Amy Hamm: Liberals warning of ‘looksmaxxing’ in the ‘manosphere’ is as silly as it sounds

In June, the government of Canada’s Standing Committee on the Status of Women submitted a parliamentary report titled “Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada.”  

The report is proof of how petty and out of touch with reality — and with the real threat to women’s rights in this country, i.e. gender ideology — that the federal government truly is. I simply don’t know where to start. 

Take “looksmaxxing.” Have you heard of it? Our government has. Looksmaxxing is an online influencer trend whereby males attempt to perfect their physical attractiveness, or, in other words, maximize their looks. The concept is mostly (from what I’ve seen) discussed online by those who are mocking the young men caught up in the trend. It’s outrageous and niche, involving steroids, plastic surgeries, and T-shirts with fake muscle padding.  

It’s not clear that more than a handful of young men are taking this trend seriously, versus gawking at looksmaxxing’s absurd hyper-vanity and silly nomenclature. Consider getting “looksmogged”: this is when a looksmaxxer is face-to-face with a more handsome adversary. No amount of Botox injections could keep the laugh lines off my face when Clavicular, currently the world’s most well-known looksmaxxer, was recently and publicly mogged by a stunningly handsome Miami judge who handed the young man six months of probation for shooting a dead alligator. Looksmaxxing is a running joke for the chronically or terminally online. (Yes, you may take this as a confession about the time I spend online.) 

To Canada’s Standing Committee on the Status of Women, though, “looksmaxxing” poses a serious and viable threat to our safety. (Rather than just to dead alligators.) Their report describes the online radicalization of young men into the “manosphere,” where they allege that “antifeminist ideologies,” including looksmaxxing, are poisoning the minds of youth and being discussed in boy’s locker rooms across the country. Indeed, the report goes so far as to describe concerns, four separate times, about wholly imagined “antifeminist” locker room talk amongst Canadian boys. 

They quote “experts” who insist that “(a)ntifeminist ideology is not simply rhetoric, it is a gateway to violence.” They do not provide any clear link between looksmaxxing or “manosphere” rhetoric and acual violence or harms. Meanwhile, the federal government, in 2017, amended the Human Rights Act and Criminal Code to include “gender identity” as a protected ground, a move that enables males to identify their way into female locker rooms — where thousands of women and girls have had their privacy, dignity, and safety violated. That is not discussed in the report at all. 

At one point, the committee cites McGill University doctoral candidate Esli Chan in their report: “Chan explained that language and terms (for example, “looksmaxxing,” the process of maximizing one’s physical attractiveness through sometimes extreme means) originating from some of the more extreme antifeminist subcommunities within the manosphere, like incels, are becoming more normalized and used by men and boys in everyday conversation.” The committee repeatedly suggests that such speech and dialogue can and does escalate to actual violence. 

Readers, I checked the publication date and can assure you that this report was not released on April 1.  

Perhaps the most glaring absurdity in the report is its failure to provide a definition for “antifeminist ideologies” in the first place. Instead of defining the term, the committee “heard about the nature and scope of antifeminist ideologies” from various witnesses, one of whom “indicated that ‘(h)aving a clear definition of antifeminism could help to better define the problem and deal with it more effectively.’” But did they do that? No.  

Instead, they seem to have settled on this: “The committee heard that antifeminist ideologies are diverse and vary in extremity.” They proceeded to haul in witnesses who expressed their distaste for “sexist jokes,” or the rise of another (mostly online) trend, the “trad wife” movement, “in which influencers advocate for women to embrace traditional gender roles, especially homemaking.” Call me a bigot (many have) but I am vastly more concerned about gender self-identification policies that provide biological males with a “free entry” pass into female spaces in Canada than I am with women who’ve decided to embrace being mothers and wives.

One is a direct threat to women’s safety, while the other is — and should remain — a personal choice that the government has no say in. Instead, this outlandish report ignores the real threat to women and sobs over those women who choose to raise children rather than study a STEM field at university. The report goes on at length about the importance of increasing the proportion of women in male-dominated fields such as engineering, and vice versa, as though we should convince legions of men to forsake their perfectly fine interest in science or math to instead sign up for nursing school. To what end? How will more male nurses equate to a reduction in violence against women? 

Of their 14 recommendations, the subtext of many is about granting the government greater powers to monitor and control Canadians’ speech, or to propagandize us all with “correct” views on feminism. Recommendations include “public awareness campaigns to counteract antifeminist rhetoric”; “enhancing support for Canadian media”; “regulat(ing) online platforms, including stronger moderation of harmful content”; and “provid(ing) youth with tools to navigate online spaces safely… including the capacity to recognize mis- and disinformation.” Unsurprisingly, the final recommendation is for more government funding: “That the Government of Canada make additional investments in research on antifeminist ideologies, its intersections with gender-based violence and coercive control, and its impacts, and that results from this research are made public.” 

“Confronting Antifeminist Ideologies in Canada” was, predominantly, an exercise in spitefully pooh-poohing the online narratives that left wing or Liberal MPs find distasteful, rather than looking at what actual harms women and girls in Canada face today — or what can be done to address them. What a waste of time and taxpayer dollars. 

National Post