When Did Men Get So Vain?

On Saturday, as Columbia University caved to the president’s demands so they could get their funding back, and while his advisers were probably group texting about how to handle Yemen, the leader of the United States expressed his deep disappointment.

It had come to his attention that an unflattering image of him existed.

“Nobody likes a bad picture or painting of themselves, but the one in Colorado, in the State Capitol, put up by the Governor, along with all other Presidents, was purposefully distorted to a level that even I, perhaps, have never seen before,” he wrote on Truth Social.

“The artist also did President Obama, and he looks wonderful, but the one on me is truly the worst.” Chin up, DJT, Obama was 47 when he was inaugurated!

There’s been a rise in male vanity, and it’s not just in the White House. Young men, but older ones too, are more worried about how they look, and controlling their public image.

My feeds are awash with men going through body transformations, guys talking about their revolutionary diets, and so many male skincare routines. The influencer Ashton Hall went viral this weekend for posting a nearly six-hour morning routine—which started before 4 a.m. and at one point showed Hall rubbing a banana peel on his face and dunking his head in a bowl of Saratoga Spring bottled water with ice. Twice. It was impossible to tell if it was satire. His huge muscles bulged the entire time.

The whole thing made American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman, with his herb-mint facial mask and his water-activated gel cleanser, look like a schlub.

And it’s not only public-facing men.

While Trump was looking at an official portrait and wondering if it made him look fat, I was on the subway trying not to look at the two teenage boys sitting across from me. They were low on the chairs, slumped into their puffy jackets. One of them pulled out his phone, flipped it around, and snapped a picture of the both of them; the kid without the camera threw up a peace sign and scrunched his face. The boy taking the photo checked the image, grimaced, deleted it, then raked through the front of his floppy hair with his fingers before holding up the camera and trying again.

He did it three more times before shame finally intervened. He sheepishly pocketed his phone. He didn’t get the shot.

When did men get so vain?

Perhaps it all started with Jordan Peterson’s book 12 Rules for Life, which came out in 2018. In it, he encouraged men to make such self-improvements as to sit up straight and to make their beds. At the time, there was much talk about a lost generation of men who lived in their parents’ basements, who couldn’t get girlfriends and couldn’t get jobs. Peterson was trying to help those guys who had let themselves—their financial security, their hygiene, their self-confidence—fall by the wayside.

Seven years later, there are still a lot of young men who can’t get girlfriends and can’t get jobs, but there’s also a subset of opportunists who’ve taken Peterson’s self-improvement message and gone way too far. Male influencers, like Andrew Huberman and Bryan Johnson, sell followers on concepts like longevity and peak health—male-flavored science-y terms for “You’re going to look goddamn incredible.” They lean hard on their own physiques to do it—and it’s having an impact on ordinary guys. There’s been a rise in male body dysmorphia, according to a new study, with 42 percent of the men surveyed reporting that they feel pressure to have a certain body type.

It’s like heroin chic in the ’90s, except instead of girls looking at an ad with Kate Moss and then skipping dinner, it’s boys looking at beefcakes online and overnighting steroids.

At the same time, cottage industries are sprouting to take advantage of male insecurity. The business of curing baldness is booming. Ditto the one for testosterone replacement therapy, which helps men put on muscle mass and ratchets up their libido.

Jordan Peterson wrote to “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping,” but I don’t think he meant someone you are helping become a gigolo.

Another Peterson rule: “Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.” Maybe that is why there are so many videos of men cleaning their homes within an inch of their lives?

It’s possible that men, like all of us, are trying to get a sense of control over their lives, and they’re just doing it in weird ways, like by never missing leg day at the gym, or ironing their pillowcases.

But while they may be aiming for a masculine ideal, they’re coming off as feminine.

Women, of course, have a tendency to be weird about their faces and bodies—especially when having their picture taken. If I had sat next to a few teenage girls on the train, it would not have registered if they’d taken a selfie and then three reprises of it because someone thought their hair looked off. Women have rules around pictures; this one doesn’t like to stand on the end of a group shot because of how it makes her arms look, this one needs to vet any picture where she is present and reserves the right to hit delete. And the worlds of makeup, fashion, self-care, and wellness are worlds where women go to tango with all their anxieties, and to find a salve or a serum, a flattering outfit, or a foolproof ab workout that will make them all go away.

But women don’t want their guys to be as insecure as they are. We aren’t attracted to someone who needs six hours of prep before he can leave the house. Or who can’t eat out because they’re trying out an anti-inflammatory diet, inspired by some influencer they’re obsessed with. Vain men aren’t following rules laid out to them by women; they’re following ones laid out by other men. And any woman could tell them: Beating yourself up about an ugly picture and obsessing over calories is the best way to project insecurity—not power.

If you missed Suzy’s column on Timothée Chalamet and the Oscars, read it here: “Timothée Chalamet and the Rise of the Try-Hards.”