Your son says a girl “mogged” him. He’s worried about his “canthal tilt.” He’s pressing his tongue against the roof of his mouth at dinner because someone online told him it would fix his jaw. You have two bad options in that moment, and you can feel both of them: laugh, or lecture. Neither works, and some part of you already knows it.
So before either, it helps to understand what you’re actually looking at. Not a phase, and not a personality change. A vocabulary — and one that was engineered, very deliberately, to do something to him.
Here’s what the spaces this language comes from get right, because it matters and because he can tell when you pretend otherwise. A lot of boys are genuinely struggling right now. The old script for how to be a man stopped working, and nobody handed out a new one. Loneliness among young men is at levels we haven’t seen before. Dating is confusing and often bruising. These are real problems, and when your son went looking for help with them, the internet said it had some.
What found him was a content economy that is extremely good at two things: taking his problem seriously, and selling him an explanation that keeps him coming back. That second part is the whole game. A boy who feels understood and dissatisfied clicks, watches, and returns. A boy who feels genuinely better does not. So the material is tuned, relentlessly, to keep him feeling like he’s losing a race he didn’t know he’d entered.
The vocabulary is how it keeps score. Take “mogging” — to be visibly out-classed in looks by someone standing next to you. It sounds like slang. It’s actually a machine: it turns every ordinary moment, every group photo, into a ranked contest he can lose without anyone saying a word. “PSL” is the same move formalized — a 1-to-10 attractiveness scale that grew out of incel forums and is now used to sell ratings and “improvement” plans. A 2025 peer-reviewed study traced how it repackages that ideology in the friendlier language of self-improvement. When someone scores your son’s face out of ten, they are not measuring him. They are running him through something built to find him wanting.
And a lot of what the vocabulary promises simply isn’t true. “Mewing” — the tongue-posture thing — has no published evidence that it changes an adult face; Cleveland Clinic says flatly that the research doesn’t support the claims. The “sigma male,” the lone wolf too self-sufficient to need anyone, was coined in 2010 by a far-right blogger, half as a joke, and its whole function is to let a boy reframe being left out as being above it all. Even the “alpha male” rests on a piece of wolf science that the researcher who popularized it spent decades trying to retract, because it came from animals in captivity and describes nothing about wolves in the wild, let alone men.
Most of it is words. Some of it isn’t. “Bonesmashing” — deliberately hitting your own face with hard objects to reshape the bone — is a real trend that doctors have warned about directly, with documented cases of nerve damage and worse. If your son is anywhere near that one, it’s not a vocabulary problem anymore.
Here’s the part that’s hard to hear: you cannot argue him out of this word by word. Try to debunk each term, and you’ll lose, partly because the list is endless and partly because it’s not really about the terms. What entrenches a boy isn’t disagreement — it’s coercion and contempt. Mock the words, and you confirm the story he’s being sold, which is that the adults in his life don’t take him seriously. Then he stops talking to you and keeps talking to them.
What actually helps is slower and less satisfying, which is exactly why nobody’s selling it. Take the underlying problem seriously out loud — the loneliness, the sense of falling behind — without rushing to the reassurance. Be the one adult in his life who’s interested in him and has nothing to sell. Get curious about the words instead of scared of them: “What does that one mean? Where’d you hear it?” is a better opening than any correction, because it keeps him in the conversation.
And know what you’re up against, so the words stop landing as a foreign language. That’s the one thing you can actually do this week. I keep a plain, non-commercial glossary of these terms — what each means, where it came from, and which ones are genuinely dangerous — precisely so a parent doesn’t have to decode it alone at eleven at night.
The men selling your son this vocabulary need him dissatisfied, because a boy at peace with his face and his standing doesn’t click, doesn’t buy, and doesn’t come back. You’re offering him the opposite of that. It’s less exciting and it takes longer.
It’s also the only version that works.
*If your son is hurting himself or talking about it, that’s the moment to set the vocabulary aside and get him to someone — his doctor, a counselor, a crisis line. The words can wait.*
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