Taylor Lorenz

You know, it's interesting.

I talked to a lot of people in the looks max or community and a lot of people that were actually like taking courses from people like clavicular and like smaller people.

And so many of these young men, like the reason they're turning to looks maxing is because they feel like they don't have any sort of economic mobility.

They don't feel any sort of agency over their lives.

And so taking.

Agency over the way that you look is this way to kind of like establish autonomy and feel a sense of control This is also how a lot of women end up with serious eating disorders.

It's this like desire for control and autonomy and like exerting that control in unhealthy ways and I think that like if we want to address like the looks maxing and all of these sort of like unhealthy things we need to have like

again, broader conversations about like, what is it that is making these men feel so hopeless and nihilistic about the world?

And how do we mitigate that?

Because it's like, yes, social media exacerbates it, but actually the worst sort of places where these places, you know,

the places where these men get radicalized and all of this hate is fomented are, are forums like looksmax.org that are not algorithmic.

They're like old school forums.

And so it's like, you could ban social media and stuff, but there's, they're actually getting radicalized in this like very 1990s kind of like format.

So you can't just blame the algorithms.

Like you need to go a little deeper and be like, what is making young men radicalized?

turn to these coping mechanisms.

And like you said, unhealthy stuff, whether it's, I think, drugs, alcohol, going, you know, bone smashing, whatever, you know, it's all sort of like maladaptive.

Yeah, it's not the fact that young men, you know, have seen like average wages decrease for, you know, so many years or they watch their parents struggle economically.

Their entire childhood was defined by the financial crisis.

They feel, you know, I did a bunch of stories back when I was at the New York Times in 2021 on Wall Street bets.