This NY Times piece was depressing enough had I read it anywhere and not noticed the author; and then I hit the end of it and oh how much worse it became. First, this essay on “LooksMaxxing” (link below) is as solemn and superficial in its analysis of the phenomenon as is the phenomenon itself. It goes into statistic detail about the increasing rates of cosmetic surgery among men, cites explanations for this
phenomenon coming from a university psychology professor who blames it on social media, “curated and perfect” images now causing men to dwell in the same dreary world “women have been living in where you’re expected to have perfection.” Next comes men blaming dating apps, according to more scholarly research, which have “empowered” women to reject men on the same superficial grounds that men have always rejected women. Then the suggestion from the author of the piece that it’s not “picky women” causing male anxieties over their looks and grooming: It’s the “male gaze” of bullying frat-boy type men – the ones who, according to more cited research, value “competitiveness and dominance, having a playboy lifestyle, and pursuing power over others”. The piece goes no farther than this parade of fashionable finger-pointing.
Is any of this news or analysis? We get a recitation of these very familiar habits and attitudes of people stuck in Jr. High School mentality. That’s when many of us walked around insecure about just about everything while a few lunkheads and mean girls lorded it over the rest of us. Some of us were more consumed than others with the need to be accepted by the cool crowd, went to silly and even self-destructive lengths chasing external validation. Painful as this feels in those early teen years, it wasn’t very interesting even then. And it certainly wasn’t news or interesting about 15 years later when I had a patient in my office who shyly told me how she and her bratty high school friends made fun of the smart kids because they felt inferior to and even threatened by them. I’m sorry the women and men discussed so solemnly in this article have never grown up – never outgrown their frat boy mean girl defenses, their pre-adolescent overconcern with being in the cool crowd, their soothing self-identification as victims and finding someone to blame for it all. It is of course their right to spend their time, money, and emotional energy trying to be cool. But is telling me that such people exist news? Is it New York Times material? Because again that’s all the article has done. There is no probing beyond the surface fact that people have these attitudes and consequent behaviors – as anyone who went through pre-adolescence already knows.
Now here’s the real kicker. I hit the end of the article and saw who wrote it. It was not penned – can you say that in the digital age? – by that new breed of Kardashian known as the “influencer”, by a chat show host, by a nervous college kid entering adulthood and stretching his/her wings. That would be cheerfully, dismissably fun, and I could watch from my avuncular perch in my middle sixties, much as my father did at the same age watching me getting worked up during my clinical psych internship over theoretical
disputes among the professors, as if those had much to do with actual practice, with helping real patients (it doesn’t). No, the author of this trivia is a philosophy professor at Cornell University, one of our great institutions of higher learning. Well, it used to be.
Philosophers used to probe into our deepest gnarliest questions: Whence cometh and to what end all that snarky frat boy mean girl behavior, and why do so many of us succumb to it? Is the phenomenon related to and perhaps fueled by the prevalence and evolutionary value of social phobias as compared with fear of snakes, spiders, heights, or enclosed spaces? Does Jane Goodall’s observations of xenophobic violence in chimpanzees factor in? … My only hope is that this Ivy League professor wrote the piece as something of a lark, to stay current in her students’ eyes, to keep her name out there, to help her book sales or increase applications to her university. If she wrote it seriously, if she is turning what I assume is her formidable and well-read cranium to this pre-adolescent preoccupation – especially if this is as deep as her understanding of it goes – then I fear I’ve lived too long.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/11/opinion/plastic-surgery-looksmaxxing-male-gaze.html
My Facebook post: