I never thought I’d see discussions of looksmaxxing on LinkedIn of all places. But nowadays, I increasingly am.
For the uninitiated, “looksmaxxing” is an internet term that originated on incel message boards in the 2010s. It’s a practice that encapsulates various extreme methods, such as jaw surgery, that some men go through to improve their looks. (Or, in the language of masculinity-coded productivity culture: to achieve peak optimization.) “Looksmaxxing” entered the zeitgeist in earnest after it seemingly started when its patron saint, the 20-year-old influencer Clavicular, appeared at New York Fashion Week last month, with profiles in The New York Times and GQ.
The term “looksmaxxing” and the goal of “optimization” are closely associated with what’s become known as the “manosphere”: a somewhat loosely related ecosystem of online communities and groups that promote outdated views of masculinity, rampant misogyny, and an opposition to feminism, has seemingly moved more mainstream. Netflix entered the conversation with a documentary featuring several other prominent influencers in this space. Since then, coverage has appeared everywhere from NBC News to the Wall Street Journal.
Now? Manosphere lexicon is entering the workplace.
“I’ve definitely noticed some manosphere-coded language in some of my employees,” Liam, an HR executive who asked me not to use his real name to speak freely on this topic, told me. “It raises some red flags, but I’ve never had any issues with any of these guys yet,” he d, noting conversations about “alphas,” “betas,” “chads,” and “stacys.”
While the concept of the manosphere may feel new to those who don’t closely internet subcultures, its language—and the problematic ideologies it describes—have been slowly seeping into daily life for years. What’s changed is that we now have the tools to recognize it.
The manosphere’s slow, wide expanse
To better understand how internet subcultures move beyond niche communities and into everyday language, I spoke with Whitney Phillips, an associate professor of information politics and media ethics at the University of Oregon, who studies the relationship between online behavior and mainstream culture.
Phillips noted that the term “manosphere” itself has become increasingly amorphous. It’s used to describe everything from Andrew Tate, the controversial influencer known for promoting hyper-masculine self-help and anti-feminist views, to “anyone with even a tenuous connection to UFC” or generic “hustle culture”—collapsing very different figures and audiences under the same umbrella.
As media coverage of these communities has expanded, she suggested, the label has stretched along with it, absorbing adjacent ideas and audiences that weren’t originally part of the same ecosystem. That’s what we’re seeing happening in the workplace..
“It creates a kind of unified front that then people who get lumped into that category latch onto.” She pointed to Mark Zuckerberg’s comments on Joe Rogan’s podcast about bringing “masculinity” back to the workplace—language that overlaps with the idea that leadership requires traditionally masculine traits, dominance, or that workplace culture has become “neutered” by DEI initiatives.
Lumping more and more figures into the “manosphere,” she suggested, can make the label easier for those audiences to adopt—or strategically repurpose. As the media has covered the idea of the manosphere more, Phillips said that language from niche online communities started circulating far beyond the people who originally used it.
When toned-down versions of manosphere language start appearing in mainstream settings—phrases “high body count” appearing on LinkedIn, for example—it can make the underlying worldview feel more legitimate to the people who already use those terms, Phillips said.
In that context, the language can serve as an insider signal, recognizable to some audiences even when it sounds neutral to others—allowing the assumptions behind it to circulate more widely without being openly debated.
‘When terms get used, ideologies come with them’
You can easily find other examples of “manosphere” terminology in everyday professional discourse. While some examples clearly originate inside manosphere communities (a Computer Science subreddit post crediting looksmaxxing with landing an internship) others have already started drifting away from their origins.
For example, folks on LinkedIn discussing “high-value” employees, or “body counts” regarding layoffs. This reflects the way language travels before institutions and systems catch up to its meanings. The problem is, in this case, the toxic meanings can unintentionally travel through culture with the terms themselves.
“When terms get used, ideologies come with them,” Dr. Alice Marwick, Director of Research at Data & Society, who studies online behavior, told me. Even if people adopt these terms casually or ironically, they carry assumptions about hierarchy, competition, and value that can reshape how success and status are discussed.
For example, she notes how many young people now use the term “sigma,” a label that originated in the manosphere to describe a supposedly independent “lone wolf” man outside traditional hierarchies but still dominant within them. While young people use it as a new substitute for “cool,” its manosphere roots are still traceable. And that matters because the origin of the term doesn’t disappear just because the tone becomes casual.
That shift is especially visible in the overlap between manosphere discourse and a broader culture of self-optimization that already has a foothold in professional environments. Long before most workplaces were explicitly talking about the manosphere, they were already comfortable with “grind,” “discipline,” and self-optimization. In some cases, those frameworks map neatly onto each other.
Marwick noted that the logic behind looksmaxxing, for example, rests on the idea that success—romantic, social, and professional—comes from maximizing one’s position within an implicit market and hitting arbitrary benchmarks. It’s a worldview that “encourages people to see each other as objects” competing within a system, rather than collaborators operating inside one. It also encourages people to view others as competitors, whose value can be ranked accordingly.
While it may seem absurd, consider that we’re living in a personal-brand-obsessed society, where superficial-seeming benchmarks—looks, er count, connections—hold weight.
She also noted a trickle-down effect. “In the early 2020s, we have this real emphasis on diversity and feminism and coming to terms with sexism and racism, and there’s an openness to LGBTQ ideas and gender diversity. Then with the [second] Trump election, you have a real backlash to that,” she said.
“The current Trump administration draws heavily from fringe online subcultures,” she says, and “has really done a lot to normalize a lot of this stuff.” That shift is visible in the rollback of DEI protections in the federal government, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth championing the return of a “warrior” ethos to the military, and the prioritization of male audiences.
Still, the impact of these ideas doesn’t always appear where people expect it to.
While some discussions of the manosphere focus on harassment or overt misogyny, Phillips emphasized that the more common shift is subtler. The language circulating online didn’t invent sexism, she said. It makes what already exists easier to express.
“It makes what already is there more palatable,” she explained, often by framing it as humor or cultural shorthand—”locker room talk” or questioning levels of “fun,” for example —rather than ideology. This can help explain why conversations about the manosphere often feel both new and familiar at once—and why the meaning behind the language can be damaging, even if used frivolously.
‘The vacuum that the manosphere is seeking to fill’
In many workplaces, the influence of these ideas shows up less as explicit alignment with online subcultures, and more as a change in tone: how leadership is described (alpha leadership), how ambition is framed (often aggressively, if it’s a woman), or who benefits from competitiveness. And because those shifts often arrive through language rather than policy, they can be difficult for organizations to recognize as cultural change at all.
According to HR consultant Lily Zheng, the effects can be especially pronounced in younger or less structured companies, where founders’ assumptions about hierarchy and gender can quietly scale into institutional practice. A startup led by people steeped in manosphere-adjacent ideas, Zheng noted, “may very well create norms and practices that replicate those beliefs as the organization scales,” particularly if early leaders dismiss concerns about sexism or overlook the emergence of “boys’ club” dynamics. Over time, those norms can become systemic.
More established organizations aren’t immune either, but they’re shifting for different reasons. Rather than responding directly to manosphere discourse, many companies have stepped back from gender conversations altogether amid the broader backlash against DEI initiatives. Zheng warned that this retreat may create a vacuum that online communities are increasingly positioned to fill.
“The diminishing presence of these spaces at work,” they said, “will only widen the vacuum that the manosphere is seeking to fill.”
If that happens, the workplace won’t necessarily become more explicitly ideological. But folks may be less ly to challenge the status quo or speak out against problematic behavior.
And that may be the most important takeaway from the recent surge of attention around the manosphere. As conversations about gender and power recede in some workplaces, the language filling that space can feel a sudden arrival—even when the assumptions behind it have been circulating for years.
But as Marwick and Phillips pointed out, researchers and activists have been tracking these dynamics since at least the late 2000s. What’s changed isn’t the existence of the ideas—it’s that they’ve infiltrated workplace culture so deeply that they’re becoming harder to ignore.
The current wave of coverage isn’t introducing the manosphere into the workplace, so much as reflecting the broader shift that’s mainstreamed an internet subculture and made the embrace of its more problematic aspects more permissible.
It’s not a sudden arrival. It’s a moment of recognition that this language and these assumptions have been shaping the world of work for some time.
The good news is that when people can recognize and name behaviors, they’re better positioned to challenge them.
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Fastcompany.com
