Why Looksmaxxing Has Nothing to Do With Looks

My seven-year-old twins are boys, which means I have a front-row seat to the YouTube algorithm's slowly expanding ambitions for their attention. A few weeks ago I walked past the living room and one of them was watching a video about "jawline exercises." He's seven. He doesn't have a jawline. He has a face that still has residual baby softness in it and I want to bite his cheeks every time I look at him.

I didn't say anything. I wasn't sure what to say. I closed the door and stood in the hallway for a second feeling like someone had handed me a problem I didn't have the right tools for yet.

That's what sent me down the rabbit hole that eventually landed me on Dr. K's latest video, where he makes the argument that looksmaxxing — the practice of optimizing your physical appearance through everything from skincare and mewing to bone smashing and leg-lengthening surgery — is not actually about looks at all. Dr. K, whose full name is Alok Kanojia, is a Harvard-trained psychiatrist who now runs HealthyGamer, an online mental wellness platform for gamers. He still describes his work in clinical terms, though it's worth noting he now operates primarily as a content creator and educator rather than in active clinical practice.

His argument is worth taking seriously, even where it's incomplete.

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The control thing first, because it's the part that landed hardest

Dr. K opens with a claim that I think a lot of people will brush past too quickly: the real engine of looksmaxxing isn't vanity, it's the experience of being fundamentally out of control.

"The world is fundamentally out of control," he says. "And there's only one domain that you have control over, which is yourself."

He references — with appropriate vagueness, so I'll flag it the same way — a paper from 1979 about anorexia that he says established a relationship between external helplessness and internal brutality: the more out of control you feel in the world, the harsher you become with yourself. He doesn't cite the author or journal, so I can't verify that framing directly. Take it as his clinical observation, not as settled science. But the pattern he's describing maps onto enough things I've seen and read that I'm not dismissing it either.

What hit me about this frame is that it's not really a young-men-on-the-internet problem. It's a stress response problem. And it explains something I've noticed in myself: I am thirty-seven years old, I am not on dating apps, and I have still caught myself googling "face fat reduction exercises" at 11pm after a week of feeling professionally useless. The form changes. The underlying logic — I can't control my career trajectory, but I can control my face — doesn't.

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The template problem, which is the parenting problem

Here's where Dr. K says something that I think most parenting conversations about looksmaxxing completely miss.

He argues that when young men can't get the social outcomes they want — connection, attraction, belonging — they don't abandon the template they've absorbed about how human relationships work. They try to move up within it. The template, in its crudest form: there's a high-value person who gets chosen, and a low-value person who doesn't. So the goal becomes becoming the high-value person.

"When you have a lot of horny kids who aren't able to get dates," he says, "they strive to be objectified. I want women to surround me and want this body. Not necessarily who I am, but want this body."

I want to sit with that for a second — not breeze past it like it's uncomfortable trivia — because what he's describing is young men wanting to be treated like objects. Not as a kink. As a goal. As the thing that would confirm they'd finally made it to the right side of the template.

That's the part that should make us put down our phones. Not because it's scandalous, but because it reveals how complete the collapse of internal self-worth can be. When your entire sense of value has been outsourced to other people's reactions to your body, being desired isn't intimacy — it's proof of existence.

And here's the thing about templates: we give them to our kids before they can read. Every time I respond to stress by criticizing my body in front of my sons, I'm teaching them something. Every time I reduce a person — on TV, in conversation, in passing — to how they look, I'm handing them a filing system. Dr. K's framework suggests those templates are nearly impossible to scrap once installed. Kids don't abandon them; they try to win within them.

That's not a reason to be a perfect parent. There's no such thing and I've spent a lot of this column's existence arguing against the premise. But it is a reason to be conscious about what template I'm demonstrating when I'm standing in the kitchen at 7am, exhausted and half-dressed, talking about the world.

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The objectification piece, and where Dr. K's history gets fuzzy

Dr. K pulls in objectification theory to explain what's happening psychologically to looksmaxxers — the process by which the way other people see you becomes the way you see yourself. It's a real framework, developed formally by Barbara Fredrickson and Tomi-Ann Roberts in their 1997 paper in Psychology of Women Quarterly. Dr. K situates the origins of this research in "the 70s and 80s," which is where he loses some precision — the male gaze literature from that era (Mulvey, 1975) is a related but distinct lineage. Fredrickson and Roberts' objectification theory, which is specifically what he's drawing on, is a 1997 framework. Worth knowing if you want to go deeper.

But the application he's making holds up: self-objectification — where external evaluation becomes internal identity — is genuinely measurable and genuinely harmful. It suppresses what researchers call "peak motivational states." It increases shame. It makes it harder to access your own internal experience because you're so busy monitoring how you appear from the outside.

The reason looksmaxxing is accelerating now, Dr. K argues, is that the standard was previously unattainable — so people had to do the psychological work of accepting their bodies. Now, there's a protocol. Bone smashing. IGF peptides. Leg-lengthening surgery. The existence of a technical route to the ideal means you never have to do the internal work, because the internal work is no longer the only option.

He also makes a statistical argument worth holding onto: yes, research shows more attractive people have better financial and dating outcomes. But he argues — credibly, though he references a "drive for muscularity" study without citation that I can't verify independently — that when you actually model which variables drive success, appearance ranks well below EQ, perseverance, conscientiousness, and work ethic. The correlation is real; the causal weight is overstated.

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What I actually want to say to my kid

I'm still not sure what I'd have said if I'd walked back into that room. "Jawline exercises are pseudoscience" is both true and useless. "You're handsome" is sweet but misses the point entirely.

What Dr. K is really describing — beneath the looksmaxxing influencers and the bone-smashing forums — is a generation of young men who feel fundamentally powerless and are trying to solve that feeling with their bodies. The world is uncertain. The labor market is terrifying. AI is rewriting entire industries. Social connection feels mediated and scarce. And the one thing you can reliably control is what you eat, how you train, what products you put on your face.

The problem isn't the mewing. The problem is the feeling underneath it that says: if I can just get the outside right, maybe I'll finally feel okay.

I want my sons to have enough internal architecture that when the world goes sideways — and it will, repeatedly, spectacularly — they don't automatically reach for their faces as the answer. I want them to know who they are beneath what they look like.

I'm not sure exactly how to teach that. But I think step one is probably not standing in their doorway watching jawline videos and saying nothing.

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Marcus Obi