New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has become known, in part, for wearing a suit. He has named Uniqlo as one of his chosen brands, and his on-duty style, with its slim-tailored trousers and nicely tailored jackets, has made him the poster boy for a brand of millennial optimism popular during the Obama administration that was swiftly replaced by the forcefulness of the MAGA look a decade or so ago. Today, in the era of plumped faces and fake tans, peptides and looksmaxxing, Mamdani stands in for a certain realness. Which is why an image of the mayor looking jacked that circulated on X earlier this week landed as a surprise.
Except that those aren’t Mamdani’s arms.
They are the doing of AI and someone with enough extra time and a certain curiosity for seeing the mayor in a different light. Mamdani is also not alone. Images of notable men including Pedro Pascal, Jaden Smith, Chris Pine, Finn Wolfhard, Ed Sheeran, and Adam Sandler have been modified to make them appear remarkably muscular, despite having physiques that already range from impressive to perfectly fine to healthy-looking. Even Jeremy Allen White, the actor known in part for a steamy Calvin Klein underwear campaign that flaunted his very real muscles, has been augmented by this pocket of the internet.
Many accounts posting these images are verified on X and appear to be anonymous. Broadly, this now recurrent clickbait speaks to the content plaguing the platform since Elon Musk’s takeover: the kind of bro-ey, AI-generated, and manosphere-centric material that seems pitched to pique body-conscious young males to look and behave a certain way. But these enhanced images also reflect our hazardous and growingly insidious relationship with our bodies and our self-image.
Earlier this summer, speculation regarding Ariana Grande’s weight and body image reached a fever pitch after the singer announced her retreat from public life following the ending of her ongoing tour next week. Grande became the face of an ongoing conversation around health, and the cultural pendulum swing away from body positivity to the glorification of thinness, ignited by the proliferation of weight-loss drugs.
Now, weight loss and diet culture appear contentious as ever. It’s as if, despite seemingly being able to agree when thin becomes too thin, we can’t find common ground on how one is allowed to drop pounds, and on whether we should even comment on each others’ bodies. But even as the culture seems fairly concerned with the way famous women look, and the impact these images have on young girls and teenagers, the conversation around men and their body image has been lean.
Last year Braden Peters, who is known online as Clavicular, rose to prominence as a stand-in for the “lookmaxxing trend,” which sees young men seek a certain kind of aesthetic and physical beauty. Some undergo cosmetic procedures and reportedly inject their bodies with peptides, testosterone, and other substances that enhance their physiques. Nowadays, a scroll on TikTok reveals a concerning online trend amongst 20-something men: They sport the same kinds of haircuts—generally short with puffy curls clustered at the top—and all have astonishingly muscular bodies.
At face value, young men exercising should not be reason to sound the alarms, and yet there is something treacherous about men in their formative years placing physical beauty as the ultimate expression of self-actualization.
