Six hours after signing the paperwork, Ali emerged from the operating theatre in Rome. He regained consciousness and felt surprisingly energetic, but was unable to walk, use the toilet, or eat. He shares some photos of himself post-surgery, his swollen face wrapped up in bandages. A mop of disheveled hair. Dark blood around his nose. He also shares some of his “before” photos, portraits he’s used for his dating profile. He’s well-groomed, donning a patterned shirt, striking poses in a park. He looks sweet, earnest, albeit a little uncomfortable in his own skin. It’s a vulnerable juxtaposition.
Ali spent that first day video-calling his friends and family, then was discharged to recover for a few more days in his Airbnb. There, he told me, he spent time looking in the mirror. Seeing his swollen face wrapped up in bandages staring back at him, he started to feel his anxiety rising. “I took a big gamble,” he says. “I started to struggle mentally, thinking, ‘What have I done? I’ve broken my entire face to look better and I don’t even look better now.’” All he could do, he said, was sip liquids and wait for the swelling to go down.
Love, and the pursuit of it, has never felt more like a marketplace. On dating apps from Tinder to Feeld, and even on more everyday social media, we now view ourselves as brands, vying for investment from potential matches. “You’ve got almost infinite choice,” says Ruth Holliday, a professor of gender and culture at the University of Leeds. “Then, at the same time, everybody’s trying to maximise their own possibilities.”
“And some men are just excluded from that,” she continues. “They fall off the bottom because they haven’t got a good job or stable income. They’re not particularly good-looking either, and then they withdraw and become incels and get angry with women from the sidelines.”
The red pill and black pill ideologies can harness this resentment, immolate it, and drive people to despair. For those that identify as “incels” (the term originally meant ‘involuntarily celibate’), the black pill is a particularly nihilistic truth to swallow. It can lead to suicidal ideation, violence and even acts of terror: in 2014, a gunman killed six students at the University of California before killing himself, after posting about his inability to form a relationship and calling for further violence against women. The call was taken up by another gunman, who killed 10 people in Toronto in 2018. In 2021, a self-identified incel killed five people in Plymouth. Fixation on a vision of masculinity that leads some men to choose jaw surgery can lead others to hatred.
Manosphere communities are often rooted in loneliness, insecurity and a feeling of being disempowered. It’s the same anxiety that is driving a record number of men to pay for hair transplants, Botox, and even leg-lengthening surgery; the desire to look healthy, youthful, competitive. Prejudice on the basis of appearance is real (though it is undoubtedly most acutely felt in the form of racism, or by those with disabilities or deformities). But even Daniel Hamermesh, an economist who quantified this effect in his book, Beauty Pays, concluded that investment in looks, whether through surgery, fashion or cosmetics, was usually limited in its returns. “Bad looks,” he wrote, “are not a crucial disadvantage, not something that our own actions cannot at least partly overcome, and not something whose burden should be so overwhelming as to crush our spirit.” As Kjerstin Gruys, author of Mirror, Mirror Off the Wall, has said, while those at the extreme ends of the beauty scale may have vastly different experiences in life, most of us are (sadly… or happily) pretty average.
Will Coldwell
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