Gen Z Men and the Spectacle of Status

mog

verb | MAWG

To look or perform far better than someone else

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I’ve long been thinking about the rootlessness of Gen Z—a generation longing for home and community. One symptom of this rootlessness is the spectacle of status: young men and women saying outrageous things to evoke a reaction, forging pseudo-communities through shock value, attempting to break free from the digital mass society by becoming its most extreme performers.

Michael Knowles’ recent interview with Braden Peters—better known as Cavicular—was one such performance. Peters tells Knowles that he began taking testosterone at fourteen (he’s nineteen now), claiming he was simply placing himself “where we…evolutionarily should be” given declining testosterone levels across generations. His justification? “Ambitious young men want to improve themselves.”

When I heard this, what became evident was how young men are seeking community and meaning online. There is something they are seeing in the mirror or online that is driving them to want to be different. Peters seems to be one such case. He was dissatisfied with himself—with his appearance. At one point in the interview, Knowles points out that this change in identity is not much different than what motivates transgender ideology, to which Clavicular offers a laugh and half-heartened attempt at engagement with the critique. But more than being dissatisfied with himself, he has a misconstrued notion of what makes “success.” Peters views success in purely temporal categories: high paying job, attractive girl, an online following, independence from society and authority, breaking free from the generational shackles, the list could go on and on.

It was interesting that Knowles asked Peters what his parents thought about his decision to “better himself.” They apparently saw the issue and tried to take away his supplements, but this was to no avail. Peters was determined to change his trajectory by altering his appearance. Shaping himself into who we wanted, or better yet what others wanted, him to be.

Peters highlights several areas of improvement on the quest to gigachadom: physical, mental, spiritual. But for him, all of these collapse into one metric: looks. “Looks,” he says flatly, “is just the most important metric.” Metric for what? Well, in this case, a metric for status and self-worth. Peters spends a good portion of the interview explaining his transition from a regular boy to the definition of looksmaxxing.

Looksmaxxing is an online movement that promotes maximizing one’s own physical attractiveness. There are varying levels of “maxxing” including softmaxxing, which is done by “mewing” or oral posture training. Mewing is a facial strength exercise whereby one places their tongue on the top of their mouth and applies pressure in an attempt to modify the structure of the jaw. Hardmaxxing, as in the case of Cavicular, is more drastic and often involves the use of outside means of improvement such as surgical enhancements or the use of anabolic steroids (“roidmaxxing”).

As I listened to the interview, on thing that stood out throughout the exchange was Peters’ fixation on status. I kept asking myself “but status in whose eyes?” But it was apparent who he meant: the eyes of the social media masses. The spectacle being the mediation of oneself to others through media. Guy Debord summed it up well: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” One thing that is apparent is that Peters would not be doing what he’s doing before the mass media age, or if he did, it would look quite different, and I wouldn’t be writing about it.

Gabriel Marcel, in his Man Against Mass Society, explores what he calls “the mass man.” Marcel theorizes that in this mass society, man is defined not by his intrinsic value, but by the function he performs. In other words, degrading man to a valueless cog in society. This lack of depth brings with it a lack of community. Marcel says “there can be no authentic depth except where there can be real communion; but there will never be any real communion between individuals centered on themselves, and in consequence morbidly hardened, nor in the heart of the masts, within the mass-state.” Thus DeBord’s spectacle has arrived hand-in-hand with Marcel’s mass society. The product? A disconnected mass of young people with no roots. Thus Peters is another example of this nihilistic impulse.

*Mass Media by Bruce Rolff

Honestly, my heart goes out to this young man. He’s clearly insecure, finding his identity in appearance and the perceived status that comes from this appearance. But appearances fade. We all grow old. Bryan Johnson can pretend to defy aging, but even he can’t hide the wrinkles forever. We try to cover up our frail humanity, but in the end it always shows.

The conversation then went into darker waters. The vocabulary reveals the ideology. Peters calls VP Vance “subhuman” while praising Gavin Newsom as a “mogger”—slang for, in Peters’ words, “someone who is just like, I would say, the peak human.” To “mog” someone is to dominate them in “looks…wealth…and status.” At one point, Peters offers a physiognomy assessment of Sydney Sweeney, analyzing her “recessed infra orbitals and recessed upper maxilla” before rating her “average to above average.” This quick physical categorization, almost medical in nature, gets to the root of the issue: disconnecting the human person from their being created in God’s image. The spiritual, a point that Knowles constantly tried to steer the conversation back to, was absent. There is a latent nihilism in this exchange. Knowles kept trying to bring the conversation back to meaning, and Cavicular, in a joking nonchalant demeanor gave the impression that nothing matters — only the rugged individual, the fleshly person staring back at us in the mirror.

