A man's choice of partner is often a performance to gain social and sexual capital among other men. This is seen when men date only thin, conventionally attractive women publicly, despite porn data showing private attraction to larger women.

For professional men, cosmetic procedures are increasingly tied to career longevity. Galloway argues that appearing youthful and vigorous is becoming a proxy for economic viability, shifting the motivation from simple vanity to a strategic career investment.

Men engaging in extreme beautification trends ('looksmaxing') often focus on traits that other men find formidable, such as a strong jawline. This intrasexual competition strategy may not align with what women actually find most attractive, which can be a slightly more feminized face on a masculine body.

Men's pursuit of extreme muscularity and masculinized features is often a failure of cross-sex mind reading. They are coding for formidability and respect from other men, whereas research suggests women often prefer a more neutral or even slightly feminized face combined with a masculinized body.

The male-focused "looksmaxxing" trend eerily parallels the behavior of the "Beautiful Ones" in the Universe 25 experiment. In this rodent "utopia," a generation of males withdrew from society, ceased mating, and focused only on grooming, reflecting a collapse of normal social roles and hierarchies.

Men often admire extremely lean physiques in other men because they represent a high-status signal of discipline and difficulty. This creates a perception gap, as women may view the same physique as less formidable or as a sign of an unhealthy obsession with looks.

The obsession with "looksmaxing" is a displacement activity. Improving one's appearance is a controllable, single-player game. It's a way to avoid the terrifying, complex, and uncontrollable challenge of learning social skills and navigating the possibility of rejection from other people.

Highly technical, male-dominated pursuits like heavy metal guitar function as an intrasexual status competition. They are not primarily for attracting women directly. Rather, men compete to establish a hierarchy among themselves, and women are then attracted to the high-status winners.

Scott Galloway reframes the trendy term "body hacking," popular among men, as a form of body dysmorphia. He argues that what is called optimization and hacking in men would be labeled as an unhealthy obsession with body image in women, revealing a fundamental unhappiness with the natural process of aging.