'Looksmaxxing': The Red Pill Mewing-to-Misogyny Pipeline
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Scrolling through TikTok, it does not take long before ‘looksmaxxing’ emerges: videos promising sharper jawlines, improved posture and higher “sexual market value” through practices such as mewing, strict gym routines and relentless aesthetic self-discipline. Framed by the language of optimisation and efficiency, this content presents itself as neutral and apolitical: maximise your face, increase your worth. What this framing conceals, however, is how often such advice functions as an entry point rather than an endpoint, feeding into a wider pipeline that converts personal insecurity into resentment towards women, equality and social change.
For the generation of young men raised within an economy of constant visual comparison, where worth is assessed instantly and publicly, ‘looksmaxxing’ offers a deceptively coherent explanation for alienation. Romantic or social failure is relocated from structural or economic conditions to biology; if you are struggling, the problem lies in your face, and therefore appears fixable. In stripping dissatisfaction of its social context, insecurity is transformed into an individual flaw to be managed through discipline and optimisation.
This political framing is far from neutral. By individualising failure, it deflects attention away from material realities such as rising living costs, precarious work and shrinking opportunities. Instead of encouraging questions about why the future feels increasingly unstable, ‘looksmaxxing’ directs men towards endless self-scrutiny. Responsibility becomes personal, dissatisfaction private, and improvement a moral obligation — a logic that closely mirrors broader neoliberal ideas about selfhood and success.
As participation in these online spaces deepens, the emphasis on self-improvement gives way to more rigid forms of hierarchy. At this stage of the pipeline, appearance is no longer a project but a ranking system. Using pseudo-scientific language, men are ordered according to appearance in ways that present inequality as natural and inevitable. Some are framed as genetically superior, others as permanently excluded. Repackaged through the aesthetics of self-help, this biological determinism echoes older reactionary ideas about hierarchy, reframing inequality not as something to challenge, but as something to endure — or resent.
Once dating is imagined as a competitive market governed by scarcity, misogyny follows with unsettling ease. Women are positioned as gatekeepers controlling access to value, while rejection is reframed as injustice rather than incompatibility. Feminism becomes a convenient antagonist, cast as a force that has disrupted a supposedly “natural” order by granting women too much autonomy. What begins as aesthetic advice hardens into a political story about lost male entitlement.
Thriving within this ecosystem, Red Pill ideology offers a coherent — if deeply flawed — account of social change. Gender equality is recast as a threat rather than a gain, empathy dismissed as weakness, and power framed as something men are owed but have been unfairly denied. The outcome is not only misogyny, but a broader hostility towards liberal values such as equality, consent and mutual recognition.
What makes this pipeline so effective is not its extremity, but its ordinariness. There is nothing outwardly political about jaw exercises, gym routines or self-discipline, just as there is nothing overtly ideological about optimisation itself. Yet when insecurity is repeatedly framed as a personal and biological failure, resentment begins to look reasonable. ‘Looksmaxxing’ does not need to preach misogyny to arrive there; it only needs to move young men from mewing to measurement — and from measurement to resentment.