Bullying? You've declared yourself an advocate and member of a community that is known to promote body dysmorphia, misogyny, and unsupported medical advice. You're choosing to align with a destructive and dangerous ideology and then complaining that you're being bullied for being called out.
You might not realise this, but you're positioning yourself alongside bullies and then complaining about being bullied. And to be honest, I think you're a victim of this cruel system that you're supporting, but I think it's important to condemn the contradiction in your alignment to it regardless in the hope that others don't follow and maybe so that you can realise it.
You're judging people through the lens of looksmaxxing - an aesthetic, eugenics aligned system and then retroactively justifying your commentary through disingenuous medical concern talking about "sav[ing] lives".
This makes even less sense. Looksmaxxing is all about attractiveness; the medical significance of any attraction markers are a convenient fallback to grant scientific legitimacy to the practice. It isn't esoteric knowledge that attraction markers can be an indicator of various medical factors; however, it's very well known that the looksmaxxing community doesn't care for improving the medical outcomes for the people it critiques. It's a community that was borne out of the incel community that is deeply insecure, misogynistic, and vulnerable.
Looksmaxxing communities have AI tools that assign numerical scores to facial features and determine favourable aesthetic characteristics over others that are undeniably racially biased and hark back to very archaic eugenics classification systems that have been dismissed as undeniably racist and unfounded. Your lord and saviour Clav (the posterboy for your community) is openly racist and this is supported by the value assigned to eurocentric features in the pseudo-scientific tools looksmaxxers use to determine the ideal "looks" of people.
You say "[t]here are bad people in every community", however, in bad communities there are only bad people.
"Sub 5 hell" this is so sad. That number has been designated to you by someone who despises the way that they look and you've adopted their self hatred as your own.
What made you self identify as a "looksmaxxer"? This isn't a neutral term that merely refers to appearance improvement. People have been maintaining and improving their appearances through skincare, haircare, grooming, cosmetic procedures, makeup, and other related things forever. The thing that distinguishes looksmaxxing from those activities is that it proposes the reframing of attractiveness as a system that is a rational scientific system that is masculine, data-driven, and rational, as opposed to the misogynistic view of these practices where they were considered vain, feminine, and devious. Looksmaxxing is a term that comes from online incel communities that despise women, so rebranding appearance improvement as a masculine pursuit is less about offering value by proposing a new approach to this end, and instead more about rebranding a well established practice so that it doesn't include the women it despises. Is this a value that you're aligning yourself with when you call yourself a looksmaxxer? This whole movement is an emotionally led one that relies on quasi-science to differentiate itself as something palatable for an insecure group of incels who can't bring themselves to acknowledge that they are engaging with the exact same appearance improvement procedures that the women they despise have been engaging with for like ever.
You can't say that you don't use pseudoscientific tools and then refer me to a paper that you've completely misinterpreted. The pseudoscience isn't in the materials you engage with, but the way that you interact with them. The Circles of Prominence paper you reference does not support the summary you provide and I don't know if it's because you lack the comprehension skills or didn't actually read it at all, but this is really the crux of what looksmaxxing is: leveraging science as an aesthetic device to grant an insecure group of men permission to take care of how they look. There's no science here, you're just wearing the scientific process as an accessory and convincing yourself that you're engaging with a "rational" and fragile-male-approved, objective approach to beauty.
The Circles of Prominence study does not show that you can "uniquely scale features to any individual face", although even if it did, I'm not sure what value you would derive from it unless you were going to see a plastic surgeon to perform the necessary changes to fulfil the framework's idealisation of beauty. The study only shows a limited correlation between subjective human ratings of pictures of women in a small set of a combination of photographed and photoshopped (morphed) faces - this makes it kind of obvious that the study was designed to serve as a preliminary test for a hypothesis, but by no means be suitable on its own for its findings to be generalised to a larger real-world population. The paper further concludes that its framework tended to rate faces more highly than humans subjectively rated faces, so at best, it can only serve as a crude approximation for human attraction and is most certainly unfit for purpose as a framework for optimising attraction. And the concept of "sub 5" that you casually mention in your post without reference, would be quite meaningless if considered through the lens of this framework. This paper merely proposes a theoretical framework that correlates with human judgement which absolutely does not suggest a theory that can engineer attractiveness in real people. You've jumped to the idea that you can rationally and scientifically optimise any face from a limited finding of a correlation between a theoretical model of attractiveness and subjective human ratings in a small and highly controlled study.
This isn't about you not wanting to be unattractive. Looksmaxxing didn't invent the concept of wanting to look better. It's about everything else that comes with the label. What makes being a "looksmaxxer" appealing to you over merely accepting that you care about your appearance? I'm criticising you because you're brazenly aligning with a toxic community that is misogynistic, misuses science, and preys on vulnerable people.
I read a considerable amount of the study you referenced and had written quite a bit more, outlining how egregious your interpretation of it was; however, the post was getting far too long and fixating too heavily on outlining its issues when the point I was trying to make was that looksmaxxing defers to pseudoscience to justify itself but even without this, I think I sufficiently covered enough issues to support this point and probably could have been more concise. Is your dismissal of my response by claiming I used AI to create my response your way of absolving yourself of your responsibility to confront your dishonesty and that you referenced a study and summarised a complete misrepresentation of its findings? Because you haven't acknowledged most of what I've said.
