5 hours ago
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I felt something akin to devastation reading that the actor Barry Keoghan sometimes “doesn’t want to go outside” because of the scale of online abuse about his appearance. It’s not just the viciousness of the abuse, but how difficult I imagine it must have been for him to articulate, as well as what was not said – what parts of his face he’s likely now had to obsess over and scrutinise.
As a man, it is often hard to say out loud that you have been made to feel insecure in yourself, or that there are things that you do not like about your physical appearance. Keoghan’s vulnerability as a grown man is striking, but I have also been thinking about how much harder it is to articulate this as a teenager or boy. I was well versed in the language of bodily dissatisfaction from a young age, though these were thoughts I would keep to myself: that I did not like my thinning hair, how narrow my shoulders were, my large forehead, or the eczema on my right hand that often drew questions like, “Were you in a fire?” I did not like that I was not as tall as my brothers, or even that my voice did not break with a deep manly husk but retained some squeakiness.
As an adult, I still spend a lot of time thinking about my appearance, but I have benefited from something quite simple: the space and time to sit with the emotional difficulty that can occur around not liking parts of yourself, and to become accepting of it. There is an essay by the novelist Megan Nolan in the New York Times that I often return to in which she reflects on her adolescent obsession with becoming beautiful: “I think now that I idolised beauty so much because I was often embarrassed and ashamed as a teenager and beauty seemed the opposite of embarrassment to me.”
That clarity about the real worth of your appearance, and that your adolescent years can feel like a never-ending ritual of shame and embarrassment (mine certainly were), is the kind of insight that can only come from maturity and the journey towards acceptance. That there may be limits and constraints on who you can be and who you will be, what you will look like, and what people will like about you. That there are things you can do to feel good about yourself, or to develop an identity or sense of style that flatters the very best parts of you.
But there is a problematic development which I think will further stunt that emotional journey for young boys who barely have the space to articulate bodily dysmorphia: the rise of “looksmaxxing”. Marketed to young boys through influencers such as Clavicular – it is the reframing of physical “self improvement” as a mathematical problem to be solved with tools: measurements, ratios, syringes, hammers to damage bones.
There has been no dearth of editorials on 20-year-old Clavicular, real name Braden Peters, attempting to parse him to those who are bemused or even shocked by his methods, and wonder why on earth any young boy would look to him. A manosphere-adjacent influencer, like his peers it’s the severity which is the sell: Peters claims to have injected himself with so much testosterone that he is infertile. All this is to put him on the true path of what he calls “ascension”. What is the destination? It’s vaguely defined as the ultimate glow up, but needless to say that once beauty is treated in such a way, the endpoint is unreachable. There will always be someone out there ready to “frame-mog” you, where men battle against other men in the areas of muscularity and facial symmetry.
Looksmaxxing has appearance into the quasi-Olympic arena of masculine competition. Critics have said that this speaks to a homoeroticism inherent in looksmaxxing, that all of this cultivation of beauty has little to do with actually attracting women, or (despite “incel” logic informing the community’s foundations) obtaining a physical body that women will want to have sex with.
But I think it is deeper than simply wanting to impress other men: it is also about how bruising adolescence and puberty can feel for young boys when everyone gets a different, unfixed outcome. Some boys will get height, deeper voices, beards, athleticism; others will be burdened by acne, struggle with their weight, or wonky teeth. I know well from attending a boys’ school for seven years that the stress of navigating this emotionally difficult time also leads boys to criticise and police each other, perhaps to deflect from their own perceived deficiencies or a way to seek leverage for social domination.
It is that sensitivity which I think is obscured by the absurdity of looksmaxxing. It is certainly true that beauty and body standards are more punishing for women, and that girls feel the sharper end of that scrutiny. But there is little acknowledgment of what this journey looks like for boys; some recognition of this issue is, I think, part of the appeal of Clavicular. What is ultimately a very private struggle – the dislike of one’s appearance – is reshaped into a site of competition and ridicule, which makes these vulnerabilities less visible, but by no means less real. None of this is helped by the fact that young boys can access the casual cruelty of adult opinion on male appearance via social media; it’s not just the harassment of Keoghan, but all of the short men jokes and mocking of hairlines and weak chins and small dicks.
The core problem we now face with young people is that technological capability has significantly outpaced emotional adaptation. If you were 14 and felt ugly, there wasn’t much you could do about it but sit with the feeling. You could get really good at school or get really into sport or join an expressive subculture. Maybe you would one day go to the gym (as I did to address my insecurity over my shoulders) and get into skincare and grooming. Now, teenagers are instructed by their algorithms how they can “solve” the “problem” of their appearance, and at their fingertips have an array of strategies and tools they can use to try to achieve their desired look.
How many boys are actually picking up the hammer? Who knows. But in some ways it’s besides the point. The extremity of looksmaxxing is something of a mirror – it tells us of an anxiety of young boys that has long gone unheard and without language. It is therefore incumbent on all of us to speak to the young boys and men in their lives, about how they look and how they feel about themselves.
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Jason Okundaye is an assistant Opinion editor at the Guardian
