Should beauty be something we aspire to — and if so, how far should we go in that aspiration? Is it still self-improvement to break your jaw for a sharper chin? On Feb. 14, Associate Professor of Political Science Jonny Thakkar brought Becca Rothfeld — former Washington Post and current New Yorker writer, philosophy scholar, and fellow editor at The Point magazine — to campus for a Valentine’s Day special edition of his “Night Owls” Saturday night lecture series. The discussion, titled “Making Yourself Beautiful,” focused on the aesthetic and social underpinnings of “looksmaxxing” subculture.
Thakkar began by briefly explaining looksmaxxing, a lifestyle trend emphasizing the use of radical techniques to improve physical appearance. The ultimate goal of a “looksmaxxer” is to “mog,” a form of visual or sexual outperformance and dominance whose name derives from the acronym AMOG, or “Alpha Male of the Group.” Gen Z’s interest in looksmaxxing is reflected in recent data: in 2023, 35 million cosmetic procedures were performed worldwide, representing a 40% increase from four years earlier.
Although the phenomenon is often associated with personal vanity, Thakkar noted that an orientation toward beauty is a feature of the human condition and that the alteration of physical appearance belongs to a broader human tradition of transforming nature as an endeavor to humanize the world. Just as humans reshape the natural world to suit their purposes through work and technology, they reshape their own bodies.
“Looksmaxxing, among other things, seems to involve men going to extreme lengths to shape their appearance, for example, by breaking their own jawbones. So some of the stakes here tonight are whether you should do that, whether I can do that, or we should do that,” Thakkar said.
Rothfeld approached this topic by recalling an undergraduate acquaintance of hers at Dartmouth whose reputation as a beautiful woman had preceded her. Looking at the woman’s Facebook photo, Rothfeld was initially underwhelmed. When she finally met that girl in person, however, she understood what people meant: “As a political philosopher would say, it was a matter of a more all-encompassing sense of self-fashioning, including, but not limited to, the way that she dressed, the way that she kind of stylized her dorm room … And so I understood then that her beauty was not just a matter of what she looked like in a narrow physical sense.”
For Rothfeld, this kind of beauty cannot be standardized in any conventional, homogenous sense. Rather, it is about uniqueness and genius in self-fashioning. This “beautiful energy,” she argues, is distinct from sorority-style aesthetics and “Instagram face,” which she sees as lacking individualizing features. On the other hand, it is different from “inner beauty” as well: “Those things might be related, but I’m talking about something that is physically perceptible — sensory qualities, things that can be appreciated aesthetically,” she added.
Based on this view, Rothfeld argued that while individuals are not morally obliged to pursue beauty, efforts at aesthetic self-stylization are praiseworthy: “Beauty is not a matter of raw physical endowments, because it is a matter of the exercise of aesthetic agency and creative feats of self-beautification. Beauty is accessible to anybody who chooses to pursue it.”
Here, she distinguished between self-beautification conforming to or compelled by social norms and the “free and chosen acts of creative self-expression in the domain of physical appearance.”
In the process of self-transformation achieved through aesthetic expression and stylization, Rothfeld said, the standards of success should be self-prescribed rather than externally imposed. “It is the task of the artist to create the standards by which he wishes to be judged,” she argued, and the problem with “Instagram face” and the self-stylization of people like philanthropist and former journalist Lauren Sanchez Bezos is that they are not creating their own standards in these cases. A successful example in Rothfeld’s mind, on the other hand, would be drag queen Sasha Velour, who has a distinctive look and a cohesive style, while at the same time embracing the unexpected and surprising.
Building on that, the panelists turned to the notion of originality in aesthetic expression and its relation to aesthetic traditions. Rothfeld highlighted that while good art should never be completely derivative or unchallenging, it cannot be completely ungrounded either. Instead, it should be in conversation with an aesthetic tradition, playing with conventions and leveraging them as a resource for its originality.
On the relationship between contingent cultural judgments about an artistic expression and its aesthetic value, Rothfeld notes that these two standards are distinct. Many “lowbrow” artworks are arguably aesthetically valuable, while some “sophisticated” aesthetics may actually be vacuous.
Thakkar echoed this stance by citing Alexander Nehamas’s quote from “Only a Promise of Happiness,” that “just as love clashes less with hate than with indifference, beauty is less opposed to ugliness than to the nondistinct.” He further argued that, in most cases, bad taste is not a preference for ugliness but rather a lack of taste. To this, Rothfeld added that having actively and aggressively bad taste can often produce a new aesthetic sensibility. “I think a highly original failure is always better than an unoriginal success,” she remarked.
Turning back to the question of cosmetic surgery, Rothfeld argued that self-alteration is a gradient, ranging from haircuts and nose piercings to radical surgeries. The line between “normal” self-transformation and what is regarded as “crazy,” she asserted, is just a social norm. For her, “no longer looking like yourself” is not the problem, because the self is never a static being but is always “as much as the product of creative endeavor as your appearance.”
Still, Thakkar suggested that the tendency to disregard human limits in these surgical interventions can provoke an intuitive unease, and that there may be something fundamentally hubristic in an attitude that fails to accept the “givenness” of our condition as finite beings.
In response, Rothfeld offered her view that, since it is virtually impossible to articulate an unambiguous standard distinguishing acceptable from unacceptable bodily interventions, a more promising criterion may be outcome-based: if the intervention makes you beautiful, it is a good intervention.
In the end, she reflected on the poignancy in humanity’s attempt to conquer nature in the quest to overcome mortality. She concluded the panel on a wry note: “Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Get Botox.”
