Softmaxxing Skepticism: How Looksmaxxing Culture Recruits the Mainstream

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiffany Prendergast can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2026/10/softmaxxing-skepticism-how-looksmaxxing-culture-recruits-the-mainstream/. About the post: Because institutional medicine offers no real answer to aesthetic anxiety, the underground is able to fill the gap using rhetoric anti-vaccine influencers have already normalized. Peptide vendors and biohacking gurus borrow directly from that playbook: "Big pharma doesn't want you to know," "your doctor is behind the times," and "take health into your own hands." Anti-establishment framing isn't an accident here; it's baked into the pitch because the premise is that official channels already failed you.