When I returned to gym work a few months ago after an extended hiatus dating from the pandemic era that saw me get creative in doing all such exercise outdoors, I noticed something I hadn’t seen before in Gym Culture, Male Locker Room Division. On pretty much every visit since my return, I observe young men from perhaps 16-25 or so stroll up to the nearest mirror, roll up their sleeves or take off their shirt, and proceed to flex their muscles and preen for several minutes at a time, striking various poses while slowly completing a few 360-degree pirouettes.
Sometimes they’re solo, sometimes in pairs and even trios, observing each other with just enough sobriety to know there’s no light-hearted satire going on here. Nothing furtive, self-conscious or ironic about it either.
These guys are the ancient myth of Narcissus personified, staring in adoration at their own reflected images. Mercifully, they are spared—so far, at least—his fate of being cursed by the gods to waste away and eventually become a flower.
Whether we’re admiring a sunset, a giraffe, a dinner entree, a movie star or the angles, alcoves, steps and shadows of a favorite building, we yearn for and respond to beauty wherever we can find it.
I should state that this behavior would have been unthinkable for anyone in my now long life of regular gym visits. Sure, in younger days there was the occasional comic flexing of or at one’s cronies, pretending to be the second coming of Arnold Schwarzenegger after a big grunt of a bench press. But that lasted about a half-second before everyone broke out in laughter at its well-honed absurdity.
That’s because preening in front of a mirror in a public setting is simply not something one of good taste and basic civility does.
At least in ye olden days. Does that make me sound like an old guy?
Very well; I am an old guy.
Still: Little did we know back then just how much more extreme modern versions of Narcissus could become.
Today, merely flexing in front of a mirror is child’s play compared to other measures an apparently growing cohort of young men are carrying on with in a misbegotten, dangerous effort to build a sense of self-worth they don’t yet know is not a product of the mug or the biceps they present to the world.
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Two new words bubbled up from the mediasphere and came to my attention in recent weeks: “looksmaxxing” and “bonesmashing.” Neither are listed in my Oxford online dictionary and both are flagged by this blog’s WordPress platform spellcheck, though I’m betting that will rectified very soon.
Both words are bound up with a third word that has earned a place in the dictionary but with which I had only a passing acquaintance: “incel.”
Oxford defines it this way:
“a member of an online community of young men who consider themselves unable to attract women sexually, typically associated with views that are hostile toward women and men who are sexually active.”
The connection is that “incels,” a term originating on TikTok about a decade ago, appear to be among the chief practitioners of “looksmaxxing,” which Oxford does not recognize as a word (yet) but Merriam-Webster does, defining it as:
“practices, especially among young men online, to enhance their physical appearance. These practices range in intensity, from everyday skincare to cosmetic surgery.”
What Merriam-Webster’s lexicographers neglect to mention is that increasing numbers of young men are also engaging in do-it-yourself procedures, with their chief tool being a hammer.
They usually wield that hammer or another blunt tool—a nice flattened stone from a riverbed would do, I suppose— in front of a mirror to literally smash their chins, jawlines, cheekbones, eye sockets, noses, you name it, into submission. Their intention is to both directly reshape key features of their face and to stimulate a healing response that will ultimately, at least in their judgment, provide them with a stronger, more attractive facial structure to present to the world.
If you search for the terms on YouTube, you will likely grow weary of scrolling, with literally hundreds of how-to videos, interviews and discussions ranging from the 70 seconds you can hear about just below to two-and-a-half hour panel discussions. Sample titles: “How To Fix Your Asymmetrical Face,” “Nose Solutions (Every REAL Method),” “How to Actually Get Hunter Eyes” (Full Guide),” and “Ugliest Facial Features (Tier List).”
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This all struck me initially as a shocking and sad variation on various self-harm practices that emotionally dysfunctional young people can engage in as both a wail to the heavens and a cry for human contact.
But of course, there’s more to it than that.
There’s always more to it than that.
It is complicated by the fact that a certain amount of “lookism” has always been part of human personal and cultural practice, reaching as it does to the very foundations of aesthetics and raw animal attraction. “Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know,” wrote the poet John Keats, making a kind of rapturous philosophical case for all things pleasing to the senses.
Whether we’re admiring a sunset, a giraffe, a dinner entree, a movie star or the angles, alcoves, steps and shadows of a favorite building, we yearn for and respond to beauty wherever we can find it. The quest for beauty is likely secondary only to our basic survival instincts, and a distinguishing feature in the hard-wiring that makes human beings the distinctive species we are.
