What Happens When the Competition Is Male but the Currency Is Female

Looksmaxxing Is Male-on-Male Warfare Using Women as Points. The Enemy Is Hierarchy Itself and It's Eating Everyone Now

I got something wrong in my looksmaxxing essay:

Not the surveillance infrastructure. Not the Thiel connections. Not the pipeline from bonesmashing to transhumanism. Not the Rat Utopia parallels or the Laurel Canyon playbook or the Human Ken Doll beta testing.

I got wrong who’s actually doing this to young men.

And the correction came from someone who pushed back hard on my framing, made me reconsider my assumptions, and showed me something sharper than my original analysis.

Tereza Coraggio wrote in response to my essay: “It’s not women who are rating these men as subhuman, it’s other men. Competition and superiority is what patriarchy is made of.”

That’s the line that stopped me cold. Because she’s right.

First, you better Sub to her RN!

Let me show you what I missed and why it matters.

Looksmaxxing forums are overwhelmingly male spaces. The rating systems: “subhuman” (1-3), “normie” (4-6), “Chad” (8), “Adam” (9), are all created by men, for men, enforced by men. The terminology: mogging, framemogging, canthal tilt, hunter eyes, is also male-generated. The hierarchies are therefore male-policed.

When a 14-year-old boy posts his face asking for assessment, it’s not women responding. It’s other men telling him he’s a “framecel” with “negative canthal tilt” who needs jaw surgery, steroids, and bonesmashing to have any hope of “ascending.”

When Clavicular injects his 17-year-old girlfriend with unapproved peptides, he’s not doing it because she demanded it. He’s doing it because other men in his ecosystem: the 950 clippers, the viewers, the mysterious donor “P”, value a certain aesthetic, and he’s optimizing his “sexual market value” in a competition with other men.

Female approval is the currency. But men are doing the trading.

I framed looksmaxxing as “teaching men feminine neurotic patterns”, the appearance obsession, the constant measurement, the chronic inadequacy that emerges when you’re valued primarily for looks. That’s partially true.

But what Tereza showed me is sharper: Looksmaxxing is male hierarchical competition turned inward.

It’s men competing with men, judging men, destroying men, using women as the metric but not actually responding to female preferences. It’s dominance hierarchy operating through appearance standards instead of physical combat or resource accumulation.

This isn’t feminine anxiety patterns being imposed on men. This is masculine competition patterns eating themselves.

And once you see that, everything else clicks into focus.

Let me back up and show you the anthropological evidence that reframed my understanding.

Tereza cited research from David Graeber and David Wengrow on societies like the Yanomami of Venezuela, the Mi’kmaq of Nova Scotia, and the Wendats of Canada. In these cultures, “sexual liberty was the norm when women owned the economic resources and money was just a plaything used for status, political apologies, and gambling.”

She cited evidence from pre-3000 BCE goddess cultures: sex happening in temple settings in broad daylight, women choosing partners freely, children raised within matrilineal kinship groups, no concept of “father” as we understand it. Archaeological evidence shows children’s bones buried under beds with mothers, adult male bones buried alone, even when they lived in the same dwelling.

This isn’t speculation. This is documented. These societies existed. Sexual liberty for women was viable when women controlled economic resources and kinship groups provided child-rearing support.

What this proves: Mating systems follow economic systems, not biology.

When women controlled resources, sexual liberty worked. Males didn’t need to control female sexuality because they weren’t trying to pass property to specific heirs. Children were raised communally within matrilineal kin groups. Male sexual jealousy and female sexual restriction weren’t necessary because the economic conditions didn’t require them.

Then something changed around 3000 BCE.

Tereza’s framework: Elite men weaponized sexually frustrated men: incels, basically to violently conquer walled cities. They killed the men, raped the women, and took prepubescent girls as sex slaves and domestic servants. Elite men holding children hostage, made mothers docile. By controlling reproduction, they created property inheritance systems that required paternity certainty.

Property created fathers. Fathers required sexual control of women. Sexual control required violence to impose and maintain.

This isn’t biological inevitability. This is violent imposition of a new economic system that required different reproductive arrangements.

