Looksmaxxing Is Not About Looks

本站添加: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]the advantages of being a dude are only held by a certain amount of dudes, right? And if you're not one of those dudes, like then what? So, the deck is stacked against you. Men are judged based on their appearance. It used to be that obesity didn't really matter at your workplace. Now, it matters a lot.

[00:00:16]Now, we have these billionaires who are all ripped and injecting peptides.

[00:00:21]Billionaires are no longer fat slobs who eat like whatever all day. They're people who have nutritionists and personal trainers and stuff like this.

[00:00:29]So, I think this kind of represents how people feel about it.

[00:00:31]>> But your vanity, self-obsession, and insecurity certainly will.

[00:00:36]>> This is really what women are doing.

[00:00:37]They're clowning looks maxers, turning off their phone, covering their face with makeup, and then swiping left on 95% of dating profiles while calling you vain, calling you insecure. Women were the original looks maxers. What's more insecure than covering your face with a bunch of toxic chemicals every day and telling other people looks don't matter?

[00:00:55]Are we living in reality? Do we actually lack this much self-awareness? I don't know. This is this is crazy work.

[00:01:02]>> So like I think this is the sentiment that it's a really interesting sentiment because what we I think a big part of looks maxing is there is like equilibrium between men and women around appearance that's growing. But I think what what's happening is that people feel out of control. And so if I want you all to think about this for a second, okay? So if my job is being stolen by AI and there's inflation, there's uncertainty. I was planning I'm I'm in my first year of prochemical engineering, but I don't know what's going on. There's war in Iran. People are moving off of fossil fuels. You know, electric cars are growing. I don't know if the industry that I'm in, I'm a programmer, but now AI is taking my job, right? So, like the world is fundamentally out of control. And I think a lot of things that people we don't realize is, you know, you can make arguments for the patriarchy. Fair enough. But I think what's really scary is the patriarchy in some ways helps men. And this is not my area of expertise either. So, like this is just what I've observed as a clinician, right? So, there's some advantages to being a dude, but like a lot of like the advantages of being a dude are only held by a certain amount of dudes, right? And if you're not one of those dudes, like then what? Right? So, the deck is stacked against you. There's no way to get people to fall in love with you, right? Which I think is true, but we're going to try to educate y'all with the guide to love, sex, and relationships.

[00:02:16]That's why we built that thing because we want to teach y'all what actually works. But then, like, what do you do, right? How can you exercise control?

[00:02:23]There's only one domain that you have control over which is yourself. And so the more out of control we feel, this is something that we learned from a paper from 1979 about anorexia is there's a relationship between the more out of control you feel in the outside world, the more brutal you will be with yourself, right? And there's this weird perverse angle to this which like I want to go back to this idea of is like I don't know if this makes sense. There's a certain like if you're a dude, there's a certain like nobility to going out with a bang. I don't need to be a candle. I'mma be a [ __ ] firework. And if the price that I pay is the sacrifice of my own death, this is something that men, we have been, we are raised in a culture where sacrificing ourselves is to be lauded. Band of brothers, you pay the price, but you ain't weak, right?

[00:03:11]Like, does that kind of make like I don't know if women in the audience are going to get that. If you're a dude, hopefully that makes sense. I don't know how else to say say it. Like the size of our sacrifice increases the moral value of what we do. I'm going to go hard. I'm going to go extreme. I'm going to research. And the more effort that we put in, the more we sacrifice, the more more more more. We're getting over this insecurity. And there is evidence, for example, that if I am better looking, then my financial outcomes are better, my dating outcomes are better, my relationship outcomes are better.

[00:03:44]There's some evidence of that. When people learn this stuff, they're blown away by how little appearance matters. I want you all to understand this because it's kind of confusing. You can look at a study and you can say people who are more physically attractive make more money than people who are less physically attractive. That can be true, but that's not the right question to ask. The right question is which are the variables that contribute the most to financial success? And how does appearance rank against other things like showing up every day like EQ, right? So for example, what I observed when I was working a lot in banking and private equity and stuff, all these startups out of Harvard and MIT is like e a balance of EQ and IQ is what it takes to get to the top. EQ, IQ, perseverance, work ethic, high amount of conscientiousness, a fair amount of anxiety, by the way, because if you're not worried about stuff, you're just going to kind of chill, right? Right?