The question is thus: At what cost in our time, treasure and attention do we pursue beauty, especially in attempts to make ourselves beautiful to others rather than simply appreciating the beauty of the external world?
This is where the siren call of Narcissus clashes with the modesty and self-effacement that have been considered basic good manners throughout most cultures in history. The myth of Narcissus is, after all, more than 2,000 years old, so the peril of people staring too long at our own reflection is not a new dynamic in human psychology.
We should remember, however, that Narcissus originally stood spellbound by the pond where he beheld his reflected face because he thought it was someone else, some beautiful water spirit, whom he simply couldn’t take his eyes off of. The roots of bonesmashing are no doubt bound up with similar admiration of others, with whom the bonesmasher compares himself unfavorably. (“STOP COMPARING!”—always easier said than done.)
This is all the more insidious when opportunities for comparisons are as maximized as they are in today’s utterly saturated social media culture.
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So how is it that attempts to make ourselves more attractive or at least passably presentable in our social milieu can break through our natural armor of aversion to harm, and instead embrace practices rife with pain, discomfort and the strong possibility of lasting damage to the only body we’ll ever have?
This is the question that a long suppressed feminism reared up on its hind legs and roared about in recent centuries, decrying the footbinding, the corseting, the lead- and arsenic-based skin creams, the impossibly high and thin heels, the fat-shaming, and perhaps most grievously, the anorexia that so distorts self-image and too often ends the lives of young girls.
Today, the question applies to what would by definition seem to be troubled boys, however much looksmaxxing practitioners try to pass off their body disfiguring efforts as simply another in the vast sprawl of self-improvement techniques available to humankind.
And yet…
Those practitioners might answer the question with another question that is not entirely nonsensical: How is bonesmashing different in a person’s willingness to endure pain and discomfort than is the plethora of plastic surgeries that are a major industry in much of the developed world? Or, for that matter, the exercise regimens that require gasping for our very breath, profuse sweating and muscle fatigue, all of which are signaling us to please stop, but which we push through anyway in pursuit of a goal that we hope will make us feel and look better in the future?
Admittedly, the plastic surgery argument holds plentiful weight, but with one huge difference: Such procedures are done in clinical settings, with trained professionals applying exacting standards of care (most of the time). Which is a far cry from teenagers showing fellow teens various face hammering techniques via YouTube.
The exercise argument is much more easily refuted, since various fitness regimens have clearly been shown to improve both physical and mental health, making its investment-dividend axis tilt very favorably toward the participant. Taking to one’s face with a hammer is self-evidently not conducive to physical health, and any emotional benefit of enhanced self-esteem is speculative at best at this point, and likely a chimera quick to fade if it truly exists at all.
Besides which, the very specter of young men assaulting themselves with hammers would no doubt send Keats and most all other sensitive souls fleeing rather than feeling inspired to write a poem celebrating whatever beauty bonesmashers think might come from their efforts.
And it requires no deep Internet dive to grasp that doctors and mental health professionals are even less enthusiastic, with but a partial list of risks daunting unto itself:
• Fractures and breaks
• Nerve damage
• Vision losss/eyeinjury
• Dental damage
• Infection/internal bleeding
• Brain injury
All of which led one doctor to tell GQ magazine last month: “Of course, it’s a stupid idea. The list of risky points is enormous.”
And still, they persist—partly victimized by social media stalwarts who reap abundant riches via advertisers on TikTok, YouTube and other social media outposts, and partly by the age-old lure of what we might consider the original social media of deeply embedded culture and its interaction with individual psychology.
Neither should we discount (ever!) the basic derring-do stupidity of hormone-fueled young men, forever testing the limits of culture, their parents’ patience, and their body’s and brain’s capacity to absorb harm in risky behavior that would set off alarm bells in every other sentient creature of the animal kingdom.
Assuming basic good intentions, luck, and the passage of time, the twin towers of culture and personal psychology will one day influence, we can only hope, today’s looksmaxxers to look beyond the mirrors and reflecting pools of their lives. There, they might come to see a larger vision that compels them to drop their hammers in favor of holding their own humanity—and all of humankind—much closer at hand.
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A brief reflection on looksmaxxing from a psychologist: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/perfect-me/202602/looksmaxxing-and-the-pressure-to-be-perfect
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Library books on homepage and stairs/rails/shadows above by Larry Rose, Redlands, California, all rights reserved, contact: larry@rosefoto.com
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Hammer by Wisnu Amaludin https://unsplash.com/@ciwis
A few months ago, I endured a Mohs procedure to remove a basal cell carcinoma over my right eye. Last month a friend said, “Wow, I hardly see a scar. Who’s your dermatologist?”