And here’s where I need to make a correction to my original framing.

I argued that sexual selection exists in all species, that females signal mate quality to attract investment, that appearance management is part of natural reproductive strategy. That’s true in the abstract.

But Tereza pushed back: In other species, females signal availability and fertility, but they don’t compete with each other through appearance to access males. Males compete with males (through display, combat, territory). Females choose among the winners. Females don’t need to “looksmax”, they signal readiness and select.

So when human women started competing with each other through appearance, something non-natural happened.

Her explanation: Patriarchal property systems made women compete to become someone’s property because that was the only path to security for themselves and children.

My explanation: Economic systems based on property accumulation created incentives for male control of reproduction, which made female economic survival contingent on male approval, which intensified appearance competition.

Both can be true. Violent imposition + economic mechanisms = same result.

The crucial insight: Female appearance competition isn’t natural. It’s a response to economic systems that made women’s survival dependent on male approval.

And now that same mechanism is being deployed on men.

But with a twist Tereza identified: It’s not women imposing these standards on men. It’s men enforcing hierarchical competition on each other.

Here’s why this matters for understanding looksmaxxing:

The “patriarchal bargain”, male provision in exchange for female sexual/domestic exclusivity, has collapsed. Men can’t own property without decades of debt slavery. They can’t support families on single incomes. They can’t offer women economic security because they don’t have economic security themselves.

Traditional male hierarchy was based on:

• Property ownership

• Ability to provide

• Status through resource control

• Dominance through economic/physical power

All of that is unavailable to young men now. They can’t compete on those metrics because the economic conditions don’t exist.

But male hierarchical competition didn’t stop. It just found a new arena: appearance.

Looksmaxxing is what happens when male dominance hierarchies lose their traditional domains (property, provision, status) but the psychology of hierarchical competition remains. Men still need to compete with men. They still need winners and losers. They still need a way to sort superior from inferior.

So they turned to the one domain where competition is still accessible: biological appearance.

And they’re destroying themselves in the process.

The rating systems: ”subhuman” to “Chad” to “Adam”, are dominance hierarchies. The mogging competitions are dominance displays. The bonesmashing, the steroids, the surgery: these are attempts to climb a hierarchy that men created and men enforce.

Women are the ostensible goal, but the actual competition is with other men. Female approval is just the currency used to keep score in a male-on-male status war.

This is why Tereza’s observation cuts so deep: “Competition and superiority is what patriarchy is made of.”

Whether you call it patriarchy (male hierarchy) or oligarchy (elite hierarchy using gender division), the mechanism is the same: dominance competition that requires ranking, sorting, winners, losers, and disposability of those who don’t measure up.

And that mechanism has turned inward on young men.

Now connect this to what I documented last week about Peter Thiel.

Thiel is an accelerationist who wants to speed societal collapse. He’s a transhumanist who wants to transcend biological limits. He’s a surveillance capitalist who builds infrastructure to track and control populations. He’s connected to suspicious deaths (Jeff Thomas) and alleged blackmail operations (Epstein network).

And he’s allegedly funding looksmaxxing influencers.

Why?

Not to help men attract women. To perpetuate hierarchical competition among men while traditional hierarchy is unavailable.

When men can’t compete through property ownership, economic provision, or status acquisition, redirect them into appearance competition. Keep them measuring themselves. Keep them destroying themselves. Keep them too focused on “ascending” to organize, build solidarity, or resist.

It’s the same pattern as every other oligarchic control mechanism:

• Laurel Canyon: Redirect political energy into drugs and dropping out

• Cryptocurrency: Redirect wealth into Ponzi schemes

• Surveillance: Redirect autonomy into compliance

• Looksmaxxing: Redirect male hierarchical drive into self-destruction & tranhumanism

The mechanism is always the same: Take human drives (political action, wealth building, autonomy, status competition) and channel them into activities that serve elite interests while neutralizing threat.

