who isn’t conventionally good-looking, who we are magnetically drawn to. Looksmaxxing sells an enticing ideology, but men are better off working on their charisma than breaking their jaws with hammers.
[Further reading: Your snus gives me the ick]
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