Shaween Amin gives a professional and personal perspective on a potential male body dysmorphia crisis.
20 March 2026
Working as a Sport and Exercise Psychologist has opened my eyes to a pressure that young men are facing – to look objectively 'perfect' in a new digital age. It's a pressure that feels darker and less controllable than those I've encountered before, such as those experienced by young male athletes in sport. The presenting issues I am faced with now are increasingly extending beyond my scope of my practice and into the clinical space.
The trend known as 'looksmaxxing' is the systematic, often obsessive pursuit of physical appearance optimisation – primarily by young men – driven by the belief that one's appearance is the primary determining factor of social and romantic worth. It is rooted in the self-improvement movement which encourages sensible habits like going to the gym, eating healthily or getting regular haircuts (often called 'softmaxxing' in online spaces). However, 'looksmaxxers' of the internet go several steps further, calling for more extreme measures such as limb-lengthening surgery, the injecting of performance-enhancing drugs, or 'bonesmashing' (the act of repeatedly striking a bone, typically the cheekbone, with a blunt instrument with the intention of growing it). These fall under the definition of 'hardmaxxing' due to their invasive and often irreversible nature.
Unrealistic body standards, and the mental health issues that stem from them, are not a new occurrence. Women have historically felt the greatest weight of this – decades of clinical research, cultural criticism, and hard-won public awareness have documented the damage that unattainable beauty ideals inflict on female psychology. That conversation remains vital, and it is ongoing. This article, however, concerns a crisis happening around young men, that is largely unexamined and underreported. What makes the modern male experience distinct is not merely that the pressure exists, but the form it has taken.
A degradation machine
Within looksmaxxing communities, users submit photos of themselves to be rated on a scale. This is a numerical system, developed across online forums, that claims to measure physical attractiveness with clinical objectivity. Men are not simply told they are unattractive. They are told they have failed and to seek surgical intervention. Fix the mandible. Fix the midface ratio. Fix the canthal tilt. Fix the orbital rim.
Research into these communities finds that in every single rating thread analysed, users were insulted, unfavourably compared to other men, or encouraged to harm themselves by at least one other user (Haplin et al., 2025). This is what looksmaxxing communities have built in place of self-improvement: a degradation machine with a numerical readout. Unfortunately, it does not feel like that from the inside. From the inside, it feels like the one honest system in an otherwise uncontrollable world.
From what I can understand, a combination of three factors has given rise to this. First, young men in the West are, by measurable data, the loneliest they have ever been (Department for Culture, Media & Sport, 2024; Kamal, 2024). Second, dating has migrated almost entirely online. Therefore, the first impression between two people, once equal parts personality, humour, and physical attraction, is now a static photograph – making physical attraction the only possible 'foot in the door' for many of those searching for love. Third, social media algorithms have made the circulation of extreme and unattainable physical ideals inevitable.
Over the last decade, gym membership in the West has risen sharply. To be fair, social media deserves some of the credit for this. Fitness content is among the most widely consumed on every major platform, and for many young men, seeing an idealised body online is the push they need to start looking after themselves. On balance, this is a good thing. But the problem is that the pipeline does not stop there. The same algorithm that serves a 17-year-old his first motivational gym video will, over weeks and months, walk him incrementally, invisibly, towards content that is progressively more extreme. Better nutrition becomes strict calorie counting. Calorie counting becomes a steroid cycle.
This pipeline is, of course, an extreme example that many of us cannot imagine falling victim to. However, crucially, most of us did not have our formative years hijacked by an algorithm designed to steal our attention and dictate our choices. The desire to be fit can become the compulsion to be optimal. There is no clear moment where self-improvement becomes self-destruction. That is precisely what makes it so difficult to identify, and so easy to fall into. For practitioners, parents or people generally who are interested in identifying possible 'red flags' concerned with looksmaxxing, they may watch out for things like: obsession over tiny 'flaws', excessive comparisons, and/or a heavy influence from online communities. When these preoccupations interfere with normal life functioning, or cause distress or overwhelm, it may help to seek professional support.
