looksmaxers lack empathy.

part 1

Looksmaxing, when it involves hormones (steroids) or surgery (jaw enhancement), is MtM transgenderism. Males assigned male at birth are trying to become “real men.” “Maleness” is not defined by biological sex, but by physical attributes, qualities, and socially-determined approval. Surgical and hormonal improvements are necessary to “pass” as a “real man.”

Prior to looksmaxing, we had the bodybuilding community, which itself developed out of strongman culture. Strongman is a homosocial competition, but also an individual sport or recreational activity. People can enjoy working out from the privacy of their home, without any need to be seen as attractive or aesthetic.

The most successful strongmen, like Eddie Hall, are plump looking. Not male models — but they don’t care.

Eddie Hall as a teen and as an adult

A strongman would gladly be hit in the face with an ugly stick if he could lift 100lbs more as a result. On the other had, a looksmaxer would sacrifice 90% of his strength, if he could gain the appearance of strength, muscle symmetry, fullness, and lose more body fat.

The reason why strongmen have no problem getting girls is because of their aggression, goal-orientation, and persistence. These are attractive psychological traits. Also, some women just prefer big boys.

Bodybuilders are in worse health than strongmen for two reasons:¹

1. Bodybuilders maintain abnormally low levels of bodyfat for long periods, which places additional stress on the body

2. This requires them to use steroids, which destroys the body’s natural hormonal balance, and over time, permanently damages the testicles, leading to infertility.

Bodybuilders suffer from eating disorders, self-esteem issues, and depression. They knowingly shorten their lifespans, because they are suicidal.

Not all bodybuilders end up like this, especially in the “classic” division. Arnold Schwarzenegger is still in great health, although his success in Hollywood and politics has allowed him to have much better access to healthcare than most bodybuilders. He has access to world class doctors to help him manage the lifelong side effects of steroid use. Ronnie Coleman was not as lucky.

Ronnie Coleman destroyed the joints in his body. Even after many surgeries, he rolls around in a wheelchair in constant pain.

Just as there are “detransitioners,” there are also bodybuilders who, looking back, realize they were searching for love in all the wrong places. When we think of successful bodybuilders, we think of Zyzz, who never grew old. But the “failures” are the unknown ones who never got famous. These are people with cystic acne, who remain depressed, divorced, lonely, and sad. I would not be surprised if such types have a rate of suicide similar to trans people.

Acne due to steroid abuse. source

Whereas performative complaining is encouraged among trans people, performative Stoicism is preferred among bodybuilders. In contrast to this culture of silence, Mark Plummer is an example of a MtM bodybuilder who honestly shares his feelings online. Mark is open about his depression, anxiety, failed relationships, extreme risk taking behavior (including crashing sports cars), getting in trouble with the law, constantly fearing death (and sometimes embracing the thought of dying), etc.

source

Bodybuilders lean toward libertarian or right wing ideas, like opposing vaccines, opposing immigration, and supporting gender norms. As a result, the mainstream psychology industry has no sympathy for these people, and seeks to marginalize them. Bodybuilders are described as threatening, toxic, menacing, dangerous, or contemptible, silly, and worthless.² Contrast this with the support afforded to the Mtf or FtM trans community.

Is looksmaxing autistic?

Looksmaxing is an attempt to resolve an internal identity crisis. Mewing, jaw exercises, and cosmetic surgery are meant to gain recognition, status, acceptance, and love. Just like trans identity, looksmaxing comes from a lack of intuitive empathy.

I use the term intuitive empathy (IE) to distinguish it from moral, logical, or analytic empathy.³ Intuitive empathy is the ability to naturally recognize and interpret the feelings of others, and to skillfully and appropriately display reciprocal emotions to elicit a positive response. IE is not the same thing as extroversion, although they are strongly correlated.

People enjoy playing to their natural strengths. If you are really good at math, you will enjoy algebra more than someone who struggles with division. Similarly, people with low-IE find social interactions (especially chaotic parties) to be draining, whereas people with high intuitive empathy find such engagements to be exciting and invigorating.⁴

Some men are terrible with women, because they are terrible with people in general. They have no friends. Interacting with other humans is like torture, because they have no clue how or why people do the things they do and feel the things they feel.

“Why do people enjoy dancing? It’s just moving your body in a stupid way. It feels embarrassing. Why does it matter? Why would women like good dancers?”

