The “very objective” and “very well researched” taxonomy in question is the P.S.L. scale, named for three of the most infamous forums from the incel epoch: PUAHate (Pick-Up-Artist Hate), SlutHate, and Lookism. The P.S.L. scale has eight points and sorts men into three tiers: subhuman, normie (subdivided into low-tier normie, mid-tier normie, and high-tier normie), and Chad (subdivided into Chadlite, Chad, and giga Chad). The preponderance of the population can aspire to high-tier normiedom at best. The happy few with a score of more than 7.75 are quasi-religious figures, “True Adams,” more legends than actually existing human beings. Per one popular guide to the P.S.L. scale, “this designation is reserved for mythical figures like Adonis or Apollo, as well as religious icons such as angels or prophets.” The scientific pretensions of the looksmaxxing community are belied by its reverent term for those who have succeeded in scrambling even a small way up the scale: a man who becomes beautiful is said to have “ascended,” as if he had been spirited up into the skies.
The moral objections to looksmaxxing are numerous, severe, and obvious. A system that designates any person as “subhuman” is beneath contempt, and that’s to say nothing of the racial slurs to which looksmaxxing stalwarts help themselves regularly, or the crucible of virulent misogyny in which their outlook was forged. (Their favorite word for women is “foids,” short for “female androids.”) In a recent interview, Clavicular makes a damning moral case against himself when he approvingly notes that Brad Pitt “mogs” Mother Theresa, a claim that is both true and monumentally beside the point. Writing in The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams sums up what I assume to be public opinion, concluding that “the so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”
Why, then, are we so captivated by what we ought to condemn? Lately, Clavicular has become unavoidable, shooting to the top of news feeds and dominating algorithms, perhaps because the terrible and transfixing extremity of his project suits the terrible and transfixing extremity of life in Trump’s America. In 1963, the critic Susan Sontag speculated that the idiosyncratic French mystic Simone Weil obsessed her contemporaries because she was refreshingly insane. “The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois,” Sontag wrote:
She might have been speaking of Clavicular when she wrote of “a life . . . absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation”—a life that appeals because it at least has the temerity to be forthright about its distortions and debasements.
But the drastic measures that looksmaxxers are willing to take are lethal to one of their own foundational myths—the myth of natural beauty. If our fates were inscribed in our genetics, why would anyone bother to maintain a skin-care routine, much less go to the trouble of jamming his tongue against the top of his mouth or whacking himself with a hammer? “Being natural is bad,” a beefy looksmaxxer who calls himself Androgenic declared, bluntly, in a video about the delights of steroid abuse. From this insight, it is only a short step to the conclusion that being natural is not possible. Guzzling five hundred grams of sugar a day, misguided as it may be, is a tacit admission that there is no such thing as a natural body, that merely to live is to actively shape how we look, that we are all artifacts of what we inject and imbibe.
