How to talk to boys about looksmaxxing

Young boys are being enticed to engage in risky behaviors in pursuit of the perfect body and face, as part of an increasingly popular trend called looksmaxxing. Malte Mueller/ hide caption toggle caption Malte Mueller/ Scrolling down the feed of the average adolescent boy might reveal a lot about their interests, from video games and sports content to something perhaps less familiar to parents: looksmaxxing — a viral movement that urges the radical improvement of physical appearance. Many teens are interested in working out. But looksmaxxing is pushing boys and young men to take extreme and dangerous measures — like taking steroids or getting elective surgery — to achieve their goal. Gene Beresin says he's never seen anything like it before in his more than 40 years of work in child psychiatry. The executive director of the Clay Center for Young Healthy Minds at Massachusetts General Hospital says there's a long and well-known history of how faddish and harmful beauty trends have changed the lives of young women. "But it has been going on with young men for about a decade, and it has been increasing considerably during this last decade," he says. Perhaps the most dangerous of these emerging trends, Beresin says, is looksmaxxing, which focuses on what is known as "ascendancy, or having a perfect body." Once hidden in the fringes of the online world, the concept of looksmaxxing has made its way to the mainstream. …