This is where the manosphere’s obsession with “looksmaxxing” reveals its true nature: an attempt to flatten human beings into purely physical specimens, sorted and ranked by facial structure and biological markers. In some ways this is a grasping at simplicity in a digital age that offers anything but. Young men are grasping for a way to find meaning in a society that lacks it. Dating apps offer temporary fulfillment. But one thing that seems to be the most enticing is how their (young men) peers perceive them. Robert Nisbet talks about this in his categories of social community found in his seminal work The Social Philosophers. One category of relevance is the community found in war and the military. He notes that in battle, young men find community and affinity with their squadron, not with the cause they are fighting for. In other words, when in the trenches, the young men are no longer thinking about the global superpowers, but about their friend to their right and their friend to their left. This sociological community offers some help as we think about this phenomenon. Young men are seeking validation from other young men. But instead of dealing with humans as complex God created beings, they seek to simplify it. Humans are what we can see, so they seem to indicate. We are no more than flesh and blood because this is what we think we can change.

But it is important that we see the dangers. We have a clear warning in history about doing this and if we are blind to history, we run the risk of repeating it. This is not to say that Clavicular is rehabilitating twentieth century ideology. Based on the level of the interview I’d be surprised if he could define ideology, let alone trace its roots. But we must be aware of the past lest we be doomed to repeat it.

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I went to college a few hours from DC, which made for some memorable weekend trips to the city’s historical sites and museums. One museum stands head and shoulders above the rest—the Holocaust Museum.

When my friends and I first visited, we rode up the elevator talking and laughing, completely unprepared for what awaited us. The elevator doors opened to a massive image of burning and charred bodies. We were brought to our knees in somber reflection.

I visited twice during my college years. Both times, the display that stuck with me most was the evolutionary biology section—the Nazi system for sorting people based on facial structure. Physiognomy. The Nazis had identified the male Aryan as peak humanity. All other people groups were subhuman. The ultimate status symbol was the Nietzschean Übermensch, or “superior man.” The way they decided this was through head measurements and facial features. The echoes of this ideology should warn us.

*Hannah Höch, Cut with the Kitchen Knife through the Last Weimar Beer-Belly Cultural Epoch in Germany (Schnitt mit dem Küchenmesser durch die letzte Weimarer Bierbauchkulturepoche Deutschlands) (detail), 1919-1920, Photomontage and collage with watercolor, 44 7/8 × 35 7/16 in. (114 X 90 cm), Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie.

The parallels are impossible to ignore. And I was reminded by this Debord quote: “With the destruction of history, contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations, and untenable reasoning.” When young men begin measuring “infra orbitals” and “maxillas,” when they call others “subhuman” based on appearance, when they inject hormones to reach some imagined evolutionary peak—they are walking down a very old, very dark path. I am not sure that Peters is consciously making this connection. But the parallel reveals how dangerous this mass movement can be. Our online culture has given men and women digital status symbols that they must achieve—and many are pursuing them, going so far as to alter their physical appearance to achieve status (just look at the countless weight loss commercials). In desperation to achieve status, many are saying things that are outlandish and untrue to get a reaction. Living is through digital representation not through reality.

Of course, this is not all representation, or a way to project a spectacle. For instance, there is something to be said for caring about our bodies and taking care of ourselves. But the obsession gripping young men in these spaces is not healthy self-improvement. It’s the reduction of human dignity to bone structure, the worship of biological hierarchy, the ranking of human worth by physical dominance. José Ortega y Gasset warns that “The mass crushes beneath it everything which is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Anybody who is not like everybody, who does not think like everybody, runs the risk of being eliminated.” Our desire for mog is becoming our god; and when the masses worship the spectacle of status, it will inevitably lead to a dark place.

Gen Z is longing for home and community. But a home built on physiognomy assessments and the cult of “mogging” is no home at all. Young people need strong social authority in their local communities. Churches must address these grasping attempts at meaning. Older men, step up for younger men. Older women, do the same. Parents, address these topics head-on. Don’t overreact—that often drives young people further into these spaces. Instead, be voices of truth who acknowledge the longing while exposing the lie that human worth can be measured in millimeters of bone structure.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​