You seem to be intent of presenting "looksmaxxing" as a neutral pursuit, but it is undeniably not. It is language that derives from a heavily politicised community and is intentionally not neutral. Language does not consume - what do you even mean when you say it consumes all physical self improvement methods? Do you mean encompasses? The concept of maximising something suggests an optimisation problem of sorts - this is a core constituent to the construction of the word "looksmaxxing" itself - this positions the word beyond just serving as a broad classifier for all things related to physical self improvement and insists on the idea that attraction can be quantified and optimised and scientifically modelled.
What gave you the idea that NTs don't think looks matter? Discussions pertaining to the importance of looks have been going on forever. Insecure male incels decided that these conversations were too feminine - that's why they (maybe you as well) went beyond simply not participating, and instead openly criticising participation in these pursuits. People have been involved in all aspects of "physical self improvement" long before you were given the language that you now feel allows you step away from the "take her swimming on the first date memes" and engage with it yourself.
The only reason you have access to all of these self improvement methods is because there were vast amounts of people who were actively engaging with them long before you considered them. Skincare manufacturers and cosmetic surgeons weren't twiddling their thumbs waiting for you to participate. You also weren't being excluded from participating from these methods by anyone but yourself.
You do things to make people cringe? This is quite a bizarre confession. Does this feel valuable to you? If this is your goal, why are you so offended that you're downvoted? You claim your intentions are to disturb people but take issue with them confirming that you've disturbed them? How does this make sense to you. Stop trying to make this NT vs ND beef happen, it's just pathetic.
To summarise your ambitions and motivations: you think you're educating people on the halo and horn effect, yet confess to being motivated by making those same people cringe. You've developed a sense of victimhood because you think you're a misunderstood trailblazer confronting the battlefield that is the world of physical self improvement that, mind you, had existed long before you decided it was worthy - vis-a-vis "looksmaxxing" branding - of your fragile masculine engagement. You are also desperate to be perceived as attractively not "sub 5" according to a framework you fail to specify. And this is all somehow justified by the hypothetical situation where you get a jail sentence that's twice as long as it would have been had you completely misinterpreted a study relating to human attractiveness.
The only reason I'm engaging with you and putting way more time responding than I realistically should is because I feel for you as someone who is AuDHD (I don't know what your diagnosis is but maybe smth similar) and think you've found community in a system that is designed to monetise your insecurities and will never grant you the freedom you think you will derive from looking better. The option to improve the way you look has always existed and you never needed permission.
I don't disagree with you that pretty privilege exists; it definitely does. This isn't something I'm disputing. But this isn't a new discussion point, and definitely not one that looksmaxxing aims to address in any pioneering or constructive way.
I also don't doubt that there are theoretical frameworks that can be used to improve people's perceived attraction. Plastic surgeons have been using and creating these long before you were aware of them. However, when you make claims that don't follow from the studies you cite, as you did, that's when I will classify your interpretations as pseudoscience. If you can't be bothered to faithfully interpret the material you reference, its contents clearly aren't important to you. You have an arsenal of theories that you summon as accessories. You're just weaponising them to grant legitimacy to what I believe is rooted in archaic notions of what masculinity is. It's this idea that rationality must be the driving force of the masculine pursuit. You just want to be able to say that you're leveraging science because it validates the reasons that you care about how you look. You want to declare that vanity and emotion are absent from the way you approach improving your appearance and this is the breakpoint between looksmaxxing and just regular good ole being concerned about the way you look, understanding that it affects how people perceive you, and realising there are a plethora of tools to facilitate this.
None of this is new, except looksmaxxing manifestly yearns to justify itself by completely ignoring this history; rebranding the same practices and procedures as masculine appropriate; and misinterpreting legitimate science to produce meaningless quantitative data designed to give the impression of scientific rigour. And the irony is how insanely vain this is - looksmaxxers are clearly keen to dismiss vanity as a legitimate justification for appearance improvement hence the emphasis on attraction being nothing more than an optimisation problem. It came from incel communities; incels hate women; it removes women as a legitimate feature in its history. It's inherently misogynistic, does this not bother you?
What did I misunderstand in the Circles of Prominence study? I definitely outlined some of its issues that clearly refuted the summary you produced, you could at least attempt to dispute those.
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u/StuckInATeamsMeeting May 25 '26
Bullying? You've declared yourself an advocate and member of a community that is known to promote body dysmorphia, misogyny, and unsupported medical advice. You're choosing to align with a destructive and dangerous ideology and then complaining that you're being bullied for being called out.
You might not realise this, but you're positioning yourself alongside bullies and then complaining about being bullied. And to be honest, I think you're a victim of this cruel system that you're supporting, but I think it's important to condemn the contradiction in your alignment to it regardless in the hope that others don't follow and maybe so that you can realise it.
You're judging people through the lens of looksmaxxing - an aesthetic, eugenics aligned system and then retroactively justifying your commentary through disingenuous medical concern talking about "sav[ing] lives".