From the dark corners of the web.

An emerging mindset.

I am a loser if also women know wouldn't pay me either.

A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at a deadly tipping point.

In Cells will be added to the Terrorism Guide.

I see literally zero hope.

This is in Cells a production of kt Studios and iHeart Podcasts, Season one, Episode nine, Looks Maxing.

I've written about leg lengthening, surgery, penis enlargements, and they're all about men.

As soon as you do that and you start to look for a perpetrator for a lot of men in the lopsmaxing community, that enemy has become women.

It's a kind of story about insecure young people probably not finding the best places to look in the mirror.

Online I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KATI Studios with Stephanie Leideger, Gabriel Christia Connor Powell, and Carolyn Miller.

Online self improvement is everywhere, jawlines, cheekbones, hunter eyes, routines and recipes to fix a face, routines to fix a life.

We follow how looks Maxing, a push to optimize your appearance, intersects with insul forums nihilistic beliefs and a new transphobic trope called transmaxing.

Investigative journalist Connor Powell speaks to Rupert Small's CEO of Egregious, it's a UK startup that specializes in understanding social issues online.

He also recently co authored a paper on looks maxing and radicalization pathways.

We ask Rupert to start by describing the word looks maxing.

It's kind of a belief that you know, there are various different ways and methods to maximize your physical appearance as a kind of methodology and a set of recipes, and if you follow them you can try and maximize how good you look physically objectively and through improving their looks, the believers that they'll improve their life in some way.

Connor also spoke with Simon Osborne, a freelance features writer based out of London, for a different perspective.

Simon often writes for The Guardian, and we asked how he first came across looks maxing.

I'll be honest, it was new to me, but my editor at The Guardian, who I wrote this story for, has teenage sons and he had heard about it, I think via their online lives looks maxing is in a way, it's quite simple.

It's generally young men online swapping ideas for how to improve how they look, mainly focusing on their facial aesthetics, but also their bodies.

And it's a kind of hyper masculine version of what these guys think they should look like for their own, I guess, sense of security and also to attract the opposite sex.

And when we look at the face looks maxing means hardening the jawline.

It values things like hunter eyes, which are kind of eyes that points slightly downwards towards the nose.

You know, strong foreheads, basically a sort of very masculine, strong man kind of look.

Does it also going to the sort of traditional male desire to be strong and fit as well, or is it generally sort of this facial feature.

It's very much sort of focused on the face, and a big part of it is swapping pictures of your own face for often quite harsh criticism within a community that might be a forum or a reddit or It all started a long time ago, I think, on four Chan, and then it's become very big on TikTok more recently.

But I think it goes hand in hand with a sort of general masculine look that promotes a muscular physique.

Simon's mention of harsh critics wasn't the first time we'd heard that.

In fact, it seems almost a tenant of a lot of the online looks maxing communities.

Here's a clip from First at five CTV News, followed by Connor and social scientist Rupert Small's.

It's a term you may have never heard before, looks maxing.

So it looks like it's a community where you are going to maybe pick up some tips for living a healthier life, maybe modifying your appearance in some way.

And instead, what many people are getting is, you know, if you can't hit these benchmarks, then you should really consider self harm.

Clearly, any approach that encourages someone to harm themselves is deeply concerning, But we wanted to know on a broader level how Rupert sees the idea of looks maxing.

I think there's never anything wrong with the kind of high level objectives that are there to kind of ambitiously achieve a goal.

I think what sometimes can go wrong is the roote we take to achieve that goal.

So it's almost like that I robot situation from the famous film with Will Smith, where the robots are told to protect humanity, and actually in order to protect humanity, they figure out that if they lock us all up, we're going to be safe because you just can't be trusted.

So I think it's a bit like that.

But I think what you also see, which is a bit more worrying, is that people are exploiting men.

They're trying to monetize the situation, and that's when things can go bad.

So Looks Maxine to me is it has a parallel just in the traditional female natural beauty genre, right, which is like press implants LiPo.

But I think what we're seeing online specifically is a recruitment to a much more darker world with young men.

Can you walk me through sort of what you're seeing and what your research points to.

Say there's a parallel there.

But where it does take a darker turn for the Looks max In community is when that starts to to maybe ideologies around the in cell community, And that's actually an interesting kind of difference between the two, and that you know, some of the looks the men in the Loo Maxing community are being diverted or kind of radicalized in a way to see it as a grievance issue rather than a way to discover their best selves.

It's become a manifestation of a lot of ill will and a kind of a contest between men and women, and that has meant that, you know, some of the men getting involved with that community have started to exhibit violent behaviors towards women and girls, et cetera, et cetera, which is not something you see so much in the other direction.

Rupert points out that for some looks maxing begins in a positive way, it may inspire better diet and nutrition.

However, he warrants that same motivation can easily start to shift.

I think there's a thread to the story which got metastasized to extent and started to become exploited for ill and monetized, I should say, where it became a thing of more mewing and bone smashing, and you know, things came out of it which were quite overtly harmful for the body.

And once that started happening and people started to try and I think maybe over monetize vulnerable individuals, that's where you started to see indications that there was at least a branch of that community which was leading people astray.

Mewing, as Rubert mentioned, is something that's become very popular.

The hashtag mewing has accumulated over a billion views on TikTok, with millions of videos created on the topic.

Here's a quick explanation of what it is.

This one is called mewing, Okay, not meowing, mewing.

Mewing's been around for a while.

It's this exercise where you put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and you swallow, and it's supposed to like strengthen and accentuate your jawline and get rid of the double chain if you have one.

So the action of mewing has started to trend and has been trending on TikTok.

People were teaching you, like, how do you get ready to double chane?

All that good.

Stuff here again, Connor and Rupert.

What's the discussion around looks maxing within in cell forms.

As these techniques became more and more punitive, as they became more difficult to achieve, or as they involved more and more self harm, for example, bone smashing, which involves hammering your jaw.

I think that that kind of advice.

When you're receiving it from a community you trust and leave in, you can start to get almost traumatized by it.

And as soon as you start suffering, the question becomes as an individual, who's to blame for my suffering?

They're feeling alienated, they're trying to improve their situation, but they realize by doing so, it's actually causing them to suffer, and so they're looking for who the perpetrator is.

And as soon as you do that, and you start to look for a perpetrator and adversary of some form.

Unfortunately, what has come out of that scenario is that for a lot of men in the lux maxing community, that enemy has become women.

And so there is a kind of branch of the loux max community that has led quite naturally into the in cell community where women are blamed for this situation they applied for all of the difficulties that they're experiencing.

We've heard from Luis before, he's a self identified black pilled in cell.

In this conversation, he helps us trace how these online communities have evolved and how an obsession with looks has been part of that story from the very beginning.

Now many of the same ideas are resurfacing under new banner framed as self improvement.

Let me actually give you, like the entire history of insuls.

It's going to be very quick, so ironically, the original in cell community started by a woman, a lesbian woman from Carlton University in Canada.

It's called Alana's Involuntary Celibate Project.

Who was the community for people who couldn't find love.

And it was very inclusive, right, it wasn't just mail.

And then you had other forums like love Shy, in cell support, but really, really, really the modern iteration of the incels that we all know that I'm a part of, right, the black pill and lookism and whatnot.

And PSL started on a forum called PWA Hate.

Pwayete dot com was created in two thousand and nine by a former pickup artist called Nicolaus.

They had one section called Shitty Advice.

And I don't know how, I don't know why, but they started talking about the importance of your looks.

If you want to be a pickup artist, you have to be good looking.

They came up with looks theory midphace theory.

They would recommend each other's surgeries.

Luis mentioned PSL.

PSL is an acronym from three early in cell websites, pu Hate, slut hate, and lookism dot net.

It's a ranking system many in cells subscribe to and some upset.

It ranks men's attractiveness from one to eight.

Luis continues, it's pretty funny.

But after that they created slut hate the promiscuous a term for a promiscuous women, right, slut hate dot com.

And yeah, same thing.

They would just talk about, looks how pickup artists suck, how women suck, how normy suck.

That.

In twenty eighteen they created loukism dot net.

So that's really the trifecta.

That's where PSL comes from, PA Hate, slut Hate, loukism dot net.

Right now, it's just Insul's and looksmax dot org, which came after lucism dot net.

It used to be known as lucism dot me.

No, looks max dot me.

Now it's looksmax dot org.

And that's really the history of the insull forums.

Let's stop here for a break.

We'll be back in a moment.

Connor continues his discussion with journalist Simon Osborne, asking how he've used looksmaxing intersecting with pop culture in general and in cell communities in particular.

There was a kind of almost a split where there was quite a lot of stuff on TikTok which often wasn't particularly dark in nature.

A lot of it was just often very insecure teenage boys and young men trying to find ways to kind of fulfill this look.

But I think one of the reasons it's caught the attention is that it does have a darker side, and it started in a fairly dark place, and there is or there having concerns that is sort of springing from in cell culture, and that a lot of the men who are very harshly criticizing off an insecure young men on this site are also you know, misogynistic.

