The Brotherhood of the Traveling Tongue

Mewing, mogging, mourning

We used to hold protractors to our jaws in seventh grade. When the math teacher went to the bathroom, in the back of class underneath the slanted rays of the projector, I would get my buddies to press the protractor firmly against my jawbone and trace it in with a pencil. Sometimes we would convert my jawline into radians.

“142 degrees!” my friend exclaimed.

“Shit! I’m more obtuse than the guy before me.”

In middle school, back in the golden age of Instagram, before the bottomless consumption of TikTok or the easy accessibility of the OnlyFans creator or the infinite envy of the fitness influencer, boys identified themselves in the eyes of each other. The boys with six-pack abs walked shirtless around the locker room after gym class whipping other boys with their t-shirts, and some of the boys without abs changed in the bathroom stall. We didn’t need to count our macros and our metabolisms were high without trying. We had discovered desire. Boys became jealous of each other and started calling other boys’ moms hot.

We got braces but nobody knew why we needed them. An overbite was a technicality at best, and the medical terms from the orthodontist were just jargon. I fell asleep in the dentist’s chair as he explained my misaligned smile and wide jaw to my mother. When they told me I needed to get a few teeth pulled, I followed blindly and deferred my judgment of the operation to the expert. The statute of limitations in which braces could be cool was three years. After that, something was deviant about their face, and we couldn’t put our finger on what it was.

Unfortunately, it is tangibly uncool to have braces as an adult male. I got the confirmation a few months ago from my dental hygienist who said she had bad news for me at the end of my last visit.

As I sat in the dental chair, bib soaked from a cleaning gone wrong, my hygienist thrust an oblong mirror a foot away from me. She tucked a piece of thick paper through my teeth and explained that my bite was opening up. Before I could ask what that meant, she told me to smile. “Smile with your back teeth,” she snarled. “Of course your front teeth are going to touch if you force them together!”

There were gaps between my top and bottom front teeth. “Every time you swallow, your tongue presses against the back of your teeth rather than the natural position of resting against the roof of your mouth. That’s what we call a tongue thrust. You need to stop it if you don't want braces.”

Before I left the office, we did ten reps of swallowing together.

As I walked past bus stops and billboards, every advertisement had smiling models. Their teeth all harmoniously touched. I smiled for my selfie camera and I saw the ugly fleshiness of my tongue lurking behind my ground-through canines. On the subway home, I crowdsourced open bite remedies on Reddit and TikTok.

Every morning for a week, I chewed a banana with my tongue. I kept a lifesaver on the roof of my mouth and pressed my tongue against it, swallowing my sugary saliva while maintaining tongue posture. And every algorithm, in their brutality, began recommending me videos about the masseter.

They told me to keep my tongue suctioned against the roof of my mouth, jaw clenched and mouth closed at all times. In the jargon of the 21-year-old male, this is called mewing. According to British orthodontists Mike and John Mew, it tends to have great incidental benefits. It belongs as the leading theory behind orthotropics, their proposed science that advocates for a natural solution to malocclusion — oral posture training that strengthens facial muscles and promotes facial harmony. They have been fined and expelled from orthodontic societies. The American Association for Orthodontists claims that the “scientific evidence supporting mewing’s jawline-sculpting claims is as thin as dental floss.”

Mewing serves as the gateway into the young man’s belief that his face, like the rest of his body, is a set of muscles and bones that can be modified. So much of postmodern masculinity lies in the idea that we can change our bodies, and as a result, ourselves. In the new age of the internet, we idolize fitness influencers, copy their workout routines, and purchase magnesium, caffeine, and pre- and post-workout supplements that try to fit in the most protein into one scoop.

And this is the same ethos that renders this masculinity’s mode of connectivity: that communities can be built and reconstructed as a set of established processes, rather than cultivated organically. Why beat around the bush with indirect, prerequisite conversation when you can create a post that gets you the responses you need, or a forum that gives you only the discussions you want to see? A new dystopian ideal of brotherhood has risen over time on forums like 4chan and banned subreddits, built on the premise of truth — disclosure beyond the enclosure of cancel culture, unburdened and anonymous.

A forum for men can either invite or scare. It could pleasingly have the first half of the color wheel splattered on the headline, an automated bot yelling, “Welcome! We hope you enjoy your stay,” at you, people there to listen, then speak. Men there are comfortable with their masculinity. Take, for example, /r/malefashionadvice on Reddit. They cultivated an environment so safe that somebody calls his scents “boozy vanilla.” Somebody else doesn’t want “spicy scents,” he says. “I don’t really want to smell like a man.”

