Speaker 1: From the dark corners of the web. An emerging mindset.
Speaker 2: I am a loser if also women know wouldn't pay
Speaker 2: me either.
Speaker 3: A hidden world of resentment, cynicism, anger against women at
Speaker 3: a deadly tipping point.
Speaker 4: In Cells will be added to the Terrorism Guide.
Speaker 5: I see literally zero hope.
Speaker 1: This is in Cells a production of kt Studios and
Speaker 1: iHeart Podcasts, Season one, Episode nine, Looks Maxing.
Speaker 3: I've written about leg lengthening, surgery, penis enlargements, and they're
Speaker 3: all about men.
Speaker 6: As soon as you do that and you start to
Speaker 6: look for a perpetrator for a lot of men in
Speaker 6: the lopsmaxing community, that enemy has become women.
Speaker 3: It's a kind of story about insecure young people probably
Speaker 3: not finding the best places to look in the mirror.
Speaker 1: Online I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KATI Studios with
Speaker 1: Stephanie Leideger, Gabriel Christia Connor Powell, and Carolyn Miller. Online
Speaker 1: self improvement is everywhere, jawlines, cheekbones, hunter eyes, routines and
Speaker 1: recipes to fix a face, routines to fix a life.
Speaker 1: We follow how looks Maxing, a push to optimize your appearance,
Speaker 1: intersects with insul forums nihilistic beliefs and a new transphobic
Speaker 1: trope called transmaxing. Investigative journalist Connor Powell speaks to Rupert
Speaker 1: Small's CEO of Egregious, it's a UK startup that specializes
Speaker 1: in understanding social issues online. He also recently co authored
Speaker 1: a paper on looks maxing and radicalization pathways. We ask
Speaker 1: Rupert to start by describing the word looks maxing.
Speaker 6: It's kind of a belief that you know, there are
Speaker 6: various different ways and methods to maximize your physical appearance
Speaker 6: as a kind of methodology and a set of recipes,
Speaker 6: and if you follow them you can try and maximize
Speaker 6: how good you look physically objectively and through improving their looks,
Speaker 6: the believers that they'll improve their life in some way.
Speaker 1: Connor also spoke with Simon Osborne, a freelance features writer
Speaker 1: based out of London, for a different perspective. Simon often
Speaker 1: writes for The Guardian, and we asked how he first
Speaker 1: came across looks maxing.
Speaker 3: I'll be honest, it was new to me, but my
Speaker 3: editor at The Guardian, who I wrote this story for,
Speaker 3: has teenage sons and he had heard about it, I
Speaker 3: think via their online lives looks maxing is in a way,
Speaker 3: it's quite simple. It's generally young men online swapping ideas
Speaker 3: for how to improve how they look, mainly focusing on
Speaker 3: their facial aesthetics, but also their bodies. And it's a
Speaker 3: kind of hyper masculine version of what these guys think
Speaker 3: they should look like for their own, I guess, sense
Speaker 3: of security and also to attract the opposite sex. And
Speaker 3: when we look at the face looks maxing means hardening
Speaker 3: the jawline. It values things like hunter eyes, which are
Speaker 3: kind of eyes that points slightly downwards towards the nose.
Speaker 3: You know, strong foreheads, basically a sort of very masculine,
Speaker 3: strong man kind of look.
Speaker 5: Does it also going to the sort of traditional male
Speaker 5: desire to be strong and fit as well, or is
Speaker 5: it generally sort of this facial feature.
Speaker 3: It's very much sort of focused on the face, and
Speaker 3: a big part of it is swapping pictures of your
Speaker 3: own face for often quite harsh criticism within a community
Speaker 3: that might be a forum or a reddit or It
Speaker 3: all started a long time ago, I think, on four Chan,
Speaker 3: and then it's become very big on TikTok more recently.
Speaker 3: But I think it goes hand in hand with a
Speaker 3: sort of general masculine look that promotes a muscular physique.
Speaker 1: Simon's mention of harsh critics wasn't the first time we'd
Speaker 1: heard that. In fact, it seems almost a tenant of
Speaker 1: a lot of the online looks maxing communities. Here's a
Speaker 1: clip from First at five CTV News, followed by Connor
Speaker 1: and social scientist Rupert Small's.
