One of the aspects of looksmaxxing that draws me to this beauty trend is its fundamental obsessive commitment to aesthetic improvement. The pulse of optimization vitalizes looksmaxxing, a trend that could not survive without the perpetual production of new advice, products, and tips on how to transform oneself into a more beautiful person.
Excerpts from the ‘Men’s Guide’ document provided by the looksmaxxing Subreddit page r/TrueRateMe–which claims that “the purpose of this sub [as in Subreddit page ] is to provide facial ratings of both men and women based on *objective factors* such as harmony, sexual dimorphism, symmetry, and qualities of their features. This means analyzing/evaluating a person’s attractiveness without regard for one’s own feelings. This is not a subjective rating sub.”
During this past month, I have shifted the concentration of my historical analysis from facial reading practices such as phrenology and physiognomy to Enlightenment body philosophy. I am especially inspired by the work of historian Sander Gilman who (citing Richard Sennett) writes that “the Enlightenment self-remaking took place in public, and was dependent on being ‘seen’ by others as transformed. This extended to the reshaping of the body, even within the world of fashion: ‘At home, one’s clothes suited one’s body and its needs, on the street, one stepped into clothes whose purpose was to make it possible for other people to act as if they knew who you were. One became a figure in a contrived landscape; the purpose of the clothes was not to be sure of whom you were dealing with, but to be able to behave as if you were sure.’” Such a public-facing body was also a distinctly racial and national one, demanding transformation from both well-to-do whites and those racialized as Other through their disease history, geography, or skin color. Despite this, body modification and modulation were suspect, as it illuminated the fungibility of Enlightenment racial and otherwise phenotypical categorizations. Gilman notes that “passing was the nineteenth century’s pejorative term for the act of disguising one’s ‘real’ (racial) self. It was also the ultimate articulation of the Enlightenment notion of transformation.”
Bodily transformation was widely indulged during the Enlightenment period, especially in England where bodies were becoming conspicuously thinner. Sabrina Strings writes that “during the long eighteenth century, as eating and drinking less became evidence of refinement, so too did the thinner figures such behavior produced. Therefore, at the same time that gluttony and fatness were becoming associated with African women in scientific racial literature, the values of delicacy, discipline, and slimmer physique were becoming associated with English women by the arbiters of taste and the purveyors of morality. Far from being a coincidence, the fear of being uncultured, and thus like racial and national Others, lay at the heart of these developments.” In England its American colonies, svelteness communicated the rational selfhood the Enlightenment privileged. The thinness of English and American bodies was also instrumentalized as a means to distinguish these bodies from those of other geographies, including other European nations.
This upcoming month, I will continue my investigation of the modes of selfhood constructed through body-producing discourses during the Enlightenment in England and the American colonies. Additionally, I will begin to look more closely at looksmaxxing communities and their ability to construct our understanding of body, beauty, ethnicity, race, and nation with the help of Everything I Need I Get from You: How Fangirls Created the Internet as We Know It by Kaitlyn Tiffany.
A meme I found on X, whose title translates to “Is your cat a Chad or beta?” Although made in ironic mood, the meme communicates the proliferation and metabolization of a serious and inextricable link between body and selfhood categorization.