People with low-IE become misanthropic, and are more likely to adopt extreme ideologies like Nazism or wokism, because they have a hard time getting along with others. They are likely to become misogynistic, because they regard women as “more emotional,” and the “weaker sex.” Although women have stronger social skills, they are also more socially judgmental, especially against men.⁵

If a man is weird, icky, or stranger, he will be called a loser, awkward, and creepy. In the eyes of adult women, these traits are as bad (or worse) than being a serial killer. Women display open hostility toward men who “don’t get it” — these men lack inuitive empathy.

The difference between an attractive and unattractive man has very little to do with looksmaxing. Female attraction is determined by an assessment of confidence, social skills, assertiveness, aggression, charisma, charm, humor, suaveness, and then finally wealth and physical attractiveness, in that order.

Wealth plays a large part in a woman’s satisfaction in a long term relationship. But that has nothing to do with being an incel. Women will sleep with a dude who lives out of his car if he is confident, funny, risk-taking, humorous, and suave.

I’ve known guys in their 40s living with their mom who still have sex with hot girls in their 20s. I’ve known guys in their 60s who still get laid, whether or not they have a lot of money. Money helps, but it is not the primary determinant.

Men who are shy, fearful, self-hating, and awkward have one saving grace: humor. All of those features can be forgiven, as long as the element of humor is there. You can be fat, ugly, nerdy, clumsy — whatever — but as long as you have a good sense of humor, you can crack jokes and make people laugh, it’s ok. There’s a girl who will date you, because, remember, many women are also fat, ugly, nerdy, and clumsy. But without humor, there is little hope.

Woody Allen

Humor is a skill which comes from “reading the room,” and delivering punchlines with the right timing and style. It requires intuitive empathy.

Everything women love — like dancing, art, music, and humor — demonstrates reproductive fitness, in the same way that a peacock signals fitness with its feathers. Coordination, balance, free time, tonality, rhythm, aesthetic taste, and intuitive empathy are related to a series of historically practical tasks, like fighting, hunting, social negotiation, and creativity.

When women go for the starving artist rather than the nerdy programmer, they are privileging the future above the present moment. While men criticize female choice as “impractical,” or even dysgenic, female partner choice places greater weight on traits which are more crucial for the long term survival of our species, rather than short-term practicality.

Accountants will be made useless due to AI, but having a deep soul that can truly speak to others is crucial if you want to survive an apocalypse. Civilizations are produced and maintained on religious grounds, and that includes the art of ritual. Accountants are the “cherry on top,” who deal with the pedantic minutiae of tax code — they have robotic souls.

To put this in biological terms, musicians are evolutionarily robust and adaptable. Accountants are like an extremely specialized dung beetle or parasite that feeds off a biological waste product of other species. We can live without accountants. We can’t live without music. The right wing gets this backwards, because they believe that the liberal arts are useless, while math and science are essential qualities. From a pure biological perspective, this is just right-wing cope for incels.

Increasingly, it seems as if the most intellectual faction in the right wing is simply a lobby for downwardly mobile accountants and programmers. This isn’t universally true, but that’s the direction things seem to be headed in.

I would advise men with low-IE to embrace honesty about their flaws, and to compensate for them by focusing on intuitive empathy. This is difficult, but will produce better results than pure “looksmaxing.” You cannot fix a broken vase with a hammer.

Men who lack social skills feel frustrated. Their strength is to say, “I can make money, analyze problems, crunch the numbers, and come up with solutions.” Looksmaxing plays into this frame:

1. Women don’t find me attractive.

2. Attraction is a physical, material, concrete, geometric, visual problem.

3. If I had the right angles in my face, I would look attractive.

4. I will become more attractive by overcompensating with exercise, hormones, or surgery.

This is the exact same formula as transgenderism:

1. I don’t feel accepted by myself or others.

2. Acceptance is a biological problem having to do with being born in the wrong physical form.

3. If I adjust my physical form, I will be accepted by myself and others.

4. I will gain acceptance by dressing in different clothing, using hormones and surgery.

An aside on trans people.

One of the reasons why people become trans is because they feel social aggression via sexual value. For example, “tomboy” girls get bullied for not being conventionally attractive. They fantasy about “just being a boy,” to end the bullying.

Men feel “creepy” as a result of female aggression, and think that the attacks will stop if they become a woman. When men become trans, they hope to feel a greater sense of acceptance by women.

The right wing imagines that MtF trans people are “hyper sexual predators,” who wear dresses in order to get into women’s bathrooms so they can commit rapes undetected. There is a percentage of people for whom this might apply, but the vast majority of MtF trans are attempting to escape social disapproval or aggression, often coming from their peers, family, or a misperception of “society” at large.