Speaker 4: It's a term you may have never heard before, looks maxing.
Speaker 7: So it looks like it's a community where you are
Speaker 7: going to maybe pick up some tips for living a
Speaker 7: healthier life, maybe modifying your appearance in some way. And instead,
Speaker 7: what many people are getting is, you know, if you
Speaker 7: can't hit these benchmarks, then you should really consider self harm.
Speaker 1: Clearly, any approach that encourages someone to harm themselves is
Speaker 1: deeply concerning, But we wanted to know on a broader
Speaker 1: level how Rupert sees the idea of looks maxing.
Speaker 6: I think there's never anything wrong with the kind of
Speaker 6: high level objectives that are there to kind of ambitiously
Speaker 6: achieve a goal. I think what sometimes can go wrong
Speaker 6: is the roote we take to achieve that goal. So
Speaker 6: it's almost like that I robot situation from the famous
Speaker 6: film with Will Smith, where the robots are told to
Speaker 6: protect humanity, and actually in order to protect humanity, they
Speaker 6: figure out that if they lock us all up, we're
Speaker 6: going to be safe because you just can't be trusted.
Speaker 6: So I think it's a bit like that. But I
Speaker 6: think what you also see, which is a bit more worrying,
Speaker 6: is that people are exploiting men. They're trying to monetize
Speaker 6: the situation, and that's when things can go bad.
Speaker 5: So Looks Maxine to me is it has a parallel
Speaker 5: just in the traditional female natural beauty genre, right, which
Speaker 5: is like press implants LiPo. But I think what we're
Speaker 5: seeing online specifically is a recruitment to a much more
Speaker 5: darker world with young men. Can you walk me through
Speaker 5: sort of what you're seeing and what your research points to.
Speaker 6: Say there's a parallel there. But where it does take
Speaker 6: a darker turn for the Looks max In community is
Speaker 6: when that starts to to maybe ideologies around the in
Speaker 6: cell community, And that's actually an interesting kind of difference
Speaker 6: between the two, and that you know, some of the
Speaker 6: looks the men in the Loo Maxing community are being
Speaker 6: diverted or kind of radicalized in a way to see
Speaker 6: it as a grievance issue rather than a way to
Speaker 6: discover their best selves. It's become a manifestation of a
Speaker 6: lot of ill will and a kind of a contest
Speaker 6: between men and women, and that has meant that, you know,
Speaker 6: some of the men getting involved with that community have
Speaker 6: started to exhibit violent behaviors towards women and girls, et cetera,
Speaker 6: et cetera, which is not something you see so much
Speaker 6: in the other direction.
Speaker 1: Rupert points out that for some looks maxing begins in
Speaker 1: a positive way, it may inspire better diet and nutrition. However,
Speaker 1: he warrants that same motivation can easily start to shift.
Speaker 6: I think there's a thread to the story which got
Speaker 6: metastasized to extent and started to become exploited for ill
Speaker 6: and monetized, I should say, where it became a thing
Speaker 6: of more mewing and bone smashing, and you know, things
Speaker 6: came out of it which were quite overtly harmful for
Speaker 6: the body. And once that started happening and people started
Speaker 6: to try and I think maybe over monetize vulnerable individuals,
Speaker 6: that's where you started to see indications that there was
Speaker 6: at least a branch of that community which was leading
Speaker 6: people astray.
Speaker 1: Mewing, as Rubert mentioned, is something that's become very popular.
Speaker 1: The hashtag mewing has accumulated over a billion views on TikTok,
Speaker 1: with millions of videos created on the topic. Here's a
Speaker 1: quick explanation of what it is.
Speaker 8: This one is called mewing, Okay, not meowing, mewing. Mewing's
Speaker 8: been around for a while. It's this exercise where you
Speaker 8: put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and
Speaker 8: you swallow, and it's supposed to like strengthen and accentuate
Speaker 8: your jawline and get rid of the double chain if
Speaker 8: you have one. So the action of mewing has started
Speaker 8: to trend and has been trending on TikTok. People were
Speaker 8: teaching you, like, how do you get ready to double chane?