“He’s good, but I think how little my scar shows has more to do with nature’s own makeup?”
“I’ve never heard of that brand. Where did you buy it?”
“No where. It’s free. It’s called wrinkles.”
That’s where I’m at now. However, I do appreciate dim lighting and cloudy mirrors.
One of the most beautiful things I have come across was an exquisite piece of embroidered satin cloth. My dog found it in a box in my mom’s garage. He had chewed off the corner and destroyed it. My mom had asked me before to not bring the dog over because she was allergic to dog hair and when I left him in the garage once before he pooped on a pile of clothes. So I took this ruined piece of art and never told her about it. About a year later she was upset that she couldn’t find it. When she described how much she loved it, that my father had brought it over from the Orient (I don’t know what country since he was in many countries in the Pacific Theater), I was saddened and ashamed. She said it was a mirror cover that the Chinese used to discourage vanity.
Yeah, Robert, “lookin’ good” is one of those terms whose criteria changes radically with the years. Past a certain age, it’s, “Upright? Walking? Not drooling? LOOKIN’ GOOD, pal!”
Kirk, that is a big wow of an anecdote, both for its lovely evocation of the infinite variety of beautiful things we hold dear in this life, and also for how on-point it is with the subject at hand. In the west, we often fall into the trap of thinking philosophy began with the Greeks, but Asia and other points east, west, north & south have been thinking serious thoughts for a long time as well. Thanks for this!
When I first heard about the behavior you mentioned above, I thought it was an Andy Borowitz satire. I mean, who doesn’t believe that smacking oneself with a hammer will create a better looking guy? In our day, “getting hammered” meant something completely different, and usually did not cause long term harm. It is an extreme example of the lack of a prefrontal cortex in adolescent males, where boundaries of safety, social mores, good taste, and otherwise human traits, are thoughtlessly thrown to the side.
My own nickname was spawned of such outlandish behavior.
These guys are taking it to a new level, and in a really stupid way. I guess, these days, impressing a girl means more than asking her to the prom, playing a sport, or being a nice person. Apparently it is pretty hard being a young man these days.
Yes, it likely makes for rich satire possibilities, Moon; could see it as a skit on SNL with some of those guys trying to wriggle their way into a school lunch group chat with girls, hammers close at hand, the girls freaking out until they realize the hammers aren’t meant for them. Whereupon they ask if they can help the boys by taking a few whacks…
And on the other end, yep, we do hear from sociologists and mental health pros that boys are floundering in general. But no, hating on girls and then taking to hammering their jawlines doesn’t seem to be very wise adaptive behavior. Let’s hope the whole scene fades quickly…
As someone in their 40’s at the gym daily, seeing the teens flex in the mirror I cheer them on and celebrate their hard work, with a kind compliment because I know how hard it is to stay on that routine! Only 20 percent of American men go to the gym regularly which is mind blowing, I guess Ozempic has taken its place for now. It’s terrifying in only my opinion, what a combination of the internet influencers and Hollywood celebrities are putting out into this world as normal these days. It’s so hard to tell young kids hard work works, without being asked what supplements do you take? Showing up everyday is all it takes. (for 30 years). I’d be a millionaire if I could somehow sell that in an informercial!!
True, Bryson…I’ve been a Gym Rat since my teeens, and am still pushing the iron at almost 75 years old. So, only 20%…I would have thought more. For many it is tough to maintain the discipline it takes to grind it out week by week. Pays off, though!
Moon, you and Andy are motivating, pumping iron in your 70’s!!!!!! That’s more inspiring to younger men and women to watch than you will ever realize!!!! And to keep you going you’ve got to know that the NIH sports science divisions research is now showing with physical evidence that men in their 70’s with a combination of resistance training and proper nutrition can still GAIN muscle mass! So keep going!!!!!
Give me 25 extra pushups LOL.
Good point, Bryson, about not being too hard on the muscle-flexers, though I do think self-celebration can be a slippery slope leading to self-adulation and an obsession with appearance to an unhealthy degree. As always, a spirit of levity can help minimize self-absorption, especially when it is accompanied by genuine curiosity and regard for other people, outside the confines of one’s own skin. In sum: Celebration, yes, obsession, not so much!