Patrick Bateman was the original looksmaxxer– obsessive skincare and gym routine, perfected hairstyle, clothes elevated and ironed flawlessly. But he murdered women, and somehow our generation hasn’t put together that the modern looksmaxxing community’s ideological framework isn’t too far from facilitating exactly that. President Looksmaxxer Clavicular, AKA Braden Peters, was just arrested and charged with drugging and rape. The red-pilled male’s fixation with bonesmashing and jaw exercises isn’t a dedication to self-improvement, but a manifestation of frustration at their lack of control over women.
So literally how did “I need to look hotter” come out of hating women? Today, women thankfully are straying farther and farther from conforming to societal standards set by the patriarchy. Many embrace personal styles not necessarily catered toward the male gaze and, importantly, strive for an independence from men. Specifically, I think it’s the unbotheredness that accompanies said independence that really pisses men off. They can’t assert power and control over women who don’t “need” them, so they’ve resorted to turning on each other.
What began as insecurity at not being able to get a date or female validation has morphed into consuming explanations about the “female nature,” because why would it be their fault when we can become scapegoats? They convert disappointment into a theory about women rather than processing it individually as a normal human emotion. Ideas about attractiveness hierarchies and sexual market value are so bizarre to women, because most of us aren’t even looking for the qualities that these looksmaxxers are striving for, anyway. That’s how we know it’s not for us, but for their own twisted ideology in which optimizing the variables of face, body, style, etc. makes rejection feel less arbitrary, I guess.
This type of betterment is inherently linked to misogyny, and men are acting all-of-a-sudden like the victims of wild “beauty standards” as if that isn’t what we have grown up oppressed by our entire lives. Women are expected to invest enormous amounts of time and money into our appearances, but now, talk about the oppression olympics– looksmaxxers have to find some way to subjugate themselves because no one else will. And the key effect of their community is to condemn women for this self-inflicted entrapment into unfair beauty standards.
Newsflash, no one wants to go on a date with you because you come off as a weird freak who cares more about the angle degree of your jawline than holding the door open for a girl and paying for her coffee. It’s that easy, by the way, just be a nice person. Hidden resentment, anger, and hatred is never attractive, and we can always see through it. So it’s time to stop blaming women for the effects of the patriarchy, because we’ve been trying to overthrow it and its accompanying beauty standards for the last two hundred years anyway. Quit wasting time making podcasts turning each other against us and go ask a girl at a bar about her hobbies! We are not the enemy and to be honest, turning to feminism is the solution for the looksmaxxing bullshit.
The problem isn’t wanting to look better, it’s believing that becoming better-looking will explain why you’re unhappy– and deciding that someone else has to be blamed when it doesn’t. We can all talk honestly about this generation’s loneliness epidemic without taking a hammer to ourselves, I promise!