Speaker 9: All that good.
Speaker 1: Stuff here again, Connor and Rupert.
Speaker 5: What's the discussion around looks maxing within in cell forms.
Speaker 6: As these techniques became more and more punitive, as they
Speaker 6: became more difficult to achieve, or as they involved more
Speaker 6: and more self harm, for example, bone smashing, which involves
Speaker 6: hammering your jaw. I think that that kind of advice.
Speaker 6: When you're receiving it from a community you trust and
Speaker 6: leave in, you can start to get almost traumatized by it.
Speaker 6: And as soon as you start suffering, the question becomes
Speaker 6: as an individual, who's to blame for my suffering? They're
Speaker 6: feeling alienated, they're trying to improve their situation, but they
Speaker 6: realize by doing so, it's actually causing them to suffer,
Speaker 6: and so they're looking for who the perpetrator is. And
Speaker 6: as soon as you do that, and you start to
Speaker 6: look for a perpetrator and adversary of some form. Unfortunately,
Speaker 6: what has come out of that scenario is that for
Speaker 6: a lot of men in the lux maxing community, that
Speaker 6: enemy has become women. And so there is a kind
Speaker 6: of branch of the loux max community that has led
Speaker 6: quite naturally into the in cell community where women are
Speaker 6: blamed for this situation they applied for all of the
Speaker 6: difficulties that they're experiencing.
Speaker 1: We've heard from Luis before, he's a self identified black
Speaker 1: pilled in cell. In this conversation, he helps us trace
Speaker 1: how these online communities have evolved and how an obsession
Speaker 1: with looks has been part of that story from the
Speaker 1: very beginning. Now many of the same ideas are resurfacing
Speaker 1: under new banner framed as self improvement.
Speaker 2: Let me actually give you, like the entire history of insuls.
Speaker 2: It's going to be very quick, so ironically, the original
Speaker 2: in cell community started by a woman, a lesbian woman
Speaker 2: from Carlton University in Canada. It's called Alana's Involuntary Celibate Project.
Speaker 2: Who was the community for people who couldn't find love.
Speaker 2: And it was very inclusive, right, it wasn't just mail.
Speaker 2: And then you had other forums like love Shy, in
Speaker 2: cell support, but really, really, really the modern iteration of
Speaker 2: the incels that we all know that I'm a part of, right,
Speaker 2: the black pill and lookism and whatnot. And PSL started
Speaker 2: on a forum called PWA Hate. Pwayete dot com was
Speaker 2: created in two thousand and nine by a former pickup
Speaker 2: artist called Nicolaus. They had one section called Shitty Advice.
Speaker 2: And I don't know how, I don't know why, but
Speaker 2: they started talking about the importance of your looks. If
Speaker 2: you want to be a pickup artist, you have to
Speaker 2: be good looking. They came up with looks theory midphace theory.
Speaker 2: They would recommend each other's surgeries.
Speaker 1: Luis mentioned PSL. PSL is an acronym from three early
Speaker 1: in cell websites, pu Hate, slut hate, and lookism dot net.
Speaker 1: It's a ranking system many in cells subscribe to and
Speaker 1: some upset. It ranks men's attractiveness from one to eight.
Speaker 1: Luis continues, it's pretty funny.
Speaker 2: But after that they created slut hate the promiscuous a
Speaker 2: term for a promiscuous women, right, slut hate dot com.
Speaker 2: And yeah, same thing. They would just talk about, looks
Speaker 2: how pickup artists suck, how women suck, how normy suck. That.
Speaker 2: In twenty eighteen they created loukism dot net. So that's
Speaker 2: really the trifecta. That's where PSL comes from, PA Hate,
Speaker 2: slut Hate, loukism dot net. Right now, it's just Insul's
Speaker 2: and looksmax dot org, which came after lucism dot net.
Speaker 2: It used to be known as lucism dot me. No,
Speaker 2: looks max dot me. Now it's looksmax dot org. And
Speaker 2: that's really the history of the insull forums.
Speaker 1: Let's stop here for a break. We'll be back in
Speaker 1: a moment. Connor continues his discussion with journalist Simon Osborne,
Speaker 1: asking how he've used looksmaxing intersecting with pop culture in
Speaker 1: general and in cell communities in particular.