One night, particularly feverish over the openness of my jaw after a few coffees, I stumbled upon looksmax.org. This was the scary kind of forum. The banner was short; it spared the introductions and only told me that “aesthetics matter.” It felt like I had walked into a crowded convention hall. The subforums yelled at me across the room, ranging from “Moneymaking and Success” to “Ratings.” The first thing I saw when clicking on the first thread was a man telling a 15-year-old to get a rhinoplasty. On another thread, people talked about applying unfriendly pressure to different points on their jaw. I pictured a convention hall and imagined no food except for ground turkey in the room. When I read about “incel culture” in newspapers, it took on a fantastical, fearmongering tone about its ugliness. Not a single one had actually ever introduced me to the language and dynamics of these spaces.

I made my username pbateman77 and opened up the first link: “HOW TO BECOME A CHAD (COMPLETE LOOKSMAXXING GUIDE).” Despite the orgy of bold font, all-caps, and the occasional slur, it was clear that the post was high-effort.

“This is no joke guide, this is no ‘trolling.’ It actually works, but it is close to suicide, since you are basically destroying your old self and rebuilding anew. Let us say that if you want to commit suicide this is probably a better alternative.”

I read through the entire manifesto. The author demanded limb lengthening surgery and blond hair for Asian men to “look as much like a tan-skinned white dude as much as possible. Remember: you are killing your old incel self, do not stick to any idea of being loyal to ‘yourself’ or ‘your race.’ You are building a new person here, so changing your eye color is ok.”

I moved onto a thread that described the “Ideal facial ratios and proportions.” With the surgical precision of a cosmetic orthodontist, it described the key facial features that construct the “conventionally attractive” man.

In the library, surrounded by people working on financial models, I took a selfie of myself with masturbatory shame.

For the first time in my life, I was looking at myself not in the mirror or through a camera, but on the Preview app of my MacBook Air. I measured myself using pixels with the fidelity of a plastic surgeon. There was something mathematical about this process that made me feel intelligent. I felt like I was compressing my squishy, subjective self-esteem into a single set of values that made it more legible.

After thirty minutes, I figured it out. My facial-width-to-height ratio is 155%, lower/full-face ratio is 69%, midface ratio is 1.11%, mouth-to-nose ratio is 126%, lower-to-upper-lip ratio is 108%, chin-to-philtrum ratio is 227%, bizygomatic-to-bigonial width is 135%, and eye-separation ratio is 53%.

Erotic capital, sexual market value, attractiveness – whatever you choose to call the set of characteristics that legitimizes you in the dating sphere, looksmaxxers swear to it. In their ideal world, the dating market is perfectly rational and efficient. Every person that looks for sex, regardless of their preferences, partners up. But Dr. Catherine Hakim, the sociologist who authored Honey Money: The power of erotic capital, argues that since women “want sex” less than men, they have more latitude to exploit that sexual power to their advantage. The men on the forum who quote their sister site, incels.wiki, at least, jump to this interpretation. Men are price takers in this world. The market is no longer free, and in order to meet the new equilibrium of women demanding more from the men in their lives, men begin to think about themselves as hard assets whose value can be boosted with a set of transformations. They migrate the sciences of the world, from surgery to economics, over to their genetic traits in order to gain agency over the unpredictability of human desire.

There was something comforting about finally being able to articulate my insecurities. Sometimes, my friends took a photo of me and I immediately told them to delete it, then to delete it from the “Recently Deleted” folder. I had no vocabulary to describe the problem with the photo. I just didn’t like it. I could only start and end with “ugly.”

Finally, though, I put words to my ambiguous displeasure of looking in the mirror. I only fit one of the eight criteria. My bottom lip is thin, my face is a little bit tall, my mouth is narrow, my jaw is too wide, and my eyes are too far apart. I finally cracked years of insecurity and maybe even defeatism: maybe I don’t feel ugly because of anything within my control, but I feel ugly because I am ugly.

The cultural discourse of “conventional attractiveness” continues to polarize and amuse. A few days ago, I stumbled upon a TikTok of a user named @womptomp rejecting the use of the phrase as a coping mechanism.

“Conventionally attractive is like linguistic heroin for fat women. The degree to which beauty is socially negotiated does not in any conceivable reality include you and exclude them,” he yells at the camera in his bedroom. His skin is clear and his eyebrows look recently plucked. “Imagine a bunch of short dudes being like, ‘they just meet our normative height expectation.’ Yeah, they’re taller, which makes them more attractive. Just give it a rest.”

