I am a performance artist. While researching for a piece on aesthetics I stumbled into Black Pill pipeline that allowed me to infiltrate youth culture, and actually gain a modicum of influence by nerdsignalling, giving advice from the stand point of being an OG or Unc.

They told me I was too dark to see at night. They told me I had chicken legs and a big nose and bad hair. Now I’m bald and they say I’m chopped. They say men under six feet shouldn’t exist. I wasn’t ever really sure where I fell in the spectrum of attractiveness, it sort of depends on the year. I suppose I was a cute kid, but I had an overbite and I certainly wasn’t complimented the way my younger brother was. Even now when we go out, I hear the comments people make to him, tall and slender with a full head of hair, and beautiful, even complexion, and they aren’t comments I ever remember being made to me.

As common as childhood teasing, is that shit can stick with you, I remember having to physically defend myself from being made fun of by a football player because he wouldn’t stop calling me “blueblack” and this was just one of several names I donned over the years, “darkness”, “midnight“, “stain” (like shit-stain), and of course the beloved “Blackey”. Not until after I could grow a beard did anyone ever inquire about taking my picture. Along the way though, I developed a swagger, style, and way of carrying myself that improved the way I was viewed. And while I suppose my face did change as I matured, it wasn’t without procedure. With a 121° medium gonial angle, within ideal range I have ascended without even knowing it to High Tier Normie (HTN).

Black Pill 101

You might be wondering what I’m talking about, and why I am talking about it, when literally every Black person has story about the world telling them their nose is too big, and their hair is nappy, and the impact racialized beauty standards have had on their self-perception. Anyone who is fat or short pimpled face, or has a crooked smile, falls outside of what is considered conventionally attractive has felt this sting. If you are 16 years old you may not be in touch with your agency, what you feel is a condemnation to a particular life path to be picked last by the gal you want, make less money, and basically be a loser. The expectation is that you grow up and get over it, maybe go to therapy, or make it your political identity and self-advocate as a member of a marginalized group. This last one is where Black Pill comes in.

I was fortunate enough to stumble into the Black Pill community lead by incfluencers like Calvicular, because since I started shaving my head people keep sending me links to videos about bald guys being made fun of, being attractive, literally just anything that has to do with bald guys. While I thought I was just going on the offensive against a thinning hairline, I was actually stepping in to a community that is routinely made the butt of jokes. Next thing I know I am on a 16 year old’s viral post of him talking through his journey with orthodontal headgear. I commented “ I had it too, you won’t regret it”. The comment itself got traction under the video and young men started DMing me for looksmaxxing advice. At first I told a few of them “ I got it at the dentist and my parents insurance covered it” I later began asking why they wanted it.

I realize they were inaccurately thinking it was a cosmetic procedure and I am not a Black Piller but apparently I had credibility. I’m a HTN of course, full beard, angular jaw, and I would be lying if I said it wasn’t due to a painful, expensive intervention during puberty. OMG I’m a looksmaxxer and I didn’t even know it! I had the resources, and the time to alter the shape of my actual face so long ago, I barely even remember how physically uncomfortable it was; strap pressing in to my neck and giving me headaches and impairing my ability to sleep. What I do remember is being called “radio” by my father, and the day I was asked to wear it school, which was such a traumatic experience I never did it again. Good on this kid for sharing his growth story. To be honest I wish I’d had a platform and community to support me then. Nerdsignalling today is a way to raise a flag of your identity, and carve our a social position in your niche. You don’t have to be generally famous, but you can have status in your tribe, which ultimately matters more.

The Black Pill movement, however fatalist, says what everyone is afraid to say, Looks matter, and in some cases they matter a lot.

Black Pill acknowledges that we live in a visual culture, and looks do matter when it comes to social hierarchy. Only by accepting this reality can you combat the the impact it has on your life. It’s identity politics for ugly people or rather for Uglie people; those that believe the lie that they are ugly. The framework is simple name the meta-structure; capitalism, patriarchy, or in this case conventional beauty standards and organize to resist its harmful effects. Radicalization starts with your own subconscious doing the work of comparison. The content heightens your ability to see a differential between tall, muscular, men with square jaws and short, chubby, guys with round (feminine) jaws, and empowers you to push against it.

