Looksmaxxing and the Message of the Medium
Marshall McLuhan argues that the "personal and social consequences of any medium result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves." More than a theory of content, this is a claim about how media reshape perception, embodiment, and social life at a fundamental level. The New Yorker article on the looksmaxxing movement illustrates this precisely. The issue is not simply that social media contains extreme beauty advice. Rather, the digital medium itself reshapes how users perceive the body, judge attractiveness, and assign social value. Looksmaxxing shows that media do not just communicate ideas about beauty; they reorganize perception and embodiment by turning beauty into something technical, measurable, and endlessly improvable.
McLuhan insists that what matters is not the content a medium carries but "the change of scale or pace or pattern that it introduces into human affairs." This helps explain why looksmaxxing is more than a collection of strange or disturbing posts. Platforms built around scrolling, posting, comparing, and rating extend vision and self-surveillance, encouraging users to experience their own faces and bodies as visible problems to be managed and optimized. The real message of the medium, then, is not grooming advice itself but the creation of a new relation to the body grounded in constant comparison and bodily discipline.
This connects directly to McLuhan's theory of the human sensorium. Media alter the ratios among the senses, and visually dominant media shift experience toward sight. McLuhan contrasts visual space with acoustic space, arguing that vision emphasizes surfaces, distance, and objectification. Looksmaxxing reflects this visual logic clearly. Its language of jawlines, facial ratios, and sexual market value treats the body as something to inspect from the outside rather than live in from within. The face becomes a visible surface to be evaluated, ranked, and modified, with embodiment reduced to appearance and measurable traits. This is precisely the "new scale" McLuhan describes: not just new content, but a fundamentally reorganized way of inhabiting and perceiving one's own body.
The article also exemplifies what the course frames as the Canadian discourse of technology: the idea that technology is constitutive of both social space and psychic space, actively shaping social relations and everyday perception. Looksmaxxing is not simply a trend that exists on social media. It is a media environment that structures how people think about desire, attractiveness, and personal worth. Sarah Sharma deepens this point by arguing that technology is a structuring form of power that shapes the social experience of gender, race, class, and sexuality. That matters here because the looksmaxxing movement is openly misogynistic and hierarchical. It does not merely reflect unequal power. It helps reproduce and intensify it through digitally mediated practices of ranking, comparison, and bodily control.
What makes looksmaxxing significant, then, is not only its extremity. It demonstrates how digital media environments reshape the senses, the body, and social relations in exactly the way McLuhan describes. The medium is the message because the deeper effect of this media form is to train users to see themselves and others through competitive and technical visual logics. Looksmaxxing is therefore a powerful example of what McLuhan called the "psychic and social consequences" of media: not just ideas transmitted through a platform, but a wholesale transformation in how people perceive themselves and one another.
References
Herman, A. (2026, March 30). Marshall McLuhan: The medium theory of media ecologies/environments from The Gutenberg Galaxy to Understanding Media [PowerPoint slides]. CS304B Canadian Communication Thought, Wilfrid Laurier University.
McLuhan, M. (2013). Understanding media: The extensions of man. Gingko Press.
Rothfield, B. (2026, March 7). The captivating derangement of the looksmaxxing movement. The New Yorker.
Sharma, S. (2022). Introduction: A feminist medium is the message. In R. Singh & S. Sharma (Eds.), Re-understanding media: Feminist extensions of Marshall McLuhan (pp. 1–19). Duke University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478022497-003
This analysis of “looksmaxxing” brilliantly illustrates how the medium is the message by identifying the structural "change of scale" in how we perceive embodiment. Your connection to the human sensorium is vital: the movement’s technical, measurable view of beauty is a hallmark of visual space, which objectifies the body as a surface to be inspected rather than lived in.
ReplyDeleteThis exemplifies the Canadian discourse of technology, as these platforms are constitutive of psychic space, creating an internal “vacuum of the self”. By integrating Sarah Sharma’s techno-logics, we see that social media doesn't just "carry" misogyny; its specific features—ranking and comparison—actively produce hierarchical power as extensions of desire.