It isn’t news that incels are incredibly fixated on appearances. The online subculture’s forums, made up of men who describe themselves as involuntarily celibate, are flooded with judgments on women’s looks and laments that none of the attractive ones will sleep with them. But they are also deeply, ruthlessly critical of their own bodies. And a lot of that has to do with, as one statistician tells Racked, a flawed understanding of math. A HuffPost piece published this week explored the concept of “looksmaxing,” a phrase also common on bodybuilding and pickup artist forums. Looksmaxing is exactly what it sounds like: maximizing your looks by using strategies that range from the banal (diet and exercise) to the truly dystopian (penis stretching, skull implants, wrist enlargements). Doing these things, incels think, will increase their ability to attract women, whom they characterize as “lookist,” along with society as a whole. Because the world is so shallow, they believe, any obstacle they have faced while finding a partner comes down to the genetic and social lottery that determines a person’s looks, money, and status. (Like lots of incel terminology, these three things have their own abbreviation: LMS.) In the manosphere — the many-tentacled online space made up of forums related to inceldom, pickup tactics, redpilling, men’s rights, and, often, bodybuilding — this is simply logical thinking; the only reason you don’t agree with them is because you’ve been brainwashed by society into naively believing that a person’s kindness or quick wit or goofy sense of humor matters in any real way. (They “prove” it by posing as an attractive guy on Tinder and seeing what they can get away with.) The belief is even embedded in the terms for subcategories of incels: heightcels (too short to get laid), baldcels (too bald), framecels (too small), gingercel (too redheaded), ethnicel (too ethnic-looking), skullcels (bad facial structure), and wristcel (wrists under 6.5 inches). |