For those of us that know we deserve better, and have the means to do better we have the option to ascend by looksmaxxing; putting focused effort into exercise, make-up, non invasive cosmetic procedures, and full on body modification surgery to improve our looks beyond what the genetic lottery has blessed us with. For men the height of this ascension is called True Adam, (like from the Bible) he is 10/10, the next level down is Chad(9/10), and then ChadLite (8/10), and then of course High, Mid, and Low Tier Normies (7-5/10), and below that is the Sub5 (5/10) and True Cell (3/10). If this feels like an overly formalized rating system, just wait until you visit FaceIQ, facial analysis website. It let’s you upload images of your head shots and geometrically assesses them for facial harmony, the holy grail metric.

FaceIQ and other sites like it are part of the practical infrastructure that helps young men change the way they look to have take advantage of the social reality they live in. The site will give you an action plan that includes everything from exercises to surgery recommendations, along with a “realistic” outcome you can expect if you follow the plan. Seeing as how men over 6ft make an average of 20% more income than men below, and facial signifiers of dominance like a pronounced brow, and 1.2X midface ratio can lead to a 30% increase in likelihood of being hired for management, why wouldn’t you at least try some of these things, right?

When you are repeatedly served content that demeans you by showing hot women say they would never date a guy because doesn’t fit the mold, the incentives are clear. As much as we’d like to think it applies only to impressionable young men, anyone lonely or cast away is vulnerable to their insecurities being taken advantage of. The expectation that adults are meant to be these impenetrably logical minds is false and maintains how these ideas continues to get passed down generation after generation (more on that later).

Here’s the turn you were waiting for, the condemnation of a social construct!

Yes, its all made up! From Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Vitruvian Man”, to Michael Angelo’s “David” I have come in contact with ancient European beauty norms highlighting the epitome of perfection in the male form. These literally “chiseled” features have informed the Western, and thus Global ideas of what beauty is, and thus honesty, and thus leadership, and thus dominance. This is why Batman is always drawn and cast by someone with a square jaw, and why the Pengiun is always drawn and cast as someone without. This is why Paul Giamatti is always cast as someone sort of sniveling, even when he is the lead. Because we have subconsciously ingrained the idea of what “weasely” looks like. Ferrets, rats, frogs, and even snakes don’t have chins, meanwhile Lions, Bears, and Gorilla’s have pronounced mandibles. It’s all too easy to make a naturalistic case by curating supporting facts to fit our self-imposed patterns. Whether lip plates, neck rings, or facial tattoos, every human culture has some form of aesthetic symbology that signals group affiliation, belonging, strength, or fertility.. and none of them are that scientific. Whatever may have been a local artistic and geometric statement in the Enlightenment period has become a modern standard for appearance. Black Pill content is so enticing because it is an actionable script.

Crucially though, the social justice playbook being employed to bolster the Black Pill movement lacks the component of dismantlement. Where feminism seeks to dismantle the patriarchy, and socialism seeks to dismantle capitalism, Black Pillers, and looksmaxxers take the Lean In approach, upholding it as a conventional beauty norms as a reflection of nature, much like Darwinism. The harm of the Black Pill movement is not that it organizes people who have been harmed by conventional beauty standards and encourages them to participate in personal development, it comes from the fact that it posits that you deserve to feel that harm if you do nothing about it. It creates a false agency by availing a mobility capped by the pre-existing artificial constraint.

A turn you might not like.

Paradoxically though, this isn’t a simple case of one more social paradigm we must protect our kids from, because we don’t. The ugly truth of the Black Pill movement is that though we love to say “its what’s on the inside that counts” and “beauty isn’t skin deep” we do have eyes, brains that interpret visual information as meaningful signals on how we make decisions. We do judge books by their cover, and unironically, the cover of books is the best place to find the information about its contents, maybe not in its entirely but its a signal. This is why we invest in designing our book covers, painting our houses, and putting on clothes, its communication!

Balking at the Black Pillers for reinforcing an idea that we don’t like doesn’t dismantle the paradigm of conventional beauty. Telling young men not to put their best foot forward visually, acknowledging that they will be judged by their appearance is cope. There is no argument about whether putting some effort into your presentation is good thing, our contention is the degree to which we focus on those specific outcomes and for what reasoning. We judge people who take GLP-1s, get calf-implants hair plugs, morally as have being superficial and being overly focused on external perception and status. Or maybe we pity them for being taken advantage of by the predatory beauty biz. With a fuzzy, know it when you see it logic we declare that seeking to loose weight for your health is virtuous, but doing so for more career opportunities is vain.

