Part 2 of 9 in the Toxic Masculinity in 2026: A Field Guide series.

Men have discovered what women have known forever: looks matter, and you can optimize them.

The difference is vocabulary. Women have "contouring" and "highlights" and decades of normalized beauty discourse. Men have... mewing. Canthal tilt. Hunter eyes. A pseudoscience vocabulary that makes basic grooming sound like biohacking.

Welcome to the looksmaxxing glossary. A field guide for normies who keep seeing these terms and wondering if they're having a stroke.

The Core Terms

Looksmaxxing. The practice of maximizing your physical appearance through any means available. Diet, exercise, skincare, fashion, surgery—anything that makes you more attractive. It's self-improvement dressed in gamer language.

Softmaxxing. Looksmaxxing through reversible, non-surgical means. Skincare, haircuts, gym, fashion, grooming. This is just... taking care of yourself. But it needed a name.

Hardmaxxing. Looksmaxxing through permanent interventions—surgery, implants, permanent cosmetic procedures. Rhinoplasty, jaw implants, hair transplants. The serious stuff.

Mogging. Dominating someone else in terms of appearance. If you stand next to someone and look significantly better, you're mogging them. Used as both noun and verb. "He mogged everyone at the party." "That's a hard mog."

Being mogged. The inverse. Standing next to someone more attractive and suffering by comparison. Social gatherings as competitive events.

The Face Obsession

Mewing. The practice of pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth to allegedly reshape your jawline over time. Named after orthodontist John Mew, who promoted the idea that tongue posture affects facial development.

The science is questionable. John Mew and his son Mike Mew (both orthodontists) argue that modern soft diets and mouth breathing cause improper facial development. They claim that proper tongue posture—pressed against the roof of the mouth—can guide facial bones into more attractive positions. The adult version: maintain this posture constantly, and eventually your face will restructure.

The orthodontic establishment is skeptical. The British Orthodontic Society expelled John Mew. Most research suggests that bone remodeling in adults through tongue posture alone is minimal to nonexistent. Once facial development finishes, tongue position isn't moving your maxilla.

The practice is everywhere anyway. Men walking around with their tongues pressed to their palates, hoping to manifest sharper jaws. Forums full of progress pics that may or may not show anything beyond different lighting and camera angles. The belief persists because it costs nothing and offers hope—do this one thing, constantly, and maybe you'll be more attractive.

Canthal tilt. The angle of your eyes—specifically, whether the outer corner sits higher or lower than the inner corner. Positive canthal tilt (outer corner higher) is considered attractive, associated with hunter eyes. Negative canthal tilt (outer corner lower) is considered less attractive, associated with a "sad" or "prey" look.

This is a thing men now measure. With rulers.

Hunter eyes. Deep-set eyes with positive canthal tilt, hooded lids, and minimal upper eyelid exposure. The predator look. What male models have. What forums obsess over.

Prey eyes. The opposite—wide, round, prominent eyes with negative canthal tilt. More visible sclera. The "deer in headlights" look. Considered less masculine.

Hooded eyes. When the eyelid crease is partially hidden by the brow bone, giving a more intense, shadowed look. Desirable in the looksmaxxing taxonomy.

Facial Structure

Maxilla. The upper jaw bone. Looksmaxxing communities believe maxilla position determines facial attractiveness. A "forward-grown maxilla" is the holy grail. This is what mewing supposedly achieves.

Mandible. The lower jaw. Angular, defined mandibles are masculine. Weak chins are roasted mercilessly.

Gonial angle. The angle where your jaw meets your skull, behind the ear. A sharper gonial angle creates a more angular jawline. Yes, men measure this.

Facial thirds. Your face divided into three horizontal sections: forehead to brow, brow to nose base, nose base to chin. Ideally equal. Deviation is analyzed with the intensity of architectural blueprints.

Forward growth. The idea that ideal faces project forward rather than receding. Strong brow, defined midface, angular jaw. The opposite of a "flat face."

Body

Frame. Your skeletal structure—shoulder width, hip width, the ratio between them. Can't be changed without surgery. Either you have frame or you cope.

Frame mogging. When someone's skeletal structure is so superior to yours that you're dominated by their mere bone structure. Your gym gains mean nothing next to their clavicle length.

Cope. Anything you tell yourself to feel better about features you can't change. "Personality matters more" is cope. "She's probably not into tall guys anyway" is cope. The term drips with contempt.

Gymcel. Someone who goes to the gym obsessively but can't escape their fundamental unattractiveness. The gym is cope for their face or frame.

Status Terms

Giga Chad. The apex of male attractiveness. The guy who moggs everyone, has hunter eyes, perfect facial thirds, and frame for days. Sometimes used ironically. Sometimes not.

Chad. Attractive man. Can attract women effortlessly. The aspiration.

Normie. Average person unaware of looksmaxing discourse. Blissfully ignorant of canthal tilt.

Incel. Involuntary celibate. Someone who can't attract partners despite wanting to. The term has drifted from description to identity to political position.