Speaker 3: There was a kind of almost a split where there
Speaker 3: was quite a lot of stuff on TikTok which often
Speaker 3: wasn't particularly dark in nature. A lot of it was
Speaker 3: just often very insecure teenage boys and young men trying
Speaker 3: to find ways to kind of fulfill this look. But
Speaker 3: I think one of the reasons it's caught the attention
Speaker 3: is that it does have a darker side, and it
Speaker 3: started in a fairly dark place, and there is or
Speaker 3: there having concerns that is sort of springing from in
Speaker 3: cell culture, and that a lot of the men who
Speaker 3: are very harshly criticizing off an insecure young men on
Speaker 3: this site are also you know, misogynistic. There's been a
Speaker 3: lot of recent discussion about racism in lux maxing. There
Speaker 3: was a young black journalist in the US who I
Speaker 3: think path jokingly tried to become the first black Looks
Speaker 3: Maxer because it seemed to him to be a very
Speaker 3: white pursuit, and then was very swiftly bombarded with racist
Speaker 3: abuse on social media.
Speaker 5: And one of the people you profiled is cream Shami.
Speaker 9: Yes, well, what did.
Speaker 5: You find out about him? And what's his role in this.
Speaker 3: He's a very interesting figure in that he kind of
Speaker 3: lived the life and then became a big influencer in
Speaker 3: the lux maxing world. When I spoke to me, he
Speaker 3: was twenty two. He had emigrated with his family from
Speaker 3: Syria as a youngster from the war there and settled
Speaker 3: in the US, and he had kind of done the
Speaker 3: looks Maxing thing himself and had really changed his look
Speaker 3: quite dramatically and had a lot of the sort of
Speaker 3: holy Grail features of a looks maxed person, with the
Speaker 3: cheekbones and the strong jaw and all the rest of it,
Speaker 3: and very good skin. Skin is another part of this.
Speaker 3: And then he started to kind of chart his own
Speaker 3: journey on TikTok and it kind of took off in
Speaker 3: a big way.
Speaker 1: Kareem Shami, the self proclaimed godfather of looks Maxing, has
Speaker 1: over two point five million followers on social media. He's
Speaker 1: the founder of Ascend Laboratories, which provides esthetic enhancement coaching.
Speaker 1: He ties together male self improvement, visual identity and influencer commerce.
Speaker 1: Here again Simon speaking about Kareem Shami, But.
Speaker 3: I also get the sense that he was slightly conflicted,
Speaker 3: because you know, His profile picture on TikTok at the
Speaker 3: time was Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, and that to
Speaker 3: me sort of aligned with a lot of the concerns
Speaker 3: people were expressing about misogyny and hypermasculinity and how Looks
Speaker 3: Maxing was all part of that. He said that it
Speaker 3: was just because he liked some of the way that
Speaker 3: that character looked and didn't really align with his worldview
Speaker 3: or his view of women. One particular video he posted
Speaker 3: of his transformation, he had really taken off as a
Speaker 3: kind of big figure on TikTok under the name Syrian Psycho.
Speaker 3: That was what his user name is.
Speaker 5: I was looking at Looks Maxine first because there was
Speaker 5: an obvious connection to Intel community. Those that are trying
Speaker 5: to sort of become the things that they hate to
Speaker 5: attract the women that they're frustrated with. And then there
Speaker 5: are those that just sort of accept beliefs, which is
Speaker 5: sort of like you're never going to have a relationship,
Speaker 5: You're always going to be ugly and miserable and just
Speaker 5: use that rage, live off that rage. How did you
Speaker 5: find Looks Maxine within the Intel community?
Speaker 3: That's sort of the word rep zen, a community of
Speaker 3: people that is bigger than any sort of one element,
Speaker 3: and so as far as there is an inceell overlap,
Speaker 3: I think there is also a side of it that's
Speaker 3: more just about people just being kind of bitchy and
Speaker 3: mean at each other in a way that maybe we
Speaker 3: would often sort of traditionally associate with young women. And
Speaker 3: I think part of this is that young men are
Speaker 3: increasingly subject to the same insecurities and harsh lenses as
Speaker 3: women and girls have traditionally been. Really, it's a kind
Speaker 3: of story about insecure young people probably not finding the
Speaker 3: best places to look in the mirror online.