And looksmaxxing serves elite interests perfectly because it:

1. Keeps men competing with each other instead of with elites

2. Destroys male physical and mental health (400% increase in eating disorders)

3. Creates massive markets for optimization products (surgery, hormones, supplements)

4. Prevents solidarity between men who might otherwise organize

5. Makes marriage and family formation even less viable (men too neurotic, women repelled by the neurosis)

Cui bono? Oligarchs who need male energy channeled into anything except collective action or class consciousness.

Now here’s where Tereza’s framework and mine converge on something neither of us fully articulated separately:

The enemy is hierarchy itself.

Call it patriarchy if you’re emphasizing that it’s been male-dominated hierarchy for 5,000 years.

Call it oligarchy if you’re emphasizing that it’s been elite-dominated hierarchy using gender division as control.

Both are describing the same phenomenon: A dominance-based social organization that requires competition, ranking, winners/losers, and systematic disposability.

That system originally imposed itself through violent conquest and property control. It subordinated women through sexual restriction and child hostage-taking. It subordinated working-class men through conscription, debt peonage, and wage slavery. It subordinated everyone to elite interests.

For a while, working-class men got a compensation package: small property, access to women, status above women. That made them enforcers of the system rather than resisters.

Now that compensation is revoked. Both sexes are fully exploited. Both are demoralized. Both are destroying themselves.

But instead of uniting against the system, we get:

• Women fighting “patriarchy” (blaming men as category)

• Men fighting “feminism” (blaming women as category)

• Both funded and amplified by oligarchs

• Both missing that hierarchy is eating everyone

And looksmaxxing is what happens when male hierarchical psychology has nowhere else to go. The traditional domains are closed. Property is unaffordable. Provision is impossible. Status is unavailable.

So the hierarchy turns inward. Men compete with men over appearance. Using women as the metric but not actually responding to female preferences. Creating impossible standards. Systematically destroying anyone who can’t “ascend.”

It’s hierarchy eating itself. And it’s being amplified by algorithmic platforms, funded by billionaires, and producing a generation of young men who believe they’re “subhuman” based on bone structure.

Tereza showed me something I missed: This isn’t about women imposing standards. This isn’t even primarily about attracting women. This is about male dominance hierarchies operating in the only domain still accessible when everything else has been taken away.

And that makes it worse. Because it means looksmaxxing isn’t a response to female preferences that could theoretically be satisfied. It’s a response to male hierarchical psychology that can never be satisfied. There will always be someone who mogs you. There will always be a higher tier. There will always be more optimization required.

The goddess cultures Tereza cited had sexual liberty because the economic system supported it. Women controlled resources. Children were raised communally. Male hierarchical competition existed but wasn’t tied to reproduction or survival.

We could theoretically build new systems. Different economic arrangements. Different social structures. Different ways of organizing reproduction and child-rearing that don’t require dominance hierarchies.

But instead, we’re speedrunning the worst possible outcome: Economic conditions that make traditional arrangements impossible + hierarchical psychology that hasn’t adapted + algorithmic amplification + billionaire funding + complete absence of alternative models.

The result? Young men breaking their own bones with hammers, injecting steroids at 13, believing they’re “subhuman” based on jaw width, competing with each other in a male-enforced hierarchy using female approval as currency that doesn’t actually get spent because the real game is male-on-male dominance.

And nobody’s building alternatives. While am here fighting over whether to call it patriarchy or oligarchy.

Tereza was right about the mechanism. And we’re both watching hierarchy, whatever you want to call it, turn inward on a generation that has nowhere else to channel the drive to compete, dominate, and win.

The goddess cultures had sexual liberty when economics supported it. We have looksmaxxing when economics support nothing except elite wealth extraction and everyone else’s slow-motion collapse.

That’s not male vs female. That’s not even traditional vs modern.

That’s hierarchy finding new ways to eat people when the old ways stop working.

And the kids breaking their faces don’t know they’re casualties of a 5,000-year-old system finally turning completely cannibalistic. They just know they’re “framecels” who need to “ascend” or they’re “subhuman.”

The oligarchs or patriarchs, or whatever we call them appear to be winning. They’ve just adapted the game.

Thanks to Tereza for showing me what I missed and always so kind to point me in the right direction. The correction makes the whole picture sharper.

And darker.