QAA Podcast - Looksmaxxing (Premium E243) Sample

Episode Date: May 9, 2024

We dive into an online community hellbent on improving their physical appearance through bizarre techniques like pressing their tongue to the roof of their mouth, hitting themselves in the face, and taking experimental growth hormones. Originating in Pick Up Artist (PUA) and incel forums, "looksmaxxing" has since become a proper tiktok trend. Thanks for being a patreon subscriber! Subscribe for $5 a month to get the full episode. You'll also get an extra episode of QAA every week + access to ongoing series like Manclan, Trickle Down, Perverts and The Spectral Voyager: https://www.patreon.com/QAA Liv Agar: https://linktr.ee/livagar http://qaapodcast.com QAA was formerly known as the QAnon Anonymous podcast.

POMAYOR. If you're hearing this, well done. You found a way to connect to the internet. Welcome to the QAA podcast, Premium Episode 243, looks maxing. As always, we are your host, Jake Rakitansky. Liv Aker. Julian Field. And Travis View.

Today I have another Zoomer online brain rod episode for you all. I know Julian especially is very fond of these. He's very happy during the recordings. Yeah. live goes through cycles she goes into chrysalis stage in which she's in a tent on the Columbia campus and then she emerges and just says one word and it's usually something like looks maxing and I I go now that doesn't come on that doesn't exist she made it up this time she never makes it up it's always it's like no a billion people say this every day

that's because a billion tents opened at the same moment and everyone emerged saying the same word you're saying this is a Hezbollah conspiracy looks maxing Yeah, I think Iran is paying Americans to looks max. It's very possible. They know it'll be the fall of our civilization. It is on TikTok. You know, who owns that? The Chinese government.

It's not a secret at this point that a large portion of internet meme culture has its origins in less than savory parts of the internet. Many of these memes have gone on to be absorbed into the general public's consciousness. Well, the younger part of it anyways. As innocent and funny jokes they send to their friends on Instagram or TikTok. This phenomenon goes back to even the early aughts, when impact font lolcat memes were popularized by fortune, and probably further. But it appears that this process is never ending, as we live in a hellish, Nietzschean eternal occurrence

where pickup artist sites and in-sale forums end up somehow continuing to be on the cutting edge the various inside joke references that the youth used to talk to each other online. On this episode, I'll be delving into the phenomena of looks maxing, a term that seems to have been popularized on various in-cell-adjacent websites from 2015. 15 onward, that comes with its own ideological standpoint on the nature of beauty, relationships, self-improvement, behavioral psychology, phrenology, and many more that has since evolved into a shockingly ubiquitous set of phrases embraced by young TikTok zoomers. Yeah, I guess like doing too much of anything is maxing or like focusing on something is maxing. Yeah, like if you abandon everything

to be funny to gain women, your gesture maxing. Like if you spend a bunch of time like, oh, these are a bunch of funny lines. I'll repeat. Yeah, this was like when I was in junior high and, like, not very athletic, you know, kind of chubby, like, couldn't afford good Stozy stuff. And I put all of my skill points into Dave Matthew's guitar songs. There you go. You're a guitar, your music maxing. I was, I was, yeah, I was, I was Dave maxing. You were Matthew maxing.

I would like to bombs max this country. Well, you're going to have to sacrifice some attributes from other areas. You're terror maxing No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. As an anecdote about looks maxing's popularity with the young ins, I can tell you that my sibling, who is in high school, was supervising some grade-ates during lunch period, and they were supposedly absolutely obsessed with looks-maxing memes.

It really does seem to be the main way they were communicating with each other. And while the viral manifestations of looks-maxing are certainly less insane and harmful than its protozoic manifestation on obscure in-cell forms, They still carry much of the, to use a zoomer term, brain rot of the original. It's good, though. It's like zoomers, they look out over the desolate landscape, the poisoned, horrible, desolate landscape.

And they're like, we have to eat something. And so they're farming on it, you know, they're growing things. They're growing crops on the rotten land. And we're all receiving culture. It's nice. It's like in Chernobyl, where, like, plants have developed that absorb radiation as energy. That's kind of the zoomer brain. Yes, yes.

I see it more as like the zoomers have democratized body dysmorphia, you know? This is something that the neuroses are spread amongst all the people, you know. Exactly. Now it's not just like weird obscure in-cell sub-forms. Now it's everyone. Looksmaxing developed out of what's called the PSL community, which was born from three in-sill-adjason websites. PUAHate.com, slut hate.com, and then lookism.net. Jesus Christ.