There's been a lot of recent discussion about racism in lux maxing.

There was a young black journalist in the US who I think path jokingly tried to become the first black Looks Maxer because it seemed to him to be a very white pursuit, and then was very swiftly bombarded with racist abuse on social media.

And one of the people you profiled is cream Shami.

Yes, well, what did.

You find out about him?

And what's his role in this.

He's a very interesting figure in that he kind of lived the life and then became a big influencer in the lux maxing world.

When I spoke to me, he was twenty two.

He had emigrated with his family from Syria as a youngster from the war there and settled in the US, and he had kind of done the looks Maxing thing himself and had really changed his look quite dramatically and had a lot of the sort of holy Grail features of a looks maxed person, with the cheekbones and the strong jaw and all the rest of it, and very good skin.

Skin is another part of this.

And then he started to kind of chart his own journey on TikTok and it kind of took off in a big way.

Kareem Shami, the self proclaimed godfather of looks Maxing, has over two point five million followers on social media.

He's the founder of Ascend Laboratories, which provides esthetic enhancement coaching.

He ties together male self improvement, visual identity and influencer commerce.

Here again Simon speaking about Kareem Shami, But.

I also get the sense that he was slightly conflicted, because you know, His profile picture on TikTok at the time was Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, and that to me sort of aligned with a lot of the concerns people were expressing about misogyny and hypermasculinity and how Looks Maxing was all part of that.

He said that it was just because he liked some of the way that that character looked and didn't really align with his worldview or his view of women.

One particular video he posted of his transformation, he had really taken off as a kind of big figure on TikTok under the name Syrian Psycho.

That was what his user name is.

I was looking at Looks Maxine first because there was an obvious connection to Intel community.

Those that are trying to sort of become the things that they hate to attract the women that they're frustrated with.

And then there are those that just sort of accept beliefs, which is sort of like you're never going to have a relationship, You're always going to be ugly and miserable and just use that rage, live off that rage.

How did you find Looks Maxine within the Intel community?

That's sort of the word rep zen, a community of people that is bigger than any sort of one element, and so as far as there is an inceell overlap, I think there is also a side of it that's more just about people just being kind of bitchy and mean at each other in a way that maybe we would often sort of traditionally associate with young women.

And I think part of this is that young men are increasingly subject to the same insecurities and harsh lenses as women and girls have traditionally been.

Really, it's a kind of story about insecure young people probably not finding the best places to look in the mirror online.

In fact, studies show that online feedback in the vast majority of these forums is overwhelmingly negative.

And you're report by dell Housie University saw researchers come through thousands of comments on a discussion board of an online community that receives six million unique visitors a month.

Many of the people participating in these communities are young, so they're boys who are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the university students, they're surprisingly young.

We saw no one get universal praise.

We saw everybody get insults, and predominantly people are told that they're considerably ugly or unattractive.

My bigger concern was that really it was you know, people who were already worried about their facial features putting pictures in themselves in you know, TikTok or Reddit and getting quite a lot of criticism and then just ending up feeling worse about themselves and maybe resorting to questionable, time consuming, uncomfortable processes like mewing to strengthen their faces, or in the case of the guy I spoke to, you know, seriously considering paying ten thousand pounds to have surgery and to extend his chin.

If we're sort of stepping back, do you think it's terribly different than what we're seeing with just women in general.

No, I don't, And I think that's a good point.

And for some reason I sort of seem to have developed a kind of mini specialism at the Guardian because they keep asking me to write about male esthetic surgery.

I've written about hair transplants and tooth surgery and chin implants.

With this, I've written about leg lengthening surgery, penis enlargements, and then they're all about men.

It's the same motivations, the same people, and the same kind of pressures on them and it's young men, yeah, feeling insecure and then having that insecurity fueled by online communities.

And then because the demand is they're finding the outlets via searches online to get solutions to their problems in extremely competitive online marketplaces, which often lead them to cut price and dodgy actors.

I'm thinking of transplant surgeons charging a fraction of what you would pay in a reputable clinic.

Some men have sought out corrective surgeries, such as chin lengthening or jaw repositioning.

These are done to achieve a more angular projected chin and jawline.

Limb lengthening is another area of surgery which is used to increase height.

And then you end up with the nightmare stories of men and young men finding that they're deeply distressed with the process and the results because they've often paid very low amounts for this sort of surgery.

Often, these surgeons and these markets are ones that have existed for a long time because of the demand from women, and now there is the demand from men, and one you know, on the one hand, women might I think we'll welcome to our world.

This is what it's like.

The pressure is to look certain ways, but then you know, the other way of looking at is that it's the worst sort of equality, because we should be addressing the sort of drivers for these insecurities and kind of trying to make people more common, whether they're male or female, because it's a pretty sorry trade.

And even when you speak to people who've had surgery and chin surgery in the case of looks Maxing, you know, they often say it's changed my life.

I feel like a new person.

It's amazing.

But even they often say I wish I didn't have to go through all this to get to that place.

We wanted to understand how far this can go.

Rubert Small's unpacks the overlap between looks Maxing in cells and potential violence.

We note again that the rate of actual physical violence based on in cell ideology is very low.

Here's Rupert.

We're seeing a lot of let's say, co correlations between that community and in cell communities and communities even in the kind of the mashooter communities and who kind of lionize and celebrate mass shooting and violence towards women.

So it's hard to make a a direct link and say that, you know, because this person, let's say Elliott Roger, for example, Even if we can't directly attribute Looks Maxing to Elliott Roger, we can say that there's a lot of overlap in those communities.

They share similar content, they share memes, they share members, they share symbols and meaning together, and they develop that they kind of co develop that meaning.

So that's as much as we can say to date, and just because of the kind of tight relationship between those communities, we can say at the very least that they are influential to each other.

Just as scientists, we don't want to directly attribute violence to a specific meme, more specific post.

You can see, as you say, there's the victimization, there's the what am I getting?

How the self harm?

You can see this sort of path to self destruction.

Really, yeah, people are looking for an exit out of their current situation.

I think in a lot of this, and like you say, sometimes that's going to manifest in self harm for the purposes of looks Maxing.

Sometimes actually people just doing self harm to exit in another way, like psychologically exit the situation because self harm distracts them from another pain somewhere else.

And if you're in a position of as I think a lot of in cells are in a lot of you know, members of the looks Maxing community, they're in a position of really really needing support to help them get themselves out of what they experience as a really painful situation.

Ultimately, it's all born of a form of desperation to get out of what is a very difficult situation.

You mentioned that you looked at the algorithm and the sort of adjacent words, and how does the blackpill fit into looks Maxing from what you can tell.

I guess maybe the reason you're asking this question is that you might see looks Maxing as an innately hopeful ideology or belief system where you know, if you do something regularly, if you're persistent about it, if you put work in, you'll be able to look better and that's going to help improve your life.

I think the answer to that again like, what is the link between luks Maxing and black Pile?

Again, it's a past dependent state.

To better understand how these ideas take root in real life, we spoke with a man who goes by mister East.

He's a self described black pilt in Cel Mysteries.

Explains how these beliefs shape the way he sees dating success and the world around him.

Certain traits you have, such as looks, wealth, they make it more likely for you to succeed within a certain context.

Dating romantically, I just recognize that despite what popular consensus believes about so called romantic and like just general success within like socializing in general, it does really heavily depend on your looks and your ability to socialize.

However, for some people that might not work because of their ethnicity, because of their looks, because of their might.

No matter what, a lot of the stuff that they learn might not work.

The general consensus within societies that be nice, be respectful, you will succeed.

This is like the biggest contradiction despite what society tells you, the nice guy never wins in this case, well, unless you're handsome and good looking, which I guess explains why good looking people don't understand the struggles that people who maybe are nice but don't have the looks to attract people.

May think, let's stop here for another break.

We'll be back in a moment.

Rupert continues explaining the complexity of how different threads within these communities can lead in very different directions, from self improvement to something far more nefarious.

I think people have recognized that have kind of gained that and that's why you often see you know, the Blackpool hashtag mentioned together in in posts with looks Maxing hashtags is because there's you know, some creators have recognized that overlap and they can grab attention and they can take members from that one community by just putting those hashtags together.

If you were looking at it more from the radicalization side of things, like radicalization pathways, I would say there are many different threads and pathways through looks maxing, Like tox maxing is kind of one of the resting points or the waypoints along the way for what could be very a wide range of radicalization situations.

Some would lead to self harmed, some would lead to violence against women, et cetera, et cetera.

And the fact that there are many paths which cross looks maxing and then ultimately go elsewhere makes this a very complex situation to describe to people.

Is it a phrase that you see growing?

We drew in more than eighty thousand videos from over forty thousand users on a social media platform.

This very clear connection between Elliott Roger fandom, Elliott Roger being a shooter.

UK born American shooter.

He killed six people injured fourteen others with a mixture of you know, knives and semi automatic pistols.

