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Hello, Doc.
I’m an 18-year-old sexually inexperienced male who has been pondering some questions about the nature of sexual and romantic attraction; and whether it’s purely superficial.
The reason being that I’ve been encountering a lot of “looks maxing” content online, which has sparked some insecurities within me. I’m beginning to notice aspects of my appearance that I hadn’t paid much attention to before, and it’s making me self-conscious.
I have learned about obscure stuff relating to facial aesthetics. Examples include “positive canthal tilt,” facial width-to-height ratio, the so-called golden ratio, and how if you are under 6’2″, you better make up for it with your face, or accept that you’ll never be romantically involved with a woman.
Given that I don’t compare anywhere to this so called “Chads” with their chiseled jaws, broad shoulders, and model-esque faces, I have grown pessimistic, cynical and defeatist.
What’s worse is this cynicism isn’t just related to my value in the dating marketplace, but it’s changed the way I look at the world, the human race and it’s social dynamics altogether, and it isn’t pretty.
Hoping to hear from you soon, with your insights.
Warm regards,
Blackpilled Normie
Ah, I see it’s time to reset the clock.
I get letters like this so frequently that they’ve become their own category tag. If I got paid a nickel for every average-but-needs-a-haircut-at-worst guy who insisted that he was too ugly to find love, I would retire to spend my days swimming around in my money bin like Scrooge McDuck.
Now, this question is easy, BPN. Anyone who unironically talks about the need for, or promotion of, “looksmaxxing” – a term that incels invented to talk about “trying to improve one’s physical appearance” but for people who are terminally online – is not a serious person and everything they say can safely be discarded. Anyone who is selling or promoting products related to “looksmaxxing” is at best a dupe and at worst someone who’s actively scamming you by preying on the insecurities that every teenager experiences.
The videos are nonsense and influencers themselves are clout-chasing scam artists who lack the ability to draw, sing, dance or otherwise actually do anything of interest and instead seek out fame by trying to trigger people’s anxieties, spurred on by an algorithm that considers anger and controversy to be the same as meaningful engagement. It’s clickbait of the lowest order, perpetuated by people who think you’re stupid enough to fall for it and would pull the wallet-inspector scam on you if they thought they could get it to work over Venmo.
Hell, half the time, they’ll brag to your face that they’re cheating you. Andrew Tate cheerfully talks about the scams and cons he runs on people and how they work to the people he’s charging money for the privilege of being conned.
Let me be blunt here: you didn’t really “learn” any sort of secret or occult knowledge, my guy. You spent a lot of time being fed 19th century phrenology – literally – that got nuked in the microwave until it came out a steaming grey and green-lined (no seriously, the fuck is it with these people and green lines on pictures) pile of slop. It is, to use the technical term, a massive pile of horseshit. The supposed rules and ratios of being “Chad-like” were compiled over time by a bunch of men who – by their own admission – are incapable of actually talking to a woman and are based around at times screamingly racist ideas about so-called “ideal” looks.
None of it is new, secret or even effective. “Mewing” – that is, putting your tongue to the roof of your mouth to tighten the ligaments around your neck and pull up the flesh on the underside of your chin – is one of the posing tricks that the contestants on America’s Top Model are taught to do in the first week. Those jaw exercises and “face tightening” techniques are stolen from “facercize” videos from the 90s that were aimed at middle-aged women.
Even the so-called success stories are fake. It’s very easy to achieve the same before/after results you’ll see in a lot of videos. All you need is to change the lighting, adjust how you’re angling your face, shift the focal length of the lens and pray that none of your marks I mean friends ever google “how to contour” and realize that the new cheekbones and “canthal tilt” you developed are the result of make-up tutorials and late-night infomercials with a side of dehydration.
It is, quite literally, all smokey-eye-and-mirrors, a hoax and a fraud being perpetuated on people who haven’t fully accepted that 80% of the pictures they’re seeing on Instagram have been FaceTuned to within an inch of their lives.
It also, I might point out, has nothing to do with what women find attractive. You may have noticed, as the YouTube and TikTok algorithms were opening up the firehose of self-hate, how all the “Looksmaxxers” rating and comparing celebrities and telling you which are the “ideal” are all men – not women. This would be because, contrary to what they insist, the looks that they’re advocating are entirely about what they find appealing, not what women do. It all has to do with another man’s idea of what makes men attractive, not what women actually desire and wouldn’t you know it, it all has to do with ideas of power, dominance and violence. This is why “GigaChad” – who is definitely a person and not a combo of CG and abuse of Photoshop’s liquify tool – looks like a page from Burne Hogarths’ “Dynamic Anatomy”; it’s a power fantasy for men, not a sexual fantasy for women.
Hell, when you point out the some of the guys that women actually swoon over – Pete Davidson in his Waffle-House-line-cook-that-also-deals-in-meth finest, Serge Gainsbourg and his Innsmouth Look, Matt Berry, Daniel Radcliffe, Peter Dinklage, K. Trevor Johnson, Jesse Plemmons, the number of women who want to lick frosting off Paul Hollywood or, hell, even someone like Jensen Ackles – and it’s like asking an AI to divide by zero. And if you point out, say, Don Cheadle, Winston Duke or Donald Glover, you might watch catch on fire. Cheadle, Duke and Glover are objectively good looking, don’t get me wrong… but they defy all of the “metrics” that supposedly rule attraction. And also, y’know. They’re not white.
