In short, the idea is that people have made themselves overly convenient with apps, AI, and other means of near-instant gratification – and they will be better off with increased friction in their daily lives, meaning those mundane challenges that demand some modest effort from them.
Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of “maxing” as a suffix familiar or at least understandable to most readers of mainstream news outlets is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader Internet. The online ecosystem of incels, or “involuntarily celibate” men, is saturated with this type of clinical jargon; Its victimized participants isolate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak, intended to confuse and repel outsiders. So how do non-Incels (“norms,” as Incels would label them) adopt and recontextualize these loaded words?
Whatever the origin of slang, it is viral in nature. It has a tendency to break the containment and get mutated. The popular term “woke”, as it relates to our current politics, comes from African American Vernacular English and once referred to awareness of racial and social injustice – this usage dates back to the mid-20th century, even before the Civil Rights Movement. But this century’s culture wars have turned “woke” into a favorite insult of the right, who use it as a catch-all term for anything that threatens their ideology, like black pilots or gender-neutral pronouns.
In 2014, the explosion of the GamerGate harassment campaign set the stage for a distinct linguistic realignment. An organized response to women working in the video game industry, and ultimately any kind of diversity or progressivism within the medium, it exposed a vein of reactionary anger that would be fully voiced during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This was the time when many in the digital mainstream got their first taste of the trollish nihilism and abuse that fueled toxic message boards like 4chan and gave rise to a network of anti-feminist manosphere sites, collectively known as the “PSL” community: PUAHate (a board for talking openly about pickup artists; it was created in the immediate aftermath of the Isla Vista massacre by Elliot Rodger in 2014. The latter was discontinued, which frequented the stage), SlutHate (a focus of straight-up misogyny), and Lookism (where provocateurs criticize each other’s appearance).
Lookism, named for the idea that prejudice against the less attractive is as common and harmful as sexism or racism, is the only forum of the PSL trifecta that still survives today, and while we don’t know who coined the phrase “maxing”, it is the most likely source for the first verb with this construct. “Looksmaxing”, which borrows from the role-playing game concept of “min-maxing”, or enhancing a character’s strengths while limiting weaknesses, has become the preferred expression for efforts to improve one’s appearance in the pursuit of sex. This can mean something as simple as a style makeover or as extreme as “bonesmashing,” which is a predictable technique for achieving a more defined jawline by tapping with a hammer.
If the 2000s introduced people to pickup language like “game” and “negging”, the 2010s ushered in language that expanded the Darwinian view of the dating pool as a staunch and strictly hierarchical marketplace. “AMOG”, an early term for “alpha male of the group”, gave us “mogging”, a display where a man displays his physical superiority over an opponent. An ideally masculine specimen can also be identified as a “chad”, who reportedly enjoys a selection of attractive partners, while a chad among chads is, of course, a “gigachad”. Women were disparaged as first “female humanoids”, then “femoids”, and finally just “foids”.
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