Speaker 1: In fact, studies show that online feedback in the vast
Speaker 1: majority of these forums is overwhelmingly negative.
Speaker 4: And you're report by dell Housie University saw researchers come
Speaker 4: through thousands of comments on a discussion board of an
Speaker 4: online community that receives six million unique visitors a month.
Speaker 10: Many of the people participating in these communities are young,
Speaker 10: so they're boys who are thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, the university students,
Speaker 10: they're surprisingly young. We saw no one get universal praise.
Speaker 10: We saw everybody get insults, and predominantly people are told
Speaker 10: that they're considerably ugly or unattractive.
Speaker 3: My bigger concern was that really it was you know,
Speaker 3: people who were already worried about their facial features putting
Speaker 3: pictures in themselves in you know, TikTok or Reddit and
Speaker 3: getting quite a lot of criticism and then just ending
Speaker 3: up feeling worse about themselves and maybe resorting to questionable,
Speaker 3: time consuming, uncomfortable processes like mewing to strengthen their faces,
Speaker 3: or in the case of the guy I spoke to,
Speaker 3: you know, seriously considering paying ten thousand pounds to have
Speaker 3: surgery and to extend his chin.
Speaker 5: If we're sort of stepping back, do you think it's
Speaker 5: terribly different than what we're seeing with just women in general.
Speaker 3: No, I don't, And I think that's a good point.
Speaker 3: And for some reason I sort of seem to have
Speaker 3: developed a kind of mini specialism at the Guardian because
Speaker 3: they keep asking me to write about male esthetic surgery.
Speaker 3: I've written about hair transplants and tooth surgery and chin implants.
Speaker 3: With this, I've written about leg lengthening surgery, penis enlargements,
Speaker 3: and then they're all about men. It's the same motivations,
Speaker 3: the same people, and the same kind of pressures on
Speaker 3: them and it's young men, yeah, feeling insecure and then
Speaker 3: having that insecurity fueled by online communities. And then because
Speaker 3: the demand is they're finding the outlets via searches online
Speaker 3: to get solutions to their problems in extremely competitive online marketplaces,
Speaker 3: which often lead them to cut price and dodgy actors.
Speaker 3: I'm thinking of transplant surgeons charging a fraction of what
Speaker 3: you would pay in a reputable clinic.
Speaker 1: Some men have sought out corrective surgeries, such as chin
Speaker 1: lengthening or jaw repositioning. These are done to achieve a
Speaker 1: more angular projected chin and jawline. Limb lengthening is another
Speaker 1: area of surgery which is used to increase height.
Speaker 3: And then you end up with the nightmare stories of
Speaker 3: men and young men finding that they're deeply distressed with
Speaker 3: the process and the results because they've often paid very
Speaker 3: low amounts for this sort of surgery. Often, these surgeons
Speaker 3: and these markets are ones that have existed for a
Speaker 3: long time because of the demand from women, and now
Speaker 3: there is the demand from men, and one you know,
Speaker 3: on the one hand, women might I think we'll welcome
Speaker 3: to our world. This is what it's like. The pressure
Speaker 3: is to look certain ways, but then you know, the
Speaker 3: other way of looking at is that it's the worst
Speaker 3: sort of equality, because we should be addressing the sort
Speaker 3: of drivers for these insecurities and kind of trying to
Speaker 3: make people more common, whether they're male or female, because
Speaker 3: it's a pretty sorry trade. And even when you speak
Speaker 3: to people who've had surgery and chin surgery in the
Speaker 3: case of looks Maxing, you know, they often say it's
Speaker 3: changed my life. I feel like a new person. It's amazing.
Speaker 3: But even they often say I wish I didn't have
Speaker 3: to go through all this to get to that place.
Speaker 1: We wanted to understand how far this can go. Rubert
Speaker 1: Small's unpacks the overlap between looks Maxing in cells and
Speaker 1: potential violence. We note again that the rate of actual
Speaker 1: physical violence based on in cell ideology is very low.