[00:04:34]So, when you have very very very low neuroticism, it's hard to get your ass up in the morning. People who are super chill are not super successful. It's not harder. There's just a different way to do it. Right? So, I think the problem with a lot of this research on okay, appearance does all of these things is that it it doesn't include the rest of the variables in the equation. So, as a simple example, we showed this this cool paper, you know, several like maybe about a year ago about the drive for muscularity. And the drive for muscularity is inversely correlated with length of a relationship. So what this basically means is that the more muscular more swole length of relationship. That's what it looks like.

[00:05:14]I'm sure it's not actually like that.

[00:05:15]I'm sure it's it's probably more like this actually. So a certain amount of drive for muscularity probably improves your relationship. And then after that and then if you average this out, right?

[00:05:24]So the overall trend of this line is still going to be like this. So it's still going to be an inverse relationship, but I don't think it's a straight line down. It's a random aside.

[00:05:32]So a big part of it is control. Next thing, so let's talk about objectification. So this is the other big thing that's happening right now. So objectification theory posits that girls and women are typically a culture to internalize an observer's perspective as a primary view of their physical selves.

[00:05:48]Okay? What this means is that the way that people see me is the way that I see myself. This perspective on self can lead to habitual body monitoring. Sound familiar? Which in turn can increase women's opportunities for shame and anxiety, reduce opportunities for peak motivational states and diminish awareness of internal bodily states.

[00:06:08]Okay, I want y'all to remember these things. They will become relevant later.

[00:06:13]So, what is self-objectification mean?

[00:06:15]Okay, so it's basically I have an opinion of who I am and when somebody else sees me, this determines their opinion of me. Let's say they think I'm attractive and then this becomes this.

[00:06:27]Does that make sense? So they see me, they form an opinion. That opinion is this opinion. So normally what we consider healthy is that I have an opinion of myself which is let's say this and then someone else sees me and they have an opinion of me and these two things can be different. And then I can even understand that they think of me in this way. But I'm able to hold a simultaneous opinion that is different.

[00:06:49]And I'm not trying to be alpha beta about this. I'm just using those as representations. Okay. And this is the interesting thing about objectification theory is like this came out of like feminist psychological research. This idea what people started noticing in the 70s and ' 80s is like okay we're like we have magazines, right? We have like lots of you know media about women and women were portrayed a certain way and then people were objectifying women and then women started objectifying themselves and they started determining their internal emotional state. internal emotions and peak motivation started being influenced by this. Okay, so let's take a closer look at the the paper and we'll see if we can map on. Right. The common thread running through all forms of sexual objectification is the experience of being treated as a body or collection of body farts valued predominantly for its use to or consumption by others. Did you guys see this? Job applications at JP Morgan are up 686,000% this morning. Okay, so for those of you that don't know, there was an alleged scandal, we don't know what's true or not, that there was a junior member at JP Morgan, a junior banker who was um basically repeatedly sexually assaulted by a woman who made all kinds of suggestive sexual remarks and uh there was a allegation, right? And this is like I I think this is a kind of it's funny. I was on my friends and we were actually laughing about it on Discord and I was like this is not funny, right?

[00:08:15]But we're we're sort of like it's it's so weird how much we've been programmed where it's like the things that this senior female banker did to this junior banker is something that men would love to happen to them. They think that until they're actually in that situation. It's just a psych. It's not doesn't feel good to be sexually predated. Even though men will joke about it, they don't understand. They have no frame of reference. Right? Thankfully, most of us don't have a frame of reference. We've never been sexually assaulted. But the idea of being forced to do all kinds of things to your relatively attractive female boss is something that men will joke about like applications are up 700,000%. Right? So this is this is what's so interesting I think and this is what's so hard and fascinating to me is that we live in a culture and this is not just true of men, right? Where like this is something that many men I've worked with long for, right? So, this paper is talking about how sexual objectification leads to self-objectification. But there are so many men I've worked with who would want nothing more than to be treated like a piece of meat that is desired by women.

[00:09:21]This is something I strive for. And it's not just men, right? There's lots of women who feel this way, too. I want to be the object of someone's lust. I don't care about them loving me as a person. I want to be that which is hungered and thirsted for. Now, the question is, why on earth do they feel that way? And this is where I'm going to go off the rails again. So, when we grow up, we develop templates of human interaction. And one of the most common templates that a lot of dudes develop is when they hit puberty and they get really horny, there is the object of their lust. And we can say that this is not good and it's dehumanizing and all this kind of stuff, which is true. We'll get to this in more detail when we get further into the self-objectification. But then in this template, there's the horny incel and then there's the sexually available person who gets their pick, right? I'm looking up at this thing. So the template that I have is that there's the high sexual marketplace value and the low sexual marketplace value. And so what happens with human beings is when they develop a template, they don't try to scrap the template. They're actually very resistant to scrap the template.