At some level, we’ve taken sociological and surgical terms and bullied them into futility. We are being gaslit, everybody has an anxious-attachment style, we have therapy-spoken our way into denying our emotions any agency. The looksmaxx forum is inundated with emotional Original Posters (OPs) looking for comfort and advice. The response is overwhelmingly sterile. Commenters toss seven ratios in the comment section and tell him exactly what he needs to do to improve with medical jargon. The malleable teenager begins to think of the fragility of his ego as constructible infrastructure rather than the messy, emotional pile that it should be.

I think often about “The Boys are Not All Right,” an op-ed written by Michael Ian Black for the New York Times shortly after the Parkland mass shooting in 2018. “It’s no longer enough to be a man – we no longer even know what it means,” he wrote, “and there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated.” Boyhood is broken, but we haven’t given them any community, structure, or generosity to fall back on. Here is the community, shining and prefabricated, telling boys the precise rules, role models, and definitions to be the man that will garner them both praise and envy.

If you look at the “Ratings” subforum, you’ll see the same post over and over again. “Rate me, 15 y/o 5’6 IT’S SO OVER HELP.” “Rate 6’4 15.” “rate me, 14 year old pretty boy.”

It is entirely possible that this existed seven years ago when I was that age. It may have been even less regulated or monitored, and teenagers were put in even more compromising positions to gain this validation. Men have not suddenly become insecure, but #looksmaxing has 72.2k posts on TikTok, #mewing has 516.8k, and #mog has 203.0k.

I opened up the next thread: “Why do you guys actually looksmax?”

“I'm invisible with no friends, no girls, no life,” a user named Always Stay You said. “Nothing. In the past week, my phone received no texts, no calls. I am trying to ascend to a social life because I know if I live the rest of my life out like this I will die prematurely due to the negative health effects of living life socially excluded.”

In high school, presumably around that poster’s age, I was full of desire and nowhere to put it. I never dated, and only hung out with friends outside of school twice throughout my entire sophomore year. I wanted to be wanted by anybody that would have me. While scrolling through looksmax.org, I wanted to know what would happen if that 16-year-old version of me had access to this forum.

So I posted a front-facing selfie of me in the corner of my kitchen from 2018 and titled it “16M looking for feedback and how to ascend.” In the description, I wrote: “16M. Nobody seems to be interested in me and I’m generally pretty lonely. How can I look better to ascend for my second half of high school?”

A man responded immediately: “Sorry man but you’re shooting yourself with this pic. Take a front-facing, side, and ¾ photo.”

There are structured rules to posting “Ratings” pictures. You need a white background, camera about a foot away to avoid facial distortion, and ideally you mention your height in the title or description. I knew I was breaking the rules. I didn’t have those pictures. I scrolled through the entirety of my camera roll in 2018 and 2019, and I didn’t have a single selfie that followed those rules. I took plenty of selfies where I purposefully uglified myself – I would scrunch my jaw in to give myself a double chin, or cover my face with a peace sign, or smile so aggressively it would look like I wasn’t trying. There wasn’t a single photo where I took myself seriously as somebody worthy of being desired.

I was backed into a corner. I had no other photos from when I was sixteen to show, and I refused to use a current photo for the sake of my future employment.

I said the only excuse that came to mind that would justify not being able to take an on-demand selfie: “I can’t really take pictures right now since I’m in the hospital.”

Immediately, user narroworbits replied to me. “In the hospital for obo I hope.”

An orbital box osteotomy requires both a neurosurgeon and plastic surgeon. The doctors cut bone flaps from the front of the skull out in order to force the eyes closer together, usually in the scale of millimeters. I knew that he was messing with me, but I’d never actually considered that my eyes were tangibly far apart.

Snoofy responded a few minutes later: “Just go to the gym and get a good haircut, leave the site, and enjoy life.”

From the looks of his profile picture, he wasn't much older than sixteen himself. In his profile picture, he flexed his jawline against what looked like a high school brick wall. To him, I was innocent. I hadn't swallowed the pill yet.

I bit. I was genuinely curious, my teenage desperation crawling out of its grave buried deep in my ego. I couldn’t place the feeling into desire or even yearning. It was much further up the pyramid, close to therapeutic necessity. I asked him to “please just tell me what to focus on my face.”

He said “lemme cook,” and then he told me: “LeFort 1 (upper jaw surgery), genioplasty (chin surgery), bimax (double jaw) surgery + implants, zygo implants (upper tooth implants), brow ridge implants, double eyelid surgery, and Botox to the lower eyebrows.”

To him, my face was a problem to be solved and he found the right answer. I knew he was trolling me, and from personal experience, that teenage boys are not particularly known for their kindness or generosity. However, the younger forms of myself that I still carried, shoved in the back of my id, brought insecurities up to my rational mind. Especially about my jaw, given that my dentist also pointed it out.

