Bigger is Better? Inside the Dangerous Rise of the Bizarre New Body Trend, ‘Ballmaxxing’

Chances are you’ve encountered some concept with the suffix “maxxing” attached to it. Maybe your terminally online friend starts referring to playing video games all day as “unemploymentmaxxing,” or their own extensive knowledge of internet culture as “onlinemaxxing.” Adherents to this concept take a hobby, preference, or just an activity to its practical maximum.

This has spawned entire communities dedicated to one-upping each other and spreading strategies. “Looksmaxxers” are one example, a group of (typically) young men who believe that in order to succeed, they have to devote themselves to a nigh-impossible body goal.  For some, working out, skincare and even abstaining from touching yourself is supposedly enough to help them with their body image. This less intense approach, is generally called “softmaxxing.”

​However, communities like this inevitably become competitive, with their members trying to outdo each other, striving to “mog” others through superior looks. The goal of an alpha looksmaxxer is to “mog” their fellow man, that is, to appear more physically attractive. The result is a community taking more and more extreme measures to beat out the competition. This may involve rampant steroid use, skin whitening, and even plastic surgery to achieve sharper jaws and more shapely noses.

​A new escalation, one so on-the-nose that it almost sounds like parody, is ballmaxxing, where men will inject liquids like saline into their privates in order to make them expand. Some reportedly “grow” their testes to be the size of grapefruits, believing that it demonstrates their masculinity and gives them an edge in “mogging” other looksmaxxers. Why go to such extremes, and is there a world where this can be called “safe”?