We dive into an online community hellbent on improving their physical appearance through bizarre techniques like pressing their tongue to the roof of their mouth, hitting themselves in the face, and taking experimental growth hormones. Originating in Pick Up Artist (PUA) and incel forums, "looksmaxxing" has since become a proper tiktok trend.
Thanks for being a patreon subscriber!
Subscribe for $5 a month to get the full episode. You'll also get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA
Liv Agar: https://linktr.ee/livagar
http://qaapodcast.com
QAA was formerly known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.
Welcome to the QAA Podcast Premium Episode 243, Looks Maxing.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rakitansky, Liv Aker, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Today I have another Zoomer Online Brain Rod episode for y'all.
I know Julian especially is very fond of these.
He's very happy doing the recordings.
Yeah, Liv goes through cycles.
She goes into chrysalis stage, in which she's in a tent on the Columbia campus, and then she emerges and just says one word, and it's usually something like, looks maximum.
And I go, no, that doesn't, come on, that doesn't exist.
She made it up this time.
She never makes it up.
Every time, it's like, no, a billion people say this every day.
That's because a billion tents opened at the same moment and everyone emerged saying the same word.
You're saying this is a Hezbollah conspiracy.
Yeah.
Lux Maxing.
Yeah, I think Iran is paying Americans to Lux Max.
It's very possible.
They know it'll be the fall of our civilization.
Hey, it is on TikTok.
You know who owns that?
The Chinese government.
It's not a secret at this point that a large portion of internet meme culture has its origins in less than savory parts of the internet.
Many of these memes have gone on to be absorbed into the general public's consciousness, well, the younger part of it anyways, as innocent and funny jokes they send to their friends on Instagram or TikTok.
This phenomenon goes back to even the early aughts, when impact font lolcat memes were popularized by 4chan, and probably further.
But it appears that this process is never ending.
As we live in a hellish Nietzschean eternal recurrence where pickup artist sites and incel forums end up somehow continuing to be on the cutting edge of the various inside joke references that the youth use to talk to each other online.
On this episode, I'll be delving into the phenomena of looksmaxing.
A term that seems to have been popularized on various incel-adjacent websites from 2015 onward, that comes with its own ideological standpoint on the nature of beauty, relationships, self-improvement, behavioral psychology, phrenology, and many more, that has since evolved into a shockingly ubiquitous set of phrases embraced by young TikTok zoomers.
Yeah, I guess like doing too much of anything is maxing?
Or like focusing on something is maxing?
Yeah, like if you abandon everything to be funny, to gain women, you're jester maxing.
Like if you spend a bunch of time like, oh, these are a bunch of funny lines, I'll repeat.
Yeah, this was like when I was in junior high and like not very athletic, you know, kind of chubby, like couldn't afford good Stussy stuff.
And I put all of my skill points into Dave Matthews guitar songs.
There you go, you're music maxing.
Yeah, I was Dave maxing.
You were Matthew maxing.
I would like to bombs max this country.
Well, you're gonna have to sacrifice some attributes from other areas.
You're terror maxing.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
As an anecdote about Lux Maxxing's popularity with youngins, I can tell you that my sibling who was in high school was supervising some grade 8s during lunch period, and they were supposedly absolutely obsessed with Lux Maxxing memes.
It really does seem to be the main way they were communicating with each other.
And while the viral manifestations of Lux Maxxing are certainly less insane and harmful than its protozoic manifestation on obscure incel forums, they still carry much of the, to use a zoomer term, brain rot of the original.
It's good though.
It's like Zoomers, they look out over the desolate landscape.
The poisoned, horrible, desolate landscape.
And they're like, we have to eat something.
And so they're farming on it.
They're growing things.
They're growing crops on the rotten land.
And we're all receiving culture.
It's nice.
It's like in Chernobyl, where plants have developed that absorb radiation as energy.
That's kind of the Zoomer brain.
Yes, yes, I see it more as like the the zoomers have democratized Body dysmorphia, you know, this is something the neuroses are spread amongst the all all the people, you know Exactly now.
