Rabbi Greenspans Moisid

Re: Looksmaxing/Jawline Hitting – Please Help

I’ll be honest with you.
When I saw this thread I thought it was a joke post. Then I read it again and realized it was real, which is somehow worse.
A hammer.
He used a hammer.
I have been on this forum for eleven years. I have seen threads about Alexa in the kitchen, I have seen threads about a sheitel that looked too good, I have seen the great kugel wars of 2019. I have seen a thread that was ostensibly about a leaky eruv but was actually about a parking space dispute that had been going on since 2003. And yet somehow “my son is hitting his face with a hammer for the jawline” is a new one even for me.
Now. Let’s discuss.
The boy wants a better jawline. Fine. This is the goal. The jaw is a legitimate area of the face, nobody is disputing this. The question — the only question — is the methodology. And the methodology here is a hammer, which, as a methodology, has some issues. Not the least of which being that it does not work. I looked this up. A doctor was consulted. The bones do not respond to this the way the internet claims. What the bones DO respond to is being left alone, which is free, requires no equipment, and has the added benefit of not landing anyone in an emergency room trying to explain to a non-Jewish doctor what a “looksmaxxing bochur” is.
I want to point out something that nobody in this thread has mentioned yet.
This boy did research. He found a community. He developed a vocabulary — and what a vocabulary it is: “mogging,” “looksmaxxing,” “bonesmashing,” terms that I have now been forced to learn against my will and will carry with me to my grave. He created a regimen and stuck to it consistently enough that his father eventually found him mid-session. That is not a bochur without ambition or follow-through. That is a bochur with tremendous kochos who has been catastrophically, historically, almost impressively misadvised regarding where to point them.
The same discipline, applied literally anywhere else, produces results. Applied to the face with a hammer, it produces this forum post.
To the father. You asked what to do. Here is what you do.
Step one — non-negotiable, no qualifications, no asterisks — you take the hammer. You don’t discuss the hammer. You don’t negotiate about the hammer. You don’t convene a family meeting to process everyone’s feelings about the hammer and its role in the household. The hammer is gone. It goes to the toolbox, the toolbox goes to the garage, the garage gets a lock, and the key goes somewhere that a bochur with ambition and too much free time cannot locate it. This step happens before all other steps. There is no version of this situation where it doesn’t.
Step two — you don’t make this into a production. The more you treat this as a five alarm emergency requiring every available adult and several consultations, the more interesting it becomes. You take the hammer, you say very little, you make a face that communicates that you have seen things in this life and this is now one of them, and you move on. The yetzer hara feeds on drama. He has been producing it since Gan Eden and he is very good at it by now. Do not give him material.
Step three — and this is the step that actually matters — you find out what this boy is really looking for. Because it is not a jawline. Nobody searches the internet for a hammer because they need a jawline. They search because something else is going on, and the internet, which has an answer for everything and a correct answer for almost nothing, handed them a hammer and said this will fix it. It will not fix it. It never fixed anything. But something was being asked, and that question deserves a real response from a real person who knows this boy — not a username on a forum that probably also sells protein powder.
The websites also go. Not specifically because of the jawline content, but because any corner of the internet whose logical conclusion is a bochur hitting himself in the face has disqualified itself from his time and attention and does not deserve either.
Hatzlacha rabbah to the mishpacha.

P.S. I looked up what “mogging” means so you don’t have to. I wish I hadn’t. We’ll leave it at that.
P.P.S. I also looked up “bonesmashing,” which is apparently the technical term for what occurred in this child’s bedroom. Bonesmashing. As a wellness practice. As something a person chooses to do on purpose. We should all bentch gomel that we grew up before the internet and that our own adolescent mistakes required no tools heavier than a gel pen.