Looksmaxxing and Human Potential

a response to that WIRED article, thought digest, 10.08.2025

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Hello Deeists, I’m writing this from SFO.

Another great trip to San Francisco!

There’s a part of me that wants to either start hosting events here or start aggressively covering startups or something so I have an excuse to visit more often. We all know I will pursue neither, but I am looking for more excuses to visit. With that said, if you’re hosting a conference, meet-up, debate, dinner, whatever — invite me! I will try my best to attend.

The view from my hotel window

THE CALL-IN SHOW

The call-in show is at the same time as usual, 7:30 PM Central on Thursday. Wildcard line this week — that means you can call in about any topic. Starting next week, we’re going to try something more structured.

LOOKSMAXXING AND EUGENICS

Every now and then, I’ll see something — know it’s a great story — then not pursue it, only to kick myself when somebody else does. I’m sure this is a familiar feeling for all journalists, especially those working in today’s fast-turnaround environment. This happened to me today, reading Jason Parham’s looksmaxxing-eugenicism piece while waiting in line at TSA.

The People Who Think They Were Born Into the Wrong Race

While researching for my piece on Donna Briggs — the once-black radio host who now presents as a white manifestation guru and life coach in head-to-toe Lilly Pulitzer — I stumbled across dozens of Indian and Southeast Asian men who were trying to “racemaxx.”

Racemaxxing, in the incel community, has two conflicting definitions. One is to lean into the race you were born into as a strategy to increase your attractiveness — a black man, for instance, might emphasize stereotypically “black traits.” The other definition reverses this logic: a black-passing Indian man might be encouraged to do the same.

Or, as I kept seeing, people of color who would lighten their skin and pursue cosmetic surgery to appear white. (This was most common among Indian men, who’d exchange skin-lightening tips in private Facebook groups.) I decided against writing the piece because nobody was willing to speak on the record about their experiences and I was even chastised a few times for invading private spaces.

Then I saw Parham’s article shared in a work Slack, and I wished I’d pushed my research further. After reading it, I’m still not sure where I stand. I understand why he frames looksmaxxing through the language of eugenics — it’s true that Eurocentric beauty standards set the baseline, whether you’re trying to conform to them or exist in reaction to them. That logic can make a Black man, for example, believe he can only be attractive if he fully embodies a narrow caricature of “Blackness,” or, conversely, if he manages to approximate “whiteness.” In that sense, Parham’s framing captures something real — but not the whole picture.

When I zoom out, what I see isn’t just a project to conform to racial stereotypes but a broader attempt to transcend the human altogether. The invisible hierarchy of faces and bodies that looksmaxxing aspires to is cartoonish — and I mean that literally, not metaphorically. The “looksmaxxed” woman is neotenous, like an anime character: childlike, yes, but not quite human either. The same goes for the looksmaxxed man.

It’s almost too obvious to say that most are chasing a narrow, highly standardized definition of masculinity or femininity. But at a certain point, the pursuit stops being about race and starts being about purity — an ideal so abstract it ceases to resemble any race at all. That, too, carries the logic of eugenics, though in a different way than Parham’s piece suggests.

Something else that’s striking to me is that the Red Pill and pick-up artistry worlds — the communities the incelosphere developed in response to — were arguably more “empowering,” if only in their delusional self-belief. Generally speaking, the emphasis was placed more on exploiting what they assumed were weaknesses in the female psyche than on the self-deprecation and self-hatred that, as an outsider, feel so endemic to looksmaxxing communities. That perspective was more common in the female analogues: early femcel communities were deeply “blackpilled.”

There was a strong sense that beauty defined a woman’s self-worth, and those who didn’t fit into particular standards, even by a slim margin, were at a disadvantage. The overwhelming feeling was that for femcels, you take what you can get. The definitions and emphases, over time, have shifted.

Parham’s article ends with the idea of “looks inflation,” the sense that normalcy itself no longer counts. You have to be taller, sharper, more symmetrical just to be seen. I think he’s right about that. Normalcy is no longer enough. The goal is to meet an ever-rising standard that no one set but everyone feels. You are not chasing superiority. You are chasing acceptability. The cruel joke is that the world is set up in a way where many people can’t even reach the bare minimum in many things — housing, healthcare, whatever — while the definition of acceptability keeps inflating. This makes it all too easy to blame people for wanting too much, for having standards that are too high, while ignoring how little they actually have to begin with.

Looksmaxxing is, ultimately, what our society encourages: endless self-optimization toward nothing, the performance of becoming. It comes in many different forms, of course. It’s not always “looksmaxxing.” And for my conservative readers — yes, the same logic applies to the perpetual self-examination of the early 2020’s and the mid-to-late 2010’s progressive politics — the constant inventory of your privilege, the performance of allyship, the sense that you are always falling short of being good enough. The throughline is that you’re never done. There’s always another way you’ve failed.

On the other side is its mirror image: dissolving into something larger. A friend’s boyfriend once said that Millennials are forever seeking a “transcendent family,” and I think that’s true for Zoomers too. Fandoms that consume your entire identity. Political movements that offer total belonging and moral certainty.

Both responses — the endless work on the self, the surrender to your greater family — are reactions to the same underlying pressure. Individualism promised that you could define yourself. Instead, it made you responsible for justifying your existence.

Both paths lead to the same place: the feeling that you, alone, are not enough. That if you cannot perfect yourself and be seen, or belong to something absolute, you will simply cease to exist. The promise of the Human Potential Movement was that everyone could be more. What we live with now is the hangover: the conviction that we must be.

ME AROUND THE WEB

• For The Spectator, I wrote about the practical steps we can take to improve our lives if the Internet is, indeed, the Fairyland I keep arguing that it is.

• Over at UnHerd, I wrote about the latest BlueSky scandal — how a microwaved joke from years ago caused a small civil war.