In 2024, I wrote an article about the direction male body image was heading. It was bleak, looking at how impressive male physiques of the 90s would now be considered average. At the time, there was an appetite for muscles that had once been reserved for superheroes and competitive body builders, but this was only an indicator of what was to come. 

Just a few years later, and the landscape surrounding male body image is more fraught than ever. Trends and terms like looksmaxxing, mewing and mogging, which originated in incel forums, have pushed male aesthetics to the extreme. The expectations have hit levels that feel practically unattainable. Fitness enhancing drugs, which were once only discussed in relation to competitive bodybuilders and sporting superstars, have now entered the mainstream. The misuse of GLP-1s have triggered an obsession with minimising body fat. 

“I have seen more media and social media attention to several different male body ideals at once: being thinner, being more muscular, being more proportionate, and, in some circles, looking more androgynous,” says David Sasaki, online director for the American Institute of Boys and Men, an organisation aiming to improve the wellbeing of boys and men. While this may sound contradictory, Sasaki stresses that one thing is clear: “body dissatisfaction is bad for mental health. The specific ideal may change, but the underlying pattern is the same: when self-worth gets tied too tightly to appearance, boys and men tend to suffer for it.” 

Part of the problem is that inter-male competition has become more ferocious. On social media, there’s always someone to compare yourself to, and therefore compete with. There’s a never-ending content cycle of tips and tricks for how to get the perfect jawline, prevent hair loss, and achieve facial symmetry. The fact that we’re seeing so many lads coming back from Turkey with new teeth and a reworked hairline isn’t just to do with increased accessibility, it reflects a cultural shift where aging is presented as optional, and not fighting it is failure.

We bore witness to this in Louis Theroux’s recent Netflix documentary, Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere, where many of the men interviewed spoke about body image as a form of cultural currency, and procedures like jaw filler, chin surgery and Botox are considered everyday options for “optimising” their physical appearance. Influencer Clavicular has endorsed jaw surgery, limb lengthening surgery, testosterone, minoxidil (for his hair), Accutane (for his skin), experimental weight loss medication retatrutide, crystal meth (to hollow his cheeks) and taking a hammer to the face (“bonesmashing”). In Ryan Murphy’s recent satire of beauty and Ozempic culture, The Beauty, an incel character named Jeremy is convinced by a chat room message to see a plastic surgeon who promises to make all his dreams come true by transforming him (through drastic and expensive procedures) into a cartoonish “chad”. 

“[The term] mogging is often used ironically, but it still reflects the same basic logic: ranking men against one another by appearance,” says Sasaki. “Social media turns ordinary status competition into something more visible, more measurable, and more relentless. It puts appearance into a feedback loop of comparison and algorithmic reward.” The age-old concept of sizing up other men in the locker-room showers has bled out into wider male existence. And despite an insistence that these beauty standards are what is needed to attract and date women, it is more often a male gaze rather than a female one that is driving the ideals – as was seen in the gendered debate over whether Olly Murs looked better before or after his 12-week gym transformation.   

A viral TikTok recently suggested that the current looksmaxxing culture is “toxic muscle gay circuit party culture escaping containment and being transmitted to straight people.” As a gay man, I’m reluctant to suggest that straight male body ideals are a result of the gay male gaze, but it’s hard to overlook the correlation. This ideology was theorised in the early 2000s, when psychologist Alan Downs suggested in his book, The Velvet Rage, that gay men use their bodies as a tool for handling toxic shame, claiming that the validation acquired through compliments about our bodies helps to distract from deeply rooted trauma. It tracks, then, that in an era where many of us feel increasingly scrutinised, surveilled, and judged on social media, that growing numbers of straight men are apparently channelling their insecurities into hyperfixating on their appearances.

The problem is – there’s no barometer of perfection, which means these lads will just keep toning, chisseling and injecting indefinitely. As soon as they come close to reaching this perceived body “ideal”, it jumps further away into the distance for them to keep chasing. It’s the Penrose stairs effect – there is no finish line.

But realistically, where do we go from here? Will the beauty standards keep being pushed to ever more extremes, or will the pendulum shift towards male body positivity? Sasaki and the American Institute of Boys and Men have ideas for how we can move in the right direction. “Men need more sources of esteem that are not tied to appearance, including public recognition of qualities like competence, kindness, humor, character and reliability. Men rarely receive positive, non-competitive feedback about their bodies,” he surmises. “Many are hungry for basic affirmation that they are acceptable just the way they are.”