[00:10:22]What they try to do is elevate themselves to the high position. So this is why people kids who are abused at home become bullies because the template that they learn is there's a strong person, there's a weak person. The strong person hits, the weak person cries like a little [ __ ] and then when I go to school, which one do I want to be? They reclaim the power that they lose in this relationship by inflicting that pain on another person. This is how the cycle of trauma perpetuates. And when you have a lot of horny kids who aren't able to get dates and aren't able to get laid, they strive to be they objectify this person, right? And then they want to be objectified. I want women to surround me and want this body.

[00:11:04]Not necessarily who I am, but want this body. And then there's really fascinating science behind this. Okay.

[00:11:10]Diminish awareness of internal bodily states. This is another important element. Okay. We'll get to that in a second. So objectification theory posits that the cultural millu of objectification functions to socialize girls and women now men at some level treat themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated. Right? So does this apply to looks maxers? Do looks maxers treat themselves as objects to be looked at and evaluated? Women now looks maxers often adopt an observer's perspective on their physical selves. And then there's a certain sequence to this that we can get into if you all want. begins with compliance to minimally sufficient external pressures. So what does this mean? This means that the first stage so stage number one diminished internal signal. This is going to become important too. Okay. So this starts with external signals compliance with external pressures. So everyone wants me to be beautiful, right? So people want me to be beautiful and then I'm going to comply with that. I'm going to become beautiful. Then this leads to internalization and identification. So, this isn't like really rocket science, but basically people say I should look a certain way. I start looking that certain way and then I start to believe that I'm that way. Okay? And then what that ends up with is claiming ownership of socialized values and attitudes. So, we live in a world of dating apps where like this is another huge selection pressure. Why is this changing for men?

[00:12:33]Part of the reason it's changing for men is because men are objectified on a level now, right? That like women were objectified in in the 70s and 80s. Men are judged based on their appearance. It used to be that obesity didn't really matter at your workplace. Now it matters a lot. Now we have these billionaires who were all ripped and injecting peptides, right? Billionaires are no longer fat slobs who eat like whatever all day. They're people who have nutritionists and personal trainers or and have testosterone replacement therapy and stuff like this. Right? So the the male uber mench is a self-actualized individual who is sexy, attractive, the object of everybody's lust and rich and in control of their lives and then it gets incorporated into their true sense of self. Okay, this is where we end up. So now this goes back to this thing where like now the way that I think about myself is the way that other people treat me. So, I think this is just a cool capture this idea of the phrase of the looking glass self.

[00:13:30]So, this is a self that is determined by what I see in the mirror. Okay. Pointing out, however, that only one in 40,000 women actually meet the requirements of a model's shape and size argues that the fem the ideal female body myth is unrealistic and vers virtually impossible to attain. So, this is where looks maxing comes in, right? So, back in the 70s and 80s, the ideal image of a woman was not attainable. And now we see why some of this hard maxing stuff like bone smashing and mewing and stuff like that, right? Leg lengthening surgery, cosmetic surgery has accelerated. We have face contouring, we have makeup, we have all these things that are attainable. So back in the day, what happened is the psychological process for a woman who felt objectified was like, okay, we got to do that internal work because the external work isn't possible. There's nothing that you can do to become a supermodel. But in a world of cosmetic surgery, steroid use, testosterone like h boine growth hormone injections, leg lengthening surgery, we no longer have to do the psychological work because oh, there is a system. There's almost a protocol with steps that you can do, right? There are all of these things that you can do to attain this what used to be unattainable standard, right? We can [ __ ] inject IGF peptides, insulin derived growth or insulin like growth factor, not derived, insulin like IGF which boosts muscle growth. Then there's a couple of other things. So shame is a big emotion here, right? A desire to hide to escape painful gaze above others or to disappear alongside feelings of worthlessness or powerlessness. Right?

[00:15:08]So I want to I'm going to ask you all a question. What do you think is the emotion of the person who is experiencing this?

[00:15:17]Uh what >> right? So we see like anger but like right when someone looks like this and then this happens right and then they look like this like what do you think when you have a looks maxing influencer we don't know maybe he just was responding to the fact that he was assaulted and someone put hands on him.

[00:15:39]So here's what I would really like to happen. I want you all to finish listening to this lecture and then I want you all to go back and look at clips of these people and look at how important it is for them to appear a certain way. Make sense? So it's there's shame. Okay, there's a couple of other elements. Okay, so this is another thing that we find from self-objectification theory is that when you objectify yourself in this way, it is very motivating. Okay, how is it motivating?