It's not just like weird obscurian cell subforms now.
It's everyone.
Mm-hmm Looksmaxing developed out of what's called the PSL community, which was born from three in-sale adjacent websites, puahate.com, sluthate.com, and then lookism.net.
Jesus Christ.
Goddamn.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, it's the change from the first to the second as well, just on its surface.
Yeah, that's like when you had a sentence earlier where phrenology just came up in the middle of other normal words.
It's a very common theme, I think, in the looksmaxing community.
Each website on this acronym gained popularity among vaguely the same community following the previous site being taken down for various reasons.
While the specific details of which ideas developed on which of them is essentially hearsay, as they all don't exist anymore and were fairly poorly archived, it's nevertheless possible to achieve a general overview of how looksmaxing developed here.
And some of this should be taken with a grain of salt, because a lot of my research comes, again, from stories by people who were insane enough to browse these forums in their heyday.
The first site, PUA Hate, sounds completely reasonable on its surface, given that PUA stands for Pickup Artistry.
This website was founded in 2009, and initially was focused on exposing the many pickup artist influencers running grifts and multi-level marketing schemes to scam people.
Given that much of the forum was filled with disgruntled pickup artists, they continued to hold many of the same misogynistic beliefs they had beforehand, only now coming to the conclusion that grifting pickup gurus were wrong when they continually asserted that any man who was good enough at following their method could have sex with women.
Oh, this is good.
This is like when Jordan Sather started debunking other QAnon people.
Exactly, exactly.
Many on the forum therefore came to the conclusion that game, or the ability to hit on women successfully, wasn't actually all that important of a determining factor for how much pussy a man could get.
One sub-forum on the site, which would eventually essentially take over the whole website, called Shitty Advice, was dedicated to giving other forum members tips on how to pick up women.
Members of the Shitty Advice subform would come to generally follow the LMS theory, which was created by a member of the board, or the belief that looks, money, and status are the only components of attracting women, denying that any amount of pickup artistry, or game, or confidence in general can compensate if one does not have one of these three things.
Wow, so they basically came to the cultural conclusions that men were coming to when we all wore hats outdoors.
Was this a moment in culture?
The hat moment?
Yeah, 40s, 50s, you know?
Given that it's pretty hard to give people advice on how to gain money or status over a forum thread, the board subsequently became focused on critiquing each other's looks.
Form users became obsessed with tentative studies that attempted to empirically quantify facial beauty, which emphasized things like one's mid-face ratio, or the distance between the eyes and the lips, or one's facial width-to-height ratio, as essential components of beauty.
Okay, so we're doing the Bethesda slider.
Yes, exactly.
That's cool.
This weird obsession with quantifying facial beauty is something that will stay with looksmaxing into its virality.
If you're a woman on the internet who posts themselves and you see weirdos talking about your canthal tilt or midface, it's basically because of these guys.
Midface!
God damn that's cursed.
Forum users rated each other using this rigid and unforgiving definition of physical beauty,
often emphasizing parts of the face, like the mid-face ratio, that cannot be altered
particularly well even by cosmetic surgeries.
It's just the distance between your mouth and your eyes.
Like you can't really surgery that.
I mean...
That's insane.
Like it's...
I...
Ugh.
I...uh...
Thus the site became a low self-esteem factory with users being told that their canthal tilt is off and therefore they aren't getting women because they are ontologically hideous and they should just rope max or maybe take a vow of celibacy.
That's a word.
Rope maxing is a phrase.
Yes.
No, no, no, no, no, no.
No, this is what happens.
It's like the TikTok thing where it's like you start saying pew pew for guns and like before you know it, rope max is a thing, you know?
You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA Podcast.
For access to the full episode, as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA.
Travis, why is that such a good deal?
Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA Podcast for just $5 per month.
For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes, plus all of our miniseries.
That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian and Annie, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of The Spectral Voyager with Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of Trickle Down with me, Travis View.
It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting.
Travis, for once, I agree with you.
And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA.
