Can’t get a girlfriend? Smash your face with a hammer
Rather than accepting their biological destiny, young men are self-mutilating in pursuit of better looks
It used to be women who obsessed over their appearance. Men, for the most part, not only failed to notice the extreme diets, mad exercise regimes and cosmetic surgery that were presumably designed to catch their eye, but assumed that with a clean shirt and a blast of deodorant, they were good to go. But those days are long gone. Boys are not just upping their grooming game; some are adopting the same excessive techniques that were once the preserve of women.
Women pretend that diets and exercise are about health, not looks, and injections and procedures are therapy-adjacent ‘self-care’. Young men have no such qualms. ‘Looks-maxxing’ is the term a group of very online males use to describe the lengths they go to develop the ideal male physique. While some adherents stick with ‘softmaxxing’ - hair styling, skincare routines, exercise regimes and makeup touch-ups - others go to far more extreme lengths. ‘Hardmaxxing’ might involve Botox injections or facial surgery to achieve a chiselled jaw.
Looks-maxxing influencer ‘Clavicular’, a 19-year-old whose real name is Braden Peters, but is known as ‘Clav’ to his followers, goes further still. He shares TikTok videos demonstrating ‘bone smashing’, a practice as gruesome as it sounds, which involves punching or taking a hammer to the face to increase jawbone definition. Ouch.
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