Honestly, it’s very easy to debunk these claims. All you really need to do is just go outside and look at people. Real people, average people get laid on a daily basis.
You might be shocked to see that people of all shapes and sizes, who have neither robust “lower thirds”, perfect cheekbones, “hunters eyes” or ideal brow-to-jaw ratios have, in fact, coupled up, gotten married and had kids. I work with clients who are short, fat, balding, , painfully skinny, baby-faced and otherwise “failing” at every metric the “looksmaxxers” insist are vital, but who’ve ended up having more sex in the last year than you’ve had hot meals.
Nor is it even the “looksmatching” that some incels will claim; “hot woman/mid-to-ugly boyfriend” pairing is a cliché for a reason. Billy Joel and Christie Brinkley, Lyle Lovett and Julia Roberts, Dennis and Elizabeth Kucinich, Matthew Arend and Christina Hendricks, 1/3rd of the population of France… I could go on and on.
Meanwhile many incels have dropped new car levels of money on plastic surgery and took the bandages off to discover that their love problems hadn’t been solved at all. Because, shock of shocks, the problem wasn’t their looks. The call was coming from inside their heads.
Now, there’re a lot of things that one can do to improve one’s looks. But rather than necessitating chewing extra hard gum or pulling the skin around one’s eyes – which, incidentally, will just give you baggier eyes, not change your canthal tilt – most of it is very simple. Boring, even. You want to wash your face daily with a gentle cleanser and exfoliate once every other week or so. Wash and condition your hair, including your facial hair if you have any. Use a daily moisturizer and make sure to wear sunscreen. Drink plenty of water (not coffee, not soda, not energy drinks, water) and do your best to get plenty of sleep. Get regular exercise every week, even if it’s just long walks. Wear clothes that actually fit and cultivate a sense of style that goes beyond “anything that smells acceptable that day”.
But the thing is: sexual and romantic attraction isn’t about looks. It’s not even mostly about looks. There is a wide difference between “good looks” and “being attractive”. Being attractive is about how you make people feel. Every woman alive can point out hot guys that they wouldn’t bang with a borrowed vagina and Idris Elba to do the pushing because their personalities are the anti-sex equation. Meanwhile they can also tell you about the guy who’s a little odd looking or unconventional but who made them laugh so hard that oops their panties disappeared, or who knew how to make them feel like the most fascinating person in the world.
Shit, the loverboy text scammers that have been getting women to fall in love with them to the point of being able to soak them for hundreds of thousands of dollars have done so by… asking women questions and listening to their answers.
Now fortunately for everyone, the cure for the cynicism you’re feeling is very easy: you get off TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, incel looksmaxxing boards and the rest. To speed up the process, you want to go outside, touch grass and interact with people in person. Worry less about getting the perfect jawline ratio and work on going out and just talking to women like they’re people.
If you want to know the real secret to romantic and sexual attraction, it’s this: the most-sex-getting-est men I know all look wildly different from one another. Some are fat, some are skinny. Some are tall, many are short. Some have hair, some couldn’t grow hair if you dunked them in a vat of minoxidil and Super Soldier Serum and zapped them with vita-rays. What they have all had in common is that they genuinely liked people. They liked talking to folks, they liked getting to know people and could make people feel great… because people had fun when they were around. Work on your personal warmth and charisma and you’ll have far more success than spending stupid amounts of money to chew on a mouthguard for two weeks.
Good luck.
Dear Dr. NerdLove:
My girlfriend’s autistic brother is ruining everything. He makes her cry, and tries to break us up. He’s an asshole to everybody including his parents. I called him fat once and he held a grudge for a couple months and it’s affecting me and my gfs relationship. She’s telling me to either be nice to him or leave and I don’t understand why she can’t take my side for once.
Squeaky Third Wheel
Well aren’t you just the little charmer.
So, uh, it ain’t her brother ruining everything, super chief. That’d be you. The reason why she isn’t taking your side is because you’re acting like an asshole. In particular, you’re acting like an asshole to someone your girlfriend loves.
Yeah, he may be hard to live with. He and his sister may butt heads and he may make her upset. But they’re still family. Family may be awkward, family members can fight and feud and god knows it may be hard to like them sometimes, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t love each other, fiercely. Family members may squabble like cats and dogs, but one of the surest ways to get them to close ranks and square up is for an outsider to come in and start shit with one of them.
Is he trying to break y’all up, or is he responding to the fact that his sister’s boyfriend is acting like a prolapsed anus? Seeing as you’re surprised he got angry at you for insulting him, I’m gonna go with the latter. Especially since it sure as hell sounds like you’re throwing “autistic” around like it should justify why people shouldn’t like him and why it’s unreasonable to treat him like a person. That’s not going to win you points – either with me or with your girlfriend.
Your girlfriend’s given you a choice here. Either you can make nice – even if you’re doing it through gritted teeth – or you can leave. Now you get to decide whether your relationship with your girlfriend is more important than your grudge against her brother.
If you want to stay in this relationship then you can do what men have done for generations when their sweetie has had an obnoxious sibling: do your best to ignore them or avoid them and be polite when you can’t.
But if you’re asking someone to choose between her family and someone who acts like a dick to them, you’re not going to like how it turns out.
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