Speaker 1: Here's Rupert.
Speaker 6: We're seeing a lot of let's say, co correlations between
Speaker 6: that community and in cell communities and communities even in
Speaker 6: the kind of the mashooter communities and who kind of
Speaker 6: lionize and celebrate mass shooting and violence towards women. So
Speaker 6: it's hard to make a a direct link and say that,
Speaker 6: you know, because this person, let's say Elliott Roger, for example,
Speaker 6: Even if we can't directly attribute Looks Maxing to Elliott Roger,
Speaker 6: we can say that there's a lot of overlap in
Speaker 6: those communities. They share similar content, they share memes, they
Speaker 6: share members, they share symbols and meaning together, and they
Speaker 6: develop that they kind of co develop that meaning. So
Speaker 6: that's as much as we can say to date, and
Speaker 6: just because of the kind of tight relationship between those communities,
Speaker 6: we can say at the very least that they are
Speaker 6: influential to each other. Just as scientists, we don't want
Speaker 6: to directly attribute violence to a specific meme, more specific post.
Speaker 5: You can see, as you say, there's the victimization, there's
Speaker 5: the what am I getting? How the self harm? You
Speaker 5: can see this sort of path to self destruction.
Speaker 6: Really, yeah, people are looking for an exit out of
Speaker 6: their current situation. I think in a lot of this,
Speaker 6: and like you say, sometimes that's going to manifest in
Speaker 6: self harm for the purposes of looks Maxing. Sometimes actually
Speaker 6: people just doing self harm to exit in another way,
Speaker 6: like psychologically exit the situation because self harm distracts them
Speaker 6: from another pain somewhere else. And if you're in a
Speaker 6: position of as I think a lot of in cells
Speaker 6: are in a lot of you know, members of the
Speaker 6: looks Maxing community, they're in a position of really really
Speaker 6: needing support to help them get themselves out of what
Speaker 6: they experience as a really painful situation. Ultimately, it's all
Speaker 6: born of a form of desperation to get out of
Speaker 6: what is a very difficult situation.
Speaker 5: You mentioned that you looked at the algorithm and the
Speaker 5: sort of adjacent words, and how does the blackpill fit
Speaker 5: into looks Maxing from what you can tell.
Speaker 6: I guess maybe the reason you're asking this question is
Speaker 6: that you might see looks Maxing as an innately hopeful
Speaker 6: ideology or belief system where you know, if you do
Speaker 6: something regularly, if you're persistent about it, if you put
Speaker 6: work in, you'll be able to look better and that's
Speaker 6: going to help improve your life. I think the answer
Speaker 6: to that again like, what is the link between luks
Speaker 6: Maxing and black Pile? Again, it's a past dependent state.
Speaker 1: To better understand how these ideas take root in real life,
Speaker 1: we spoke with a man who goes by mister East.
Speaker 1: He's a self described black pilt in Cel Mysteries. Explains
Speaker 1: how these beliefs shape the way he sees dating success
Speaker 1: and the world around him.
Speaker 11: Certain traits you have, such as looks, wealth, they make
Speaker 11: it more likely for you to succeed within a certain context.
Speaker 11: Dating romantically, I just recognize that despite what popular consensus
Speaker 11: believes about so called romantic and like just general success
Speaker 11: within like socializing in general, it does really heavily depend
Speaker 11: on your looks and your ability to socialize. However, for
Speaker 11: some people that might not work because of their ethnicity,
Speaker 11: because of their looks, because of their might. No matter what,
Speaker 11: a lot of the stuff that they learn might not work.
Speaker 11: The general consensus within societies that be nice, be respectful,
Speaker 11: you will succeed. This is like the biggest contradiction despite
Speaker 11: what society tells you, the nice guy never wins in
Speaker 11: this case, well, unless you're handsome and good looking, which
Speaker 11: I guess explains why good looking people don't understand the
Speaker 11: struggles that people who maybe are nice but don't have
Speaker 11: the looks to attract people.
Speaker 1: May think, let's stop here for another break. We'll be
Speaker 1: back in a moment. Rupert continues explaining the complexity of
Speaker 1: how different threads within these communities can lead in very
Speaker 1: different directions, from self improvement to something far more nefarious.
Speaker 6: I think people have recognized that have kind of gained
Speaker 6: that and that's why you often see you know, the
Speaker 6: Blackpool hashtag mentioned together in in posts with looks Maxing
Speaker 6: hashtags is because there's you know, some creators have recognized
Speaker 6: that overlap and they can grab attention and they can
Speaker 6: take members from that one community by just putting those
Speaker 6: hashtags together. If you were looking at it more from
Speaker 6: the radicalization side of things, like radicalization pathways, I would
Speaker 6: say there are many different threads and pathways through looks maxing,
Speaker 6: Like tox maxing is kind of one of the resting
Speaker 6: points or the waypoints along the way for what could
Speaker 6: be very a wide range of radicalization situations. Some would
Speaker 6: lead to self harmed, some would lead to violence against women,
Speaker 6: et cetera, et cetera. And the fact that there are
Speaker 6: many paths which cross looks maxing and then ultimately go
Speaker 6: elsewhere makes this a very complex situation to describe to people.
Speaker 5: Is it a phrase that you see growing?
Speaker 6: We drew in more than eighty thousand videos from over
Speaker 6: forty thousand users on a social media platform. This very
Speaker 6: clear connection between Elliott Roger fandom, Elliott Roger being a shooter.
Speaker 6: UK born American shooter. He killed six people injured fourteen
Speaker 6: others with a mixture of you know, knives and semi
Speaker 6: automatic pistols. And Elliott Roger is lionized by many people
Speaker 6: in the inzell and Looks Maxing communities, and he's given
Speaker 6: a lot of voice and his manifesto is spoken about
Speaker 6: a lot, all of which has now been laundered and
Speaker 6: mixed up within these insell and looks Maxing communities. That
Speaker 6: was the interesting thing to us, and that was kind
Speaker 6: of what triggered our concern because it's by kind of
Speaker 6: adopting that terminology that innocent people within who're just gone
Speaker 6: to looks Maxing for you know, self improvement, can easily
Speaker 6: start to get nudged into a much darker ideology and
Speaker 6: even into you know, self harm or into violence. So
Speaker 6: that was the link for us, rather than the volume
Speaker 6: of posts we were seeing, although when we did look
Speaker 6: we saw the very high volume of posts.
Speaker 1: We wanted to take a moment to explain what transmaxing is.
Speaker 1: Like so many of the terms we've come across in
Speaker 1: this series. It's part of an online vocabulary that's constantly evolving.
Speaker 1: Connor spoke with editor keysepe Lopez, who explains it's less
Speaker 1: something happening in real life and more reflection of what's
Speaker 1: being imagined online.
Speaker 9: My name is Keyspey Lopez.
Speaker 12: I'm the lifestyle editor over at Them, which is Conde
Speaker 12: Nast's LGBTQ publication.
Speaker 5: I've been on some of these in cell websites. It
Speaker 5: almost feels as if it's not actually a real thing,
Speaker 5: but it's just people sort of putting it out there
Speaker 5: to make a point about how great it is to
Speaker 5: be a woman and how awful it is to be
Speaker 5: a man.
Speaker 12: It's kind of stemming from the exact same ideology that
Speaker 12: is foundational to all in cell thought, which is exactly
Speaker 12: what you're speaking to.
Speaker 9: It's easier to be a woman.
Speaker 12: Society benefits women, so of course someone would want to
Speaker 12: be a woman, and that's why trans people are actually transitioning.
Speaker 9: That's the kind of backing thought to it all.
Speaker 5: How would you define transmaxine for someone who's never heard
Speaker 5: that term before.
Speaker 12: It's basically a transphobic trope that is like often perpetuated
Speaker 12: and spoken about in in cell communities that anybody would
Speaker 12: transition not because of like an internal gender feeling that
Speaker 12: they're having or a mismatch in their identity, but rather
Speaker 12: for the social benefits of it. It basically perpetuates the
Speaker 12: claim that trans women are not actually women. They're like
Speaker 12: transitioning because they want to gain the social benefits quote
Speaker 12: unquote of being a woman. And that is like obviously
Speaker 12: rooted in transphobia and also in deep misogyny and the
Speaker 12: intersection of the two.