Blackpill. The belief that looks determine romantic outcomes almost entirely, and that unattractive men are essentially doomed regardless of personality, status, or effort. Fatalistic, deterministic, grim.

What's Actually Happening Here

Men are doing what women have done for decades: obsessing over appearance, analyzing what makes faces attractive, trying to optimize.

The difference is women have had beauty discourse forever. Magazines, makeup tutorials, plastic surgery normalized. The vocabulary evolved over generations. Women learned to talk about contouring and highlights and skinny jeans versus boyfriend jeans. The optimization was cultural infrastructure.

Men are discovering this territory and building vocabulary from scratch—pulling from bodybuilding forums, incel communities, pick-up artist archives, evolutionary psychology papers. The vocabulary sounds different because it's being invented in real-time by communities that value scientific framing, even when the science is questionable.

The result is this strange hybrid: legitimate self-improvement (skincare, fitness, grooming) mixed with pseudoscience (mewing for jaw gains) mixed with fatalistic ideology (blackpill determinism). You can't always tell which you're looking at without context.

Some of it is just men learning to take care of themselves, finally. Discovering that skincare exists. That haircuts matter. That fashion is something you can learn rather than something you're born knowing or not knowing. That presentation affects how others perceive you. This is genuinely healthy—men catching up to what women have known and practiced for generations.

Some of it is men measuring their canthal tilt with calipers and deciding they're genetically doomed. Discovering body dysmorphia. Learning that you can always find a flaw if you look hard enough, that optimization has no natural endpoint, that comparison is infinite when you're measuring facial thirds with precision instruments.

The vocabulary tells you which camp someone's in. "I started a skincare routine" is healthy. "My gonial angle mogs yours" is concerning. "I'm working on my fitness" is normal self-improvement. "It's over for framecels" is blackpill fatalism dressed as observation.

The tragedy is that the communities blur together. The guy just learning to take care of himself enters forums where the blackpillers congregate. The vocabulary that could describe healthy optimization gets used to describe genetic determinism. The 20-year-old trying to dress better encounters men measuring skull ratios and concluding they're doomed. The pipeline from "maybe I should get a better haircut" to "my subhuman bone structure means it's over" exists, and it's shorter than it should be.

The Pipeline

Looksmaxxing exists on a spectrum:

Healthy end: Men learning that grooming matters, fitness matters, presentation matters. Taking care of themselves instead of assuming they shouldn't care about appearance. This is good.

Middle zone: Men getting obsessive about optimization. Tracking facial measurements. Believing mewing will restructure their skull. Evaluating every interaction through a looks hierarchy. This is concerning but not necessarily harmful.

Dark end: Blackpill ideology. Believing that looks determine everything, that they're genetically doomed, that self-improvement is cope. This leads to bitterness, resentment, and sometimes worse.

The vocabulary is shared across the spectrum, which is why normies find it confusing. A guy talking about "softmaxxing" might just be describing getting a better haircut. Or he might be deep in forums measuring skull ratios.

Context matters.

The Irony

Women have been told for decades that their obsession with appearance is shallow, damaging, driven by patriarchy. That makeup and fashion and beauty culture are oppressive. That spending hours analyzing how you look is vanity. That caring this much about attractiveness reveals moral failure.

Now men are doing the same thing—and somehow it's coded as masculine self-improvement rather than shallow vanity. Looksmaxxing is framed as optimization, biohacking, strategic enhancement. The same behaviors that would be criticized as vanity in women get reframed as agentic self-improvement in men.

Part of this is the vocabulary. "Looksmaxxing" sounds like something you'd do in a video game. Maximizing stats. Optimization language borrowed from tech and gaming cultures. It doesn't sound like vanity—it sounds like strategic thinking.

Part of this is gender. When women care about appearance, it's read as conformity to patriarchal beauty standards. When men care about appearance, it's read as taking agency. Same behavior, different frame.

The looksmaxxing community is men discovering body dysmorphia. Discovering that you can always find a flaw if you look hard enough. Discovering that optimization has no endpoint, that comparison is infinite, that "enough" doesn't exist when you're measuring canthal tilt.

Women learned this decades ago. The mirror becomes enemy. The optimization becomes obsession. The quest for "enough" never terminates because enough is relational—there's always someone more attractive, always a flaw you hadn't noticed, always another product or procedure that might help.

Welcome to what women have known forever. It's exhausting here. The constant monitoring. The awareness of how you're being perceived. The running tally of where you land in the attractiveness hierarchy. The sense that your face and body are projects to be optimized rather than just the way you move through the world.

Men are learning this now. In accelerated form, through communities that make the optimization explicit and measurable. What took women generations to absorb through magazines and media, men are encountering in forums that lay out the hierarchy with brutal precision.

The outcome is predictable: some will optimize healthily and feel better. Others will optimize endlessly and feel worse. The ones who find a sustainable relationship with self-presentation will be fine. The ones who start measuring their gonial angle are entering a maze with no exit.

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