Narroworbits came back with the one-two punch, telling me that even if I did all of those surgeries, I would look “uncanny because my base is so bad that I would need all those surgeries done.” Somebody else quickly replied: “there is nothing that u can do and your life is over. dw tho bro my starting point was lower than u and I got a girl. just start lifting and find a sport u like.”

Before I closed the tab, I saw one more message. “Hey man, here's my tips: get a better cut and keep getting leaner. Without sugarcoating, the only way you’re gonna look better is with cosmetic surgery.”

There was an earnestness to these messages that closed the gap of rationality. They weren't fucking with this 16-year-old; they pitied him.

After I settled into my post-puberty body, I took too many selfies. I was vain. I asked everybody for pictures, began going on dates, and put myself in every possible position to receive validation. I was always looking at my face, but so was that 16-year-old version of me. He took even more selfies but never saved them, and looked in the mirror nonstop, enraptured in the possibility of his own face.

One of my favorite reaction photos is an Instagram story from Jemima Kirke, an actress from HBO’s Girls whose Instagram Q&As have become a cultural monument for 20-somethings who don’t listen to their therapists. In one of her most famous stories, somebody asks: “Any advice to unconfident young women ?” Kirke takes a smug selfie and responds, “I think you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much.”

For the longest time, my ego shifted between those two self-obsessions. In both versions of myself, I was ruled by a luminous sense of possibility that I could always be more of something. Only recently have I been able to reach a compromise with my ego, getting off the narcissistic treadmill. I thought when posting that I would be able to place my emotions into apathy rather than denial. Not that I wouldn’t care about what they thought, moreso that I wouldn’t care if they were right.

When I was sixteen, my mother would always call me handsome, and I’d always get frustrated at the constancy of it. Of course she was going to call me handsome because she had to, but I still believed her because I knew she loved me enough to mean it every time. I got the sense that an inverse logic applied to those looksmaxxers — they were always going to call me ugly because they were doomed to resent me.

I was witnessing a prisoner’s dilemma in the sexual value economy, that all these men felt they could only buy into this view of desirability by bringing others into this negative feedback loop. And I imagined what would change for all these boys at their most vulnerable age if they just cooperated, and I felt deflated.

Later that night while I laid in bed, I took inventory of every woman who’d ever hit on me. The first time was at a Model U.N. conference when I was sixteen. I was so proud, and I was never attracted to women. On nights out, I still find myself deepening my voice, straightening my personality out, and wondering if that girl over there finds me attractive. People tell me that they thought I dated my girl best friend, and I revel in it. Despite our differences, the men on the forum and I want our masculinity to be validated in the exact same way — and the only thing separating us is that they are more honest about these intentions.

When I step outside of looksmaxxing land, I remember that the real world is actually very harsh to it. The Chads of the world will be the first to tell you that it’s stupid. They joke about mewing and then hold their finger to their jawbone to dramatically trace it down. They are not lonely people. They have social lives and demonstrably high sexual market value. It’s easiest to understand how dating feels like a zero-sum game when looking at how the Chads respond to the culture war imposed upon them by incels, with more of an annoyed pity rather than sympathy or reciprocal anger.

Once, I told my friend I was mewing for a school project. It was easier to say that than to legitimize it for any clinical or aesthetic reasons. He immediately laughed loudly, then flared out his jaw and traced it with his finger.

“But it’s stupid!” he said with confidence. In the sun, his pores were tight and the hollowness of his cheekbones carved into the narrow frame of his jaw.

Then, curiously, he asked, “have you seen any results?”

A few weeks after I began my trek into looksmaxxing, I told my mother that I was doing this new thing with my tongue. She laughed and said, “nobody’s going to want to date you if you keep doing that!”

Later that night, my brother and I were getting ready to go to a bar downtown. I put on a new shirt-jacket and an unwrinkled white t-shirt that broadened me out. For the first time in a while, I sprayed on cologne. While brushing my teeth, I opened up TikTok and the first video on my feed had100k likes. “Gonna focus on debloating everything,” the text read over a video of an impossibly lean man incline walking on a treadmill with a Zoolander-esque expression. “I wanna be accused of doing coke by the end of this,” he wrote in the caption, and I felt sad thinking about this inchoate intersection between the excess of steroid use and the deprivation of heroin chic. I turned off my phone. I faced towards the mirror, sucked my cheeks in, and forced my whole tongue onto the roof of my mouth. They were right — Ididlook uncanny. I caught a glimpse of my smile as I laughed at myself, and I could have sworn that my bite was closing down.