\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span> felt something akin to devastation reading that the actor Barry Keoghan sometimes \u201cdoesn\u2019t want to go outside<\/a>\u201d because of the scale of online abuse about his appearance. It\u2019s 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 \u2013 what parts of his face he\u2019s likely now had to obsess over and scrutinise.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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, \u201cWere you in a fire?\u201d 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/a> in the New York Times that I often return to in which she reflects on her adolescent obsession with becoming beautiful: \u201cI 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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 \u201clooksmaxxing\u201d<\/a>. Marketed to young boys through influencers such as Clavicular<\/a> \u2013 it is the reframing of physical \u201cself improvement\u201d as a mathematical problem to be solved with tools: measurements, ratios, syringes, hammers to damage bones<\/a>.<\/p>\n 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\u2019s 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 \u201cascension\u201d. What is the destination? It\u2019s 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 \u201cframe-mog\u201d you, where men battle against other men in the areas of muscularity and facial symmetry.<\/p>\n