Oh yeah. I mean, it's the change from the first to the second as well, just on its surface. Yeah, that's like when you had a sentence earlier where phrenology just came up in the middle of other normal words. It's a very common theme, I think, in the looks maxing community. Each website on this acronym gained popularity among vaguely the same community following the previous site being taken down for various reasons. While the specific details of which ideas developed on which of them is essentially hearsay, as they all don't accept. anymore and were fairly poorly archived, it's nevertheless possible to achieve a general overview of how looks maxing developed here. And some of this should be taken with a grain of salt, because a lot of my research comes, again, from stories by people who are insane enough to browse

these forums in their hayday. The first site, PUA hate, sounds completely reasonable on its surface, given that PUA stands for pickup artistry. This website was founded in 2009, and initially was focused on exposing the many pickup artist influencers running grifts and multi-level marketing schemes to scam people. Given that much of the forum was filled with disgruntled pickup artists, they continued to hold many of the same misogynistic beliefs they had beforehand, only now coming to the conclusion that grifting pickup gurus were wrong when they continually asserted that any man who is good enough at following their method could have sex with women. Oh, this is good. This is like when Jordan Saither started debunking other QAnon people. Exactly. Exactly. Many on the forum,

therefore, came to the conclusion that game, or the ability to hit on women successfully, wasn't actually all that important of a determining factor for how much pussy a man could get. One subform on the site, which would eventually essentially take over the whole website, called shitty advice, was dedicated to giving other four members tips on how to pick up women. Members of the shitty advice subform would come to generally follow the LMS theory, which is created by a member of the board, or the belief that looks, money, and status, are the only components of attracting women, denying that any amount of pickup artistry or game or confidence in general can compensate if one does not have,

one of these three things. Wow. So they basically came to like the cultural conclusions that men were coming to when we all wore hats outdoors. Was this a moment in culture, the hat moment? Yeah, 40s, 50s. Given that it's pretty hard to give people advice and how to gain money or status over a forum thread, the board subsequently became focused on critiquing each other's looks. Form users became obsessed with tentative studies that attempted to empirically quantify facial beauty, which emphasize things like one's mid-faced ratio, or the distance between the eyes and the

lips, or one's facial width to height ratio, as essential components of beauty. Okay, so we're doing the Bethesda slider thing. Yes, exactly. That's cool. This weird obsession with quantifying facial beauty is something that will stay with looks maxing into its virality. If you're a women on the internet who posts themselves and you see weirders talking about your canthal tilt or mid-face, it's basically because of these guys. Mid face God damn that's cursed Form husers rated each other using this rigid

and unforgiving definition of physical beauty often emphasizing parts of the face like the midface ratio that cannot be altered particularly well even by cosmetic surgeries because it's just the distance between your mouth and your eyes like you can't really surgery that it's insane thus the site became a low self-esteem factory

with users being told that their canthal tilt is off and therefore they aren't getting women because they are ontologically hideous and they should just rop-max or maybe take a vow of celibacy. That's a word. Ro-maxing is a phrase, yes. No, no, no, no, no.

No, this is what happens. It's like the TikTok thing where it's like you start saying pew-pue for guns and like before you know it, rope max is a thing, you know? You've been listening to a sample of a premium episode of the QAA podcast for access to the full episode

as well as all past premium episodes and all of our podcast miniseries, go to patreon.com slash QAA. Travis, why is that such a good deal? Well, Jake, you get hundreds of additional episodes of the QAA podcast for just $5

per month. For that very low price, you get access to over 200 premium episodes plus all of our miniseries. That includes 10 episodes of Man Clan with Julian the Nanny, 10 episodes of Perverts with Julian and Liv, 10 episodes of the Spectral Voyager, with

Jake and Brad, plus 20 episodes of trickle down with me, Travis View. It's a bounty of content and the best deal in podcasting. Travis, for once, I agree with you. And I also agree that people could subscribe by going to patreon.com slash QAA. Well, that's not an opinion.

It's a fact. You're so right, Jake. We love and appreciate all of our listeners. Yes, we do. And Travis is actually crying right now, I think. Out of gratitude, maybe? That's not true. The part about be crying, not me being grateful. I'm very grateful. Oh, oh, oh.