By now, you’ve perhaps heard of looksmaxxers, the young men pursuing extreme physical transformation in the belief that appearance is the sole determinant of social and sexual success. If not, I’m sorry to have to inform you that they’re injecting gray-market steroids and peptides, getting experimental cosmetic surgeries, even hitting their own facial bones with hammers — and they’ve become the subject of a full-blown media spectacle, especially their most prominent representative, a twenty-year-old influencer and streamer who goes by Clavicular.

If you’re a newer observer of the manosphere, you may be less familiar with their antecedents, the pickup artists of the mid-2000s, who developed elaborate behavioral scripts to manipulate women into having sex. At their peak twenty years ago, pickup artists were a genuine cultural phenomenon: their guidebooks topped best-seller lists, and their online workshops were heavily attended by men eager to learn the trade. The goal of pickup artistry was to “score” with women, and being talented in this endeavor was referred to as “having game” — archaic terminology to describe objectives that seem almost quaint from where we stand now, amid the jestergooners and chadfishers of the looksmaxxing scene.

Pickup artists conceived of women as automata whose bioevolutionary programming could be overridden by men of superior cunning and intelligence. Adherents sought to short-circuit a woman’s brain to get access to her body — something that could be accomplished through calculated behaviors like backhanded compliments (“negging”), feigned disinterest, and strategically isolating women from their friends.

This profoundly misogynistic undertaking posed an underexplored question: If you dislike women this much, why do you want to have sex with them in the first place? The pleasures of human romantic or even physical intimacy seemed beside the point. Even this early in the modern manosphere, it was clear that all of this effort was really for a hidden purpose, something perhaps more homosocial than heterosexual.

Twenty years later, Clavicular has skyrocketed to sudden fame, and all mysteries have been solved. The looksmaxxer’s explicit goal is no longer to “score,” but to “mog,” or outshine other men. The term “mogging” was coined by incels, an online cohort of men who are involuntarily celibate and have proven susceptible to far-right politics, to denote standing out as the alpha male of the group. A dominant male is a “chad,” and the ultimate objective of looksmaxxing is to be a chad among men. This was no doubt the pickup artist’s primary motivation too, only he didn’t have the words for it. The looksmaxxer does not lack the vocabulary to describe his ambition: he is here to mog, to gain aura, to ascend. Women’s attention is chiefly useful as a reflection of his sexual market value, which contributes to his overall dominance factor vis-à-vis other men.

Indeed, women are almost entirely irrelevant to the looksmaxxer except as something to be traded for rank in the male social hierarchy. In Marxist economic terms, we would say that women’s exchange value has come to outweigh their use value. For Karl Marx, one of the great perversities of capitalism is that exchange value comes to dominate and ultimately devour use value: goods are produced not because they are useful to people, but because they are sellable on markets, and the entire productive apparatus of society reorganizes itself around this inversion. All human labor becomes devoted to this marketized abstraction, not to enhancing our real quality of life.

That’s a tidy metaphor for what’s happening to gender relations under the banner of looksmaxxing. Women’s affection has no intrinsic worth to the looksmaxxer; it’s just currency to be exchanged for something of actual value. A woman’s desire is not pursued for its own sake but to generate purchasing power in a marketplace where the only real transaction is between men. All the labor looksmaxxers put into making women desire them is ultimately in the service of this transaction.

In capitalist markets, the pursuit of exchange value often erodes use value. Likewise with looksmaxxing: while the putative goal is increasing sexual market value, influencers like Clavicular routinely advise men to engage in looksmaxxing techniques that decrease sexual performance, from hair growth medicines known to cause impotence to unsafe levels of testosterone and steroid injections to the use of methamphetamine (yes, meth) for appetite suppression. Clavicular himself claims to have lost both sexual function and interest in his effort to be sexually desirable and therefore dominant; he speculates that his body no longer naturally produces testosterone. Nevertheless, despite an apparent lack of interest, he continues to pursue sexual conquests. Sex is required to retain his ability to mog, and mog he must.

Looksmaxxers have a long list of attributes that define male beauty: wide clavicles, chiseled jawlines, low body fat, optimal canthal tilt, short philtrum, low upper-eyelid exposure — the list goes on. Because looksmaxxers are so openly admiring of attractive men, people like to jokingly speculate that looksmaxxers are repressed homosexuals. This is probably inaccurate, much to their disadvantage. As one gay commentator astutely observed, if looksmaxxers were gay, they could sublimate their obsession in the sexual pursuit of other men, a path that would lead to intimacy and release.

Tragically, their aesthetic interest in male beauty appears to be more autosexual than homosexual. Their libido must therefore remain directed inward, permanently recursive, expendable only in the lonely pursuit of self-optimization and self-aggrandizement.

It remains to be seen whether the manosphere’s cult of the self will affect any reduction in sexual aggression — that is, whether it will be to women’s benefit to be basically forgotten about by this cohort of men, or whether the harassment will only increase as the dehumanization deepens. But there’s no question that these subcultures, and the fragments of them that influence mainstream culture, are a trap for men.

A defining feature of neoliberalism is its extension of capitalist market logic into ever more intimate spheres of life. Over the last half-century, neoliberalism has effectively convinced people in developed capitalist societies to imagine ourselves chiefly as consumers and entrepreneurs of our own “human capital” instead of citizens — a process that has contributed enormously to social atrophy and political disempowerment. Looksmaxxing takes the trend even further, encouraging one segment of the population to regard the attention of prospective partners not as an opportunity for genuine companionship but as a commodity that can be exchanged on a market for something abstract of greater value.

Looksmaxxing is a setup for total estrangement from women and pervasive and insurmountable hostility between men. It can only result in further alienation, as the looksmaxxer comes to see his own life as something not to be lived and enjoyed, but to be performed for an imaginary panel of judges. Looksmaxxing is a dead end of solipsism in which the self is endlessly improved for an abstract purpose that’s permanently deferred.

There is only one remaining hope for the looksmaxxer: to fall in love. If, in pursuit of another sexual conquest to aid his ascension, the heterosexual looksmaxxer suddenly becomes taken with an actual woman, then her exchange value transforms back into use value for him. He can begin to relate to her as a real person with her own interiority, to intimacy as a site of enjoyment and vitality for its own sake, and to life as something to be lived rather than won. Only love can set the looksmaxxer free.