Looksmaxing shares the same underlying causes as gender dysphoria. Looksmaxers would benefit from being honest about this.

No amount of surgery alone is going to make women like you. You have to have some intuitive empathy.⁶

Looksmaxers provide a 136 step protocol to fix your life. But although such a straight-forward process is appealing, it is deceptive.

There is no “program” or peptide that will cause social skills to fall out of the sky and plop them into your head.

Conclusion

It is natural to be an angry person as a result of low intuitive empathy. It is very logical and understandable. Anger, like all emotion, motivates us to make a change. Sometimes these changes are productive and fix the underlying issue, and sometimes they are just a coping mechanism.

You can’t be humorous if you’re constantly grinding your teeth. Let go, relax. Clavicular is correct in this respect: keep your cortisol low.

Simmering misanthropy leads to a stiff and up-tight demeanor. Learning to relax would be much more helpful at getting girls and status than getting plastic surgery.

Looksmaxers have deep problems, and hormones and surgery are bandaids, more of a placebo than a solution. If it makes you feel more confident and changes the way you see yourself so that you can be more relaxed with others, great. But I fear that many of the people pursuing looksmaxing are going to become depressed when the “protocol” fails their expectations, and they remain lonely and without love.

Making yourself look different is not going to solve deep internal personality issues. In fact, it might make things worse, because you’ve placed all your hopes into a physical placebo and when it fails you will feel hopeless. This can lead to some dark places.

Human happiness has much more to do with the inside than the outside. Chuds and woke transgenders have a difficult time understanding this, because they are autistic and lack intuitive empathy. They have a poor theory of mind, and no sense of the human soul. Everything is defined by external appearances — the essence of things is invisible to them.

Even if you do choose to make some changes in your external appearance, you can simultaneously make an effort to confront the internal weight of social rejection, and try to let go or redirect that anger and hurt. These don’t have to be mutually exclusive paths.

1. Bodybuilders training for hypertrophy is different from strongmen training for strength. Most bodybuilders (with some exceptions, like Ronnie Coleman) are not training to life as heavy as possible. Many can lift extremely heavy weights, but that’s not what they are optimizing for.

2. Bodybuilders are the Italians of the mental health community. It’s ok to make fun of them, say they have small penises, that they are overcompensating, that they are “meatheads.”

3. Not everyone who lacks intuitive empathy is necessarily a misanthrope or sociopath. Many people without intuitive empathy can engage in charity and acts of kindness; they can help others, volunteer, or make other people happy.

If asked, many with low-IE would agree with these statements: “I want to make the world a better place. I want to help others. I want to be part of something bigger than myself. I would sacrifice my life to save other people if given the chance.” People without intuitive empathy can be heroic.

4. Not all introverts have low-IE. Some introverts are are so perceptive that they “know too much” — they become overly sensitive or drained. If you could “see right through people,” and were hyper-aware of people’s “micro-deceptions,” that could be exhausting to deal with.

The most extroverted people have good social skills, but they might also be pathological in other ways, such as being willing to “go with the crowd,” even when it is morally wrong. A morally principled person may find social engagements to be exhausting (outside of a small and close circle of trusted friends), because they find most people to be deceptive, petty, superficial, and cruel.

5. If a girl is shy, introverted, and clumsy, she might be called a “nerd” and subjected to some high school bullying, but typically adult women do not engage in open hostility against other women for being awkward or having no friends.

However, teenage girls are vicious. Women who are bullied often internalize the trauma of teenage bullying, and then project the memories of this trauma onto adult relationships, thinking, “she probably would have been one of those popular girls who used to bully me.”

6. Even if you have poor social skills, there are way to compensate for that which are more effective than looksmaxing. I would start with your relationship with your mom. If that’s too scary for you, I would try joining a cult. That’s not really an exaggeration, but you’re probably not going to follow my advice. This is a negotiating tactic on my part: I hope you go to a Buddhist retreat or join a yoga class, at least. A cult would be better, but I’m pushing my luck asking you to leave your comfort zone. No one wants to change, especially not in the area of their life which is most difficult.

This might just make you angry and frustrated. This is ok, and part of the process. The point, once all of this frustrating work has been done, is to recognize that internal anger and recognize the harm it does. Buddhism or yoga would probably help reduce that anger.

Experiment with becoming aware of that anger so that it has less of a cancerous impact on your life.