Speaker 5: When did you first see this popping up online in conversation?
Speaker 12: It's something that came about in the last ten years.
Speaker 12: Rather than trying to change yourself to fit a society
Speaker 12: that benefits women, black pill believers don't believe they should
Speaker 12: have to change themselves by looks maxing, and instead they've
Speaker 12: accepted their fate as an inceell and they believe that
Speaker 12: society should change instead to be more inclusive of in cells.
Speaker 12: Transmaxing fits into that because it's basically like, well, some
Speaker 12: in cells cannot look smax out of their fate of
Speaker 12: being involuntarily celibate, so instead they should rather than trying
Speaker 12: to meet this ideal standard for like being a man,
Speaker 12: they should instead transition to be women because that would
Speaker 12: be easier for them in society. They'll get all of
Speaker 12: these like social benefits, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: As helps us understand where transmaxing began, tracing its roots
Speaker 1: back to a single manifesto.
Speaker 12: It's basically this long rambling manifesto that's been updated twelve
Speaker 12: times called the Transmaxing Manifesto. It's from the deep, deep
Speaker 12: corners of in cell communities online.
Speaker 9: It basically details all of the.
Speaker 12: Social benefits that you know, one might have if they
Speaker 12: are having, you know, not a lot of luck as
Speaker 12: an inceel, want to change their faith, want to like
Speaker 12: change their position in society by transitioning, And it kind
Speaker 12: of outlines these really ridiculous ideas that are like you'll
Speaker 12: get cheaper car insurance, you will find partnership, you'll have
Speaker 12: access to dating other trans women, like all of these
Speaker 12: things that are ignoring the tangible realities that come with
Speaker 12: being trans in this world, such as like increased starts
Speaker 12: of violence, and it kind of puts that aside and
Speaker 12: it is like, actually, it'll be great and it'll fix
Speaker 12: your life if you're an inceel to be a transmaxer.
Speaker 9: But that's just that's.
Speaker 12: The only written piece of this ideology.
Speaker 5: Any idea who wrote this manifesto.
Speaker 12: Like many ideologies that start in the Internet. It can
Speaker 12: be hard to pin down exactly who we know the
Speaker 12: user name.
Speaker 9: It's someone who is.
Speaker 12: Called bontology, and it's basically been updated a bunch of times.
Speaker 12: It exists on these Internet archives and deep Threddit threads
Speaker 12: as well as four Chune.
Speaker 5: Anytimes you want to add that I didn't ask you,
Speaker 5: or point you want to make that I didn't ask
Speaker 5: you on, I think.
Speaker 12: I just want to emphasize that transmaxers aren't a threat
Speaker 12: to your daily life. They don't exist as a movement,
Speaker 12: and I think that speaking about them in conversation with
Speaker 12: like trans people as a community is a false equivalency
Speaker 12: that I really want to urge people to not engage in,
Speaker 12: because it's just a transphobic Internet trope as opposed to
Speaker 12: like an entire community of people who are just trying
Speaker 12: to do their best and live their daily lives. I
Speaker 12: would just urge people to not add fuel to the
Speaker 12: fire and really be careful about.
Speaker 9: The information that you're consuming and do research.
Speaker 12: Have media literacy, because I think it can be really
Speaker 12: easy to get in the weeds with any kind of
Speaker 12: in cell community language because there is just so much
Speaker 12: of it and it's so vast and so awful. But
Speaker 12: I promise transmaxers aren't a threat because they don't exist.
Speaker 9: I think the real threat is the way.
Speaker 12: That young men are socialized in this country and socialized
Speaker 12: towards violence.
Speaker 1: For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow
Speaker 1: us on Instagram at KT Underscore Studios. In Cells is
Speaker 1: produced by Stephanie Laideger, Gabriel Castillo, and me Courtney Armstrong.
Speaker 1: Additional producing by Connor Powell and Caroline Miller, editing by
Speaker 1: Jeff Tooi music by Vanikore. Studios In Cells is a
Speaker 1: production of KAT Studios and iHeart Podcasts. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: like this, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
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