Keep watching…
Young men have not suddenly become more insecure than previous generations. What is different is the exposure to social media algorithms. Research has found that the association between social media use and body dysmorphic symptoms is specific to image-based platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, rather than text-based ones (Gupta et al., 2023). This is a meaningful distinction. Short-form video does not merely occasionally expose a young man to idealised bodies. It exposes him to thousands of them, in rapid succession, selected and ranked by an algorithm with one objective: keep him watching. The algorithm does not know it is curating a dysmorphic mirror. It only knows that this content performs. Men with large platforms now reel off advice on how to achieve the ideal masculine body to audiences of millions, and the algorithm surfaces the most extreme versions of that content because extreme content holds attention longest.
The result is a generation of many young men holding a belief that they are less than, feeling unworthy and unhappy. Worryingly, where social media is concerned, what begins with a gym membership can end with a teenage boy hitting his own face with a blunt object, on camera, for an audience that encourages him. At the extreme end of this world, research has found forums where users are routinely told their lives are 'over', that they are beyond saving, that no intervention will ever be enough. These comments are commonplace, unmoderated, and directed at teenage boys and young men. The pipeline has an endpoint, and it is not self-improvement.
The problem is the pipeline
Of course, looksmaxxing is not the whole story of young men and social media. For every forum thread telling a teenager his life is over, there are thousands of young men who found a gym, a routine, and a sense of discipline through the same platforms this article has been critical of. Social media did not invent male insecurity, and it did not invent the pressure to be physically attractive. It inherited both, and in many cases, it has given young men communities, structure, and a vocabulary for self-improvement that previous generations did not have access to. That is worth acknowledging.
The problem is not the starting point. The problem is the pipeline. A specific combination of conditions – measurable loneliness, a dating market that reduces first impressions to a photograph, and algorithms optimised for engagement rather than wellbeing – have produced an environment in which normal male insecurity can harden into something clinical. Body Dysmorphic Disorder. Muscle Dysmorphia. Non-suicidal self-injury dressed up as a self-improvement practice. These are not the inevitable outcomes of wanting to look better. They are the outcomes of a system that profits from ensuring that looking better is never quite enough.
The scripts for male suffering
The young man at the centre of this crisis is not, for the most part, being radicalised by malicious actors with a deliberate agenda. He is being processed by an indifferent one. The algorithm does not hate him. It does not know he exists. It simply keeps serving him content that keeps him watching, and the content that keeps him watching is the content that makes him feel most acutely that he is not enough. That is the mechanism. It is mundane, and it is causing serious harm. But there are individuals designing these algorithms, and I believe ethical considerations should be addressed around the consumption for profit at the expense of vulnerable individuals.
What this moment asks of clinicians, of platform designers, and of anyone working with or raising young men, is simple in principle and difficult in practice: seek to recognise and understand this better. The diagnostic frameworks that exist for body image disorders were largely built around female patients. The scripts we have for male suffering do not easily accommodate a teenage boy who is distressed about his midface ratio. The gap between the suffering that exists and the language we have for it, is where this crisis lives. Closing it will not fix the algorithm. But it might mean that the boy who saves the video does not have to find his way out alone.
And if you reading this having been led onto, and influenced by, these platforms, what I want to say to you is: what you're seeing online isn't real, you are not going through this alone. Help is there if you need it, and you are enough and worthy exactly as you are.
And a perfect jawline never made anybody laugh. Shaween Amin is a Chartered Psychologist, and HCPC registered Sport and Exercise Psychologist.
References
Department for Culture, Media and Sport. (2024, December 4). Community Life Survey 2023/24: Loneliness and support networks. GOV.UK.
Gupta, M., Jassi, A., Krebs, G. (2023). The association between social media use and body dysmorphic symptoms in young people. Frontiers in Psychology. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1231801
Halpin, M., Gosse, M., Yeo, K., Handlovsky, I., Maguire, F. (2025) 'When help is harm: Health, Lookism and self‐improvement in the Manosphere', Sociology of Health & amp; Illness, 47(3). doi:10.1111/14679566.70015.
Kamal, J. (2025, Jan 24). Digital & social trends, charts, consumer data & statistics – GWI Blog.
SOURCE:
https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/algorithmic-mirror-psychological-costs-looksmaxxing(accessed 28.3.26)
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