Male beauty standards have gone haywire

Vox

2 days ago

A small but curious sign of the deepening gender divide in our politically fraught times: Male beauty standards are getting really weird.
In the latest salvo, young boys on TikTok are shaving off their eyelashes, ostensibly because long eyelashes are girly. This new phenomenon joins a number of other perplexing masculine trends from the last few years, including doing tongue exercises known as 'mewing' in order to achieve the squarest jaw possible, and 'going to Turkey' for hair transplants. Somewhat relatedly, a Republican congressman bragged recently that he refuses to drink out of straws because that's 'what women do' (not quite a beauty standard as much as a sort of inscrutable new gender norm).
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To be clear, we don't know how many people are actually participating in these practices: enough for a few viral TikToks and mystified trend stories, not enough for an academic study. But it does seem that male beauty standards, infected by the ethos of the newly ascendant manosphere and incel-adjacent spaces, are evolving to focus far more on being masculine for its own sake than to attract and appeal to women. The point, it seems, is to impress other men, and a certain amount of ambient misogyny is part of the package deal.
There's long been a divide between what men consider admirable on another man and what women consider attractive on men. That's why actors who show off rippling muscles on men's magazine covers emphasize a charming smile in women's media. A 2005 study found that men consistently overestimate the degree of muscularity that is attractive to women, while women, in turn, overestimate the degree of thinness that is attractive to men.
Manosphere spaces, which blend self-help and fitness advice with uncompromising messaging about traditional masculinity, have made that divide starker than ever. Just look at the recent dust-up on X (which has increasingly become a right-wing echo chamber since Elon Musk's takeover in 2022), when a researcher invited men and women to vote in an anonymous poll about which photo of British pop star Olly Murs they found more appealing. In a 'before' photo, Murs's muscles are prominent but undefined; in the 'after' photo, he is shredded, with visible abs.
Not only did men and women diverge on which photo they preferred (men far more often chose the 'after' photo), but a certain subset of men insisted that women were mistaken, or outright untruthful, about their own preferences. 'Women in this poll are lying. I know from experience how women feel about 6 packs,' went one characteristic response. Another poster tried to dissect what was really going on: 'What I'm getting from these replies is that men confuse their own sexuality for that of women.'
An emphasis on hypermasculinity is perhaps the natural end result of the sensibilities of the manosphere circulating and gaining traction for over a decade. Misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate believe so stridently in the dominance and supremacy of men that they will go to extreme lengths to eschew anything they consider feminine.
An emphasis on hypermasculinity is perhaps the natural end result of the sensibilities of the manosphere circulating and gaining traction for over a decade.
Which leads of course to trends like eyelash-shearing. Long, thick, heavily mascara'ed and false eyelashes are particularly trendy for women right now. Anecdotally, a lot of straight women like long eyelashes on a man. Perhaps perversely, that makes it more attractive now than ever for men to get rid of them.
It's notable that one of the projects of feminism over the last 20 years has been to help girls create relationships with their bodies that don't depend on men: to dress for themselves or for other women, and to exercise their bodies to become strong and healthy, rather than to reach for men's approval.
Some of the decoupling of male physical ideals from what straight women like borrows the same rhetoric and suggests the same sense of working toward healthy self-love. A recent Daily Beast article on body-building as a ramp to the alt-right quotes a 26-year-old body-builder as saying, 'People who lift a lot know that having a really just huge physique, or being super lean, is not that attractive to the average woman. But they're doing it more for their own body image's sake… or to impress other men. Most people would not understand a really defined back, but if you lift around other men, they would absolutely notice that.'
But the attitude of 'do it for you' among certain communities of men online is never very far off from the denigration of women. Two clicks away from self-love body building on an algorithmic feed are the 'gymcels,' an off-shoot of incels who obsessively go to the gym. They, in turn, are a subset of Men Going Their Own Way, a group of male separatists one member described as holding the view, 'It's not you, it's women that are the problem. You do whatever YOU want to do to better yourself. Disregard those wenches.''
Ironically, the pursuit of nonsensical and often contradictory beauty standards have led young men to the same place that young women have long found themselves: with crippling body dysmorphia. A 2019 study found that 22 percent of males displayed traits of disordered eating behaviors geared toward an obsessive desire to build muscle. Another study showed that looking at social media content that glorifies muscle-building is heavily correlated with muscle dysmorphia among young men.
It's a self-sabotaging act, targeted at a bodily attribute vital for eye health, because of its alleged girliness.
The shaving off of the eyelashes comes with a similar aggressive strain of contempt towars women as the gymcel self-conception. It's a self-sabotaging act, targeted at a bodily attribute vital for eye health, because of its alleged girliness. In opposition to the layers of mascara and false lashes that beauty influencers pile on, some young men simply shave their eyelashes down to stumps, rejecting everything about their appearance that could be described as girly — especially if girls like it.