And Elliott Roger is lionized by many people in the inzell and Looks Maxing communities, and he's given a lot of voice and his manifesto is spoken about a lot, all of which has now been laundered and mixed up within these insell and looks Maxing communities.

That was the interesting thing to us, and that was kind of what triggered our concern because it's by kind of adopting that terminology that innocent people within who're just gone to looks Maxing for you know, self improvement, can easily start to get nudged into a much darker ideology and even into you know, self harm or into violence.

So that was the link for us, rather than the volume of posts we were seeing, although when we did look we saw the very high volume of posts.

We wanted to take a moment to explain what transmaxing is.

Like so many of the terms we've come across in this series.

It's part of an online vocabulary that's constantly evolving.

Connor spoke with editor keysepe Lopez, who explains it's less something happening in real life and more reflection of what's being imagined online.

My name is Keyspey Lopez.

I'm the lifestyle editor over at Them, which is Conde Nast's LGBTQ publication.

I've been on some of these in cell websites.

It almost feels as if it's not actually a real thing, but it's just people sort of putting it out there to make a point about how great it is to be a woman and how awful it is to be a man.

It's kind of stemming from the exact same ideology that is foundational to all in cell thought, which is exactly what you're speaking to.

It's easier to be a woman.

Society benefits women, so of course someone would want to be a woman, and that's why trans people are actually transitioning.

That's the kind of backing thought to it all.

How would you define transmaxine for someone who's never heard that term before.

It's basically a transphobic trope that is like often perpetuated and spoken about in in cell communities that anybody would transition not because of like an internal gender feeling that they're having or a mismatch in their identity, but rather for the social benefits of it.

It basically perpetuates the claim that trans women are not actually women.

They're like transitioning because they want to gain the social benefits quote unquote of being a woman.

And that is like obviously rooted in transphobia and also in deep misogyny and the intersection of the two.

When did you first see this popping up online in conversation?

It's something that came about in the last ten years.

Rather than trying to change yourself to fit a society that benefits women, black pill believers don't believe they should have to change themselves by looks maxing, and instead they've accepted their fate as an inceell and they believe that society should change instead to be more inclusive of in cells.

Transmaxing fits into that because it's basically like, well, some in cells cannot look smax out of their fate of being involuntarily celibate, so instead they should rather than trying to meet this ideal standard for like being a man, they should instead transition to be women because that would be easier for them in society.

They'll get all of these like social benefits, et cetera, et cetera.

As helps us understand where transmaxing began, tracing its roots back to a single manifesto.

It's basically this long rambling manifesto that's been updated twelve times called the Transmaxing Manifesto.

It's from the deep, deep corners of in cell communities online.

It basically details all of the.

Social benefits that you know, one might have if they are having, you know, not a lot of luck as an inceel, want to change their faith, want to like change their position in society by transitioning, And it kind of outlines these really ridiculous ideas that are like you'll get cheaper car insurance, you will find partnership, you'll have access to dating other trans women, like all of these things that are ignoring the tangible realities that come with being trans in this world, such as like increased starts of violence, and it kind of puts that aside and it is like, actually, it'll be great and it'll fix your life if you're an inceel to be a transmaxer.

But that's just that's.

The only written piece of this ideology.

Any idea who wrote this manifesto.

Like many ideologies that start in the Internet.

It can be hard to pin down exactly who we know the user name.

It's someone who is.

Called bontology, and it's basically been updated a bunch of times.

It exists on these Internet archives and deep Threddit threads as well as four Chune.

Anytimes you want to add that I didn't ask you, or point you want to make that I didn't ask you on, I think.

I just want to emphasize that transmaxers aren't a threat to your daily life.

They don't exist as a movement, and I think that speaking about them in conversation with like trans people as a community is a false equivalency that I really want to urge people to not engage in, because it's just a transphobic Internet trope as opposed to like an entire community of people who are just trying to do their best and live their daily lives.

I would just urge people to not add fuel to the fire and really be careful about.

The information that you're consuming and do research.

Have media literacy, because I think it can be really easy to get in the weeds with any kind of in cell community language because there is just so much of it and it's so vast and so awful.

But I promise transmaxers aren't a threat because they don't exist.

I think the real threat is the way.

That young men are socialized in this country and socialized towards violence.

For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at KT Underscore Studios.

In Cells is produced by Stephanie Laideger, Gabriel Castillo, and me Courtney Armstrong.

Additional producing by Connor Powell and Caroline Miller, editing by Jeff Tooi music by Vanikore.

Studios In Cells is a production of KAT Studios and iHeart Podcasts.

For more podcasts like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.