[00:16:10]because now you're like working really hard. So now we get to the BPD element.

[00:16:13]Okay, so let's talk about BPD for a second. So borderline personality disorder is a personality disorder that is characterized by a chronic sense of emptiness and has an internal sense of self that is unstable. Okay, so the two things are chronic emptiness and a sense of self that is unstable. I don't know who I am. And what happens in BPD? Uh we have a our second most successful video on the channel on the YouTube channel is me explaining BPD. I love working with patients with BPD. A lot of people will avoid them because supposed to be difficult, but I have a lot of compassion. They're just amazing individuals who are just struggling because they don't know who they are. So then what happens with BPD is the way I feel about myself is determined by the way that people treat me. So being in a relationship with someone with BPD is very difficult because if I get angry at you and you've got BPD, my anger towards you is not me being angry. That becomes your sense of selfworth. So if someone is angry at me, me that means I am bad.

[00:17:15]So basically the problem in BPD is this step right here. This happens a lot where if someone thinks about me in a certain way then that's the way that I feel about myself. Okay? So then people with BPD have a challenge because the way they feel about themselves is determined by the way that people treat them. So then what happens is people with BPD become very manipulative subconsciously for the most part. But they do all kinds of things to manipulate other people's reaction to them. Don't ever get mad at me. Often times the women that I work with will almost like this is not really the right word but it's the best word. They will weaponize sex. they will discover. So, people with a history of BPD have high coorbidities of substance use, which we'll get to in a second. And they also tend to have a history of intense and unstable relationships, engage in a lot of high high-risisk sexual behavior.

[00:18:03]Okay? And one of the reasons that they engage in high-risisk sexual behavior is because when a woman has BPD and she engages in a sexual activity, it changes the way that people react to her. It changes the way that she's treated, right? So when some when I have sex with someone, it increases the likelihood that they will like treat me well and they will hold me and I'll feel good and we'll feel good together and it'll be amazing and it'll be like in the movies.

[00:18:24]So they become dependent on other people's evaluation to to determine their own selfworth, right? And I think what we see in a lot of looks maxers is a piece of that. This is when we take self-objectification and we kind of elevate it a little bit more. We sort of end up in this BPD kind of character structure. I'm not saying looks maxers all have BPD. I have no idea. There's a whole set of diagnostic criteria. What I'm saying is that there is a core element of BPD that I think predisposes people to look maxing. Because when I don't feel good about who I am, when I don't feel confident in who I am, when I don't know who I am, and I start to change all of my appearance because I feel out of control and stuff like that, and then then the most dangerous thing for a looks maxer is for the world to respond the way that they want because now I know how to evoke this response.

[00:19:19]Now I know how to get respect. Now I know how to feel desired. Now I know how to be the person that people lust after instead of the one who is doing the lusting and it feels amazing, right? So the more dependent you are on that kind of feedback from other people, the more addictive this is going to be. And then something cool happens for these people because if we look at the stuff that looks maxers do, there's really cool research on something called behavioral activation and depression. So when you have someone who's suffering from a major depressive episode, they don't feel like doing anything. But the more that you do, the better you start to feel. See, a lot of people think you cure the depression or treat the depression, then you feel like doing stuff and then you do more stuff. It's actually the other way around. You force yourself to do things and when you force yourself to do things, your mood actually elevates. You start to feel more in control of your life, which by the way is very attractive by the way.

[00:20:10]So, number one thing, not number one thing, but one of the top three things, this is in the guide, too, that people are attracted to, men and women, is a sense of direction in someone's life, being in control of your life. You don't want to be in a relationship with someone whose life is directionless in a dumpster fire. You want to be in a relationship with someone who knows where they're going, right? It doesn't have to be like a career. It can even be like you want to be a stay-at-home mom, stay at home dad, you're devoted to, you know, being a homesteader. Like, that works, too. This is the kind of stuff we cover in the guide. But going back to motivation, like it's so cool because if you're someone who's like life is falling apart and you don't know what job you have and you don't know what's happening to your degree and you you don't know if you can find a job, but you can start taking control and you start doing stuff, right? You start liking the way that you look in the mirror. You start hitting the gym. Your cortisol levels are better. These looks maxers will will uh say, "Hey, you got to get eight hours of sleep every night.

[00:20:57]You got to reduce your cortisol levels.

[00:20:59]Reduce your inflammatory burden. Start eating healthy." and you get motivated to do all of these good things. And when you start doing these things, you start to feel really motivated, too. This is the self-help part of it. This can feel really good. It can be really good and be really healthy. And so that stuff I think is fine, but then we also have the sense of diminished internal signals, right? And then we get to stories like this one, which is really sad. I just got home. That was brutal. All the substances are just to cope. Trying to feel neurotypical while being in public, right? But obviously this is that isn't a real solution. This is the sentence that really like I I felt for this guy trying to feel neurotypical in public, right? What does that mean to y'all?

[00:21:36]Like we don't know what it means to him exactly, right? We don't we haven't talked to him or anything like that. But like this is the thing. It's like this is an attempt to feel normal, right? And this is the scary thing is like people with BPD have a higher risk of of substance use. And this is exactly why because they don't like the way they feel on the inside. The way that they feel on the inside is determined by the way that people treat them. When we're talking about self-objectification theory, what we know about these people is that they have diminished internal signals. So the reason that this is the case is because this is blocked. Their ability to determine the way they feel about themselves is actually blocked.

[00:22:13]And this internal feeling, being blind to your internal state, is also a risk factor for addiction. It's one of the fundamental risk factors for addiction is when you don't know who you are on the inside. So, you can't self-regulate internally naturally or you haven't learned how to do it. There's a lot of negative emotions, shame, anxiety, judgment. You feel bad about yourself.

[00:22:33]And so, there are two things that people will do. They'll either change their appearance to change the way that people treat them or they will use drugs. But the fundamental thing, this is what's really kind of sad and I think this is the basic work that I try to do with people when I'm working with someone who has this kind of structure is, you know, if you're with body dysmorphia or anorexia or whatever, right? Like it's all about connecting with who you are within. Because once your sense of identity, once your sense of selfrespect is independent of the way that people treat you, then you're golden. You can receive the judgment of others acknowledging its real world impact which is like okay if I like don't look good then my chances of promotion are lower that is factually true but there are also many other things that I can do to increase my likelihood of promotion outside of my appearance if someone doesn't like the way that I look that is okay at the end of the day what is my interaction with this person for the rest of my life it's minimal people can think I'm ugly and it's like not that big of a deal I can go on and live my life I can eat food that I enjoy. I can lay out in the sun. I can go swimming in the ocean. I can read a good book. I can play a good video game. I can still enjoy working out and feeling healthy, right? Like all of those things are fine. I can wear SPF skincare to try to optimize my appearance some. Not against the optimization of your appearance.

[00:23:48]It's a fact that human beings like to look good. Human beings like to be desired. Nothing wrong with that. It's just that when we're not careful about these psychological substrates, that's when we get into trouble. So there's absolutely an element of of muscle dysmorphia, body dysmorphia in looks maxing. I think a lot of this stuff that is uh you know about like facial structure and stuff like that there is like there is science that shows that a certain facial structure is attractive but there's also like just because that's true doesn't mean that some people don't overindex for the importance of that. And that's what I think is going on. So I think there's an element of body dysmorphia. But the the tricky thing about looks maxing is that once again what we're kind of dealing with is not body dysmorphia, not borderline personality disorder, maybe some amount of self-objectification theory, some amount of pressure, like almost like an eating disorder kind of makeup of like feeling out of control and wanting to be control. I think this is what's kind of difficult and for me personally like exciting is that we're living in a world where like these labels don't you can't apply those to looks maxers. At least I don't think you can. And it's not even everyone in it is pathologic, right? This is where self-help meets self harm. And what is the pathology? It is a combination of all of these things. And so what what you know when I work with people like this, it's not like I've worked specifically with looks maxer influencers by the way, which is an important disclaimer, or looks maxers in general. I've worked with lots of people at body dysmorphia, lots of people who are incelss, you know, are very hyperconerned about their recessed chin and all kinds of stuff. But I think that's what's like so tricky about this.

[00:25:13]This is not like one thing. This is like a new thing. It's these fundamental aspects of psychology that we learn from like feminist psychology studies in the 70s and 80s that are now happening to men. We are doing to men what we did to women 40, 50 years ago, arguably longer.

[00:25:29]That's when there was an awareness of it. This idea of acceptance if you weren't a supermodel, that you don't have to have kids, that you don't have to have a job, that you as a woman have the right of self-determination and your value as a woman is not determined by how you look or what you do or whatever, right? that self-determination is a thing. And now this level of judgment we are seeing because of the rise of social media the the you know people are kind of getting hammered by all of these images and then this sense of being out of control it's turning into this soup that results in looks maxing Everything.