Meet the men paying to have their jaws broken in the name of ‘manliness’

Authored by gq-magazine.co.uk and submitted by speckz

Ali – all I can tell you about him is that he’s a young man in his twenties who lives in Western Europe – is pacing up and down the streets of Rome, killing time. The last time he was in the city, Ali managed to fit in some sightseeing: visiting the Vatican, checking out the Colosseum. But on this occasion he’s feeling too nervous for gladiators or crucifixions. You would feel nervous, though, the night before paying someone £17,500 (€20,000) to break your jaw.

Until then, Ali’s killing time. That’s why he’s talking to me. It’s lonely out there, away from home, edging towards anaesthesia. We’re on video call, but his camera is switched off so I can’t see his face. I figure he’s not ready to share it yet. Besides, this is the “before” phase. With any luck, he’ll emerge from the operating theatre tomorrow looking like an entirely different person. A man with a strong jaw.

The medical terms for his procedures are a bilateral sagittal split osteotomy, a Le Fort 1 osteotomy, and a genioplasty. After splitting Ali’s lower jaw, upper jaw and chin respectively, surgeons will bolt the pieces of bone back together, restructuring – and advancing – Ali’s jawline.

Ali (not his real name) has been waiting for this day since 2020, when, amid the stasis of the pandemic, he began reaching out to cosmetic surgeons. But the seed was sown much earlier, in his teens, when Ali first felt himself fall behind his “better-looking” friends. As he saw it, they had no problem getting girlfriends, whereas he struggled. He didn’t consider himself ugly, but the guys around him seemed to channel a different sort of energy. It was crushing to see the genetic lottery at play; even more so when some of his friends were scouted as models. Online dating – the cold, hard stats of a low match count – only put the feeling into numbers.

Ali considers himself a deep thinker, “philosophical.” As a teenager he was a smart kid, albeit a little lazy, with a good memory and an eye for detail, which helped him start a career in engineering. Professionally, he applied that skill to technical drawings, construction blueprints. Privately, that instinct lasered in on the building blocks of his face.

In 2019, Ali started hanging out on Looksmax.org, an online forum in which men strive to achieve their “aesthetic potential”. Looksmaxing is a facet of the manosphere, that swamp of online communities that's often a potent mix of toxic masculinity, men’s rights and misogyny. There, one can encounter a whole array of influencers, from pickup artists and provocateurs like Jordan Peterson to self-proclaimed misogynists like Andrew Tate. The manosphere is dominated by “red pill” ideology, which references the scene in The Matrix when Neo chooses to take a red capsule instead of a blue one and, in so doing, see the world as it truly is. To be “redpilled” can refer to any unsettling awakening; in this particular context, it describes an understanding of society in which modern men have become disadvantaged by a feminist power shift that leaves them unable to find sexual partners. Women, meanwhile – or so the distorted logic goes – can take their pick.

PigeonsArePopular on March 20th, 2023 at 17:35 UTC »

Masculinity now falling victim to a lot the consumerism insanity that women have long been subject to (make-up, insane diets, corsets)

This is not the gender equality I had in mind

ASexual-Buff-Baboon on March 20th, 2023 at 16:38 UTC »

It’s probably the same men breaking their legs for more height

UglyLaugh on March 20th, 2023 at 15:37 UTC »

My husband’s dentist in Southern California recommended he do this to have a more defined jaw. No medical reason. Just for aesthetics. This was about 15 years ago. He did not go back to that dentist.