Amy Hamm: Liberals warning of ‘looksmaxxing’ in the ‘manosphere’ is as silly as it sounds

Report on 'anti-feminist' ideologies unsurprisingly overlooks actual threats to women

The report is proof of how petty and out of touch with reality — and with the real threat to women’s rights in this country, i.e. gender ideology — that the federal government truly is. I simply don’t know where to start. Recommended Videos Take “looksmaxxing.”

Have you heard of it? Our government has. Looksmaxxing is an online influencer trend whereby males attempt to perfect their physical attractiveness, or, in other words, maximize their looks.

The concept is mostly (from what I’ve seen) discussed online by those who are mocking the young men caught up in the trend. It’s outrageous and niche, involving steroids, plastic surgeries, and T-shirts with fake muscle padding. It’s not clear that more than a handful of young men are taking this trend seriously, versus gawking at looksmaxxing’s absurd hyper-vanity and silly nomenclature.

Consider getting “looksmogged”: this is when a looksmaxxer is face-to-face with a more handsome adversary. No amount of Botox injections could keep the laugh lines off my face when Clavicular, currently the world’s most well-known looksmaxxer, was recently and publicly mogged by a stunningly handsome Miami judge who handed the young man six months of probation for shooting a dead alligator. Looksmaxxing is a running joke for the chronically or terminally online.

(Yes, you may take this as a confession about the time I spend online.) To Canada’s Standing Committee on the Status of Women, though, “looksmaxxing” poses a serious and viable threat to our safety. (Rather than just to dead alligators.)

Their report describes the online radicalization of young men into the “manosphere,” where they allege that “antifeminist ideologies,” including looksmaxxing, are poisoning the minds of youth and being discussed in boy’s locker rooms across the country. Indeed, the report goes so far as to describe concerns, four separate times, about wholly imagined “antifeminist” locker room talk amongst Canadian boys. They quote “experts” who insist that “(a)ntifeminist ideology is not simply rhetoric, it is a gateway to violence.”

They do not provide any clear link between looksmaxxing or “manosphere” rhetoric and acual violence or harms. Meanwhile, the federal government, in 2017, amended the Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include “gender identity” as a protected ground, a move that enables males to identify their way into female locker rooms — where thousands of women and girls have had their privacy, dignity, and safety violated. That is not discussed in the report at all.

At one point, the committee cites McGill University doctoral candidate Esli Chan in their report: “Chan explained that language and terms (for example, “looksmaxxing,” the process of maximizing one’s physical attractiveness through sometimes extreme means) originating from some of the more extreme antifeminist subcommunities within the manosphere, like incels, are becoming more normalized and used by men and boys in everyday conversation.” The committee repeatedly suggests that such speech and dialogue can and does escalate to actual violence. Readers, I checked the