Beauty is a lie.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you aren’t born conventionally attractive they will clown you for being ugly and ask why you don’t just hit the gym or stop complaining. And if you actually work on it, they talk behind your back for being superficial, and analyze the quality of your results. The catch here is that even the best of us moralize aesthetics because a specific kind of beauty has been aligned with virtue. Symmetry, balance, harmony, and Fibonacci ration of limited scientific and anthropological study have bled in to cultural groups clamoring for agency. We can’t tell the difference between Liberation and Freedom beyond semantics and when you couple that with prosperity politics it equals individual responsibility to cure your own mental illnesses and bootstrap your way out of ugliness by any means necessary.

Beauty isn’t just a social construct, its a measurable phenomena that impacts daily life. And when the consequences of how we are perceived determine the quality of our experience in society, its hard to judge someone for whatever decisions they make. We still have a right to feel deceived and manipulated when other’s play into looksmaxxing because its not our own hope for what we want the world to be, but that hope alone doesn’t change whats immanent in culture for so many. Dismissing beauty as a construct fails to acknowledge its currency in the economy of attention, desire, likeability. Beauty isn’t subjective, it’s relative. The distinction being that you may feel that everyone is beautiful, but we don’t operate in a world where everyone is seen as having equal amounts of beauty. The number of people who like looking at you and the degree to which shapes hour people are treated, and without a mechanism to combat that perception day-to-day it matters.

For the socially progressive may support gender affirming practices for transgender people, but why not for cishet people? Implying that there are good reasons and bad reasons to fundamentally alter your appearance is tricky theoretical territory that few of us dare tread. We just talk shit about white men’s bad hair pieces, or orange tan, and defend black women’s wigs and weaves as if we aren’t talking about the same thing. The point at which you participate in looksmaxxing for survival, or for power is not a line, it is a spectrum. One person may be seeking self-determinance through transcending constructed gender confines, the other may seek self-actualization through ascending to the pinnacle of their ascribed gender model, both altering their appearance with unobservable motivations beneath the action.

My parents put me in headgear, presumably to “correct” my bite and prevent longer term jaw issues. Or maybe it was because they realized that having straight white teeth would give be an edge in a superficial racial America. I am not sure one reason would be better than another to put me through a painful, permanent, process that I had no context for. I don’t blame them though, how could I? I have benefited in ways I can measure and others I will never know, and part of the role of the parent is to structure hardships that reap long term benefit for their kids (as if I know anything about parenting).

Imagine my surprise at his disapproval when I mentioned to my father that I had considered getting hair transplants. Yes, even a well adjusted, confident, adult male is not invulnerable to the onslaught of memes, songs, cartoons, and advertisements convincing me to partake in yet another costly, painful, looksmaxxing procedure. His logical incoherence is as common as yours. I doubt you do nothing to looksmaxx and you probably have your own inconsistent reasoning for doing one thing or another from “its fun” to “its my job” but when we take this deeply personal issue that is informed by a deeply public paradigm and moralize it we do no one justice.

So instead of telling the young men I am currently interacting with to stop working on their jawline, I am helping them to realize that they should be reading and working on their social skills as well. The moral if there is one, isn’t about whether facial harmony is a scam or not, they have their own experiences and its not for me to invalidate how they choose to approach life. I rather express that appearance isn’t the only or near most important aspect of personhood that we can apply effort to developing. Interestingly enough, deep parts of the community are in debate about the “ROI” on looksmaxxing for daily life.

The juncture which we face ourselves is the cross road between continuing to leverage technology and medicine in ways that conform us to status optimizing monoaesthetics or the radical embrace of our wildest natural state, consequences be damned. As we continue to rupture beauty norms we further polarize our society, with anti-professional attire, and intentional ugliness as protest against the constraints of archaic hegemony. Or perhaps the rebellion we should be staging isn’t against a specific set of beauty norms, but the way we use personal visual cues all together. The underlying tenant that your presentation of any sort, is an indicator of virtue, value, or intent is a false equivalency, and we reasonably know it. Cultivating spaces in dating, the job market, and elsewhere that subvert the need to correlate status to performance enriches the quality of the status being claimed and the self-determinance of anyone who claims it.

It’s time we flip the script on beauty standards, for now, still acknowledging the realities of visual stimuli but recognizing a more comprehensive set of inputs, like character expressed through behavior, emotional intelligence expressed through care, and intellect expressed through coherent thought. This new quotient integrates the measurable with the meaningful and edges us towards the magical.

The question isn’t whether to be looksmaxx or not, but rather how you prioritize it in your overall development of mind, body, spirit. As your resident HTN, I still am far from perfect, but given the chance to Black Pill and lean into a distorted paradigm of harping on externalities, or Nerdsignal and retreat to my books and art the choice is clear.

From a dark skinned, skinny-legged, short, bald, normie — Uggos Unite!