GigaChad Aesthetics as an Eternal Ideal?

 

We live in the era of the GigaChad. Of U.F.C. cage matches on the White House lawn. Of teenaged looksmaxxers progressing from mewing to bone smashing to hardmaxxing with chin implants and buccal fat excision, in pursuit of the prominent jaw and high cheekbones of their chiseled masculine paragon. They claim it is the eternal, evolutionarily-compelled ideal that all men have always hoped to embody.  

It isn’t!

Consider Cesare Lombroso, the 19th century eugenicist and pioneering criminologist who invented the photographic mug shot. He was a misogynist and a racist, and a big believer in the glory of Rome and Western civilization. So you’d imagine he’d be a fan of GigaChad faces. But the truth is absolutely the opposite! The eugenically-inferior physiognomy that proved a man was born to criminality and evil acts, he claimed, were the “animalistic” features of “enormous jaws” and “high cheekbones.”

Superior men of innate good character had “refined” features, wrote Lombroso. Jaws of modest size, elegant noses, restrained cheekbones. The eugenically-superior man’s most prominent feature was his high forehead and large cranium. He was evolved beyond the brute strength of the apes, unlike his racial inferiors. A creature of brain, not brawn. 

Lombroso’s eugenic philosophy might fit in nicely with that of many manosphere denizens’ today. But the eugenic masculine beauty ideal of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—one of poise and perfectly-erect posture, a year-round version of No Nut November, of giant brains and small jaws? 

Fans of today’s GigaChad masculinity disdain what turns out to be their own political forebears’ ideal. They frame it as the eternally-pathetic, naturally-repellant form of the “beta male.” Too much soy, not enough peptides!

My point is just that it is funny how the idealized masculine form of men who like to see themselves as “naturally superior” changes wildly with the times—while nature does not.