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community weblog

This was Mike Mew ... he was the glamorous dentist.

Mike Mew is the head of the closest thing dentistry has to a cult. This was not true when I was nine but it is now. Mike and his father, John, believe that in humanity there is currently an epidemic of ugliness. They promise that you can build yourself a new and strong and masculine jawline, basically just by swallowing different. They call this mewing. His New York Times profile calls him a "celebrity to [the] incels," but girls like him too. He has obtained adoration on both 4chan and TikTok. Mewing is a big thing, a real phenomenon. Mike Mew also has, at time of writing, an ongoing misconduct hearing for, among other things, making a six-year-old boy wear head, neck, and inside-mouth appliances that allegedly led to the child being in so much pain he had "seizure-like episodes." I was Mike Mew's patient from ages nine to fifteen, or thereabouts. This all started in 2005.
posted by chavenet on Jul 02, 2024 at 3:54 AM

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So, my orthodontist was prescribing stuff like this to me once my braces finally came off...except after a year and a half of nothing really happening, my parents got a second opinion with a different orthodontist, and that's how it came to light that my orthodontist had actually gone crazy. I'm not kidding - apparently they told my parents there were grounds for a malpractice suit. (My parents didn't do it, they're not litigious people. I sure as shit would have done so, but I was still a minor.) This is probably a bad sign if Mike Mew's stuff is reminding me of "signs your orthodontist has lost his mind".
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:13 AM

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[content note: secret lives of dentists]
posted by HearHere at 4:25 AM

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Little Shop of Horrors - dentist song [Steve Martin]
posted by HearHere at 4:33 AM

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I'm still reading this but in case it's not obvious from the description, HOLY FUCKING SHIT CONTENT WARNING FOR ANYONE WITH DENTAL ANXIETY.

I don't have anxiety about dental stuff but wow this is hardcore.
posted by Zumbador at 4:46 AM

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... also amazing and fascinating to read. Easy to forget what it's really like to be a helpless child
posted by Zumbador at 4:47 AM

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Content warning for child abuse, and graphic descriptions of blood and (basically) prolonged torture to a child over a period of years.
posted by AlSweigart at 4:52 AM

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"The problem is," he said, "that you're swallowing wrong. You're swallowing with your tongue in the bottom of your mouth. It's working the muscles in your cheeks. It's making them too strong. Your tongue should be at the top, firmly. Watch me."

Mewing is, of course, a complete crock of shit pseudoscience. You can't change your facial bone structure by pressing up on the roof of your mouth with your tongue. It's tragic to see young people posting their before and after photos that look god damn the same because they don't realize the effect is a trick of camera angle, lighting, and wish fulfillment.

Once, in a particularly philosophical moment, Mike Mew told me: "Everything is discipline. You can apply what I'm teaching you now to anything you choose."

In a previous mefi post about Andrew Huberman, someone pointed out how there's a cultist segment of discipline/self-improvement that acts as a pipeline for fascism. Unfortunately, it was widely misperceived as saying "exercise = Nazi", but I hope this piece adds further nuance: There is a cultist mindset that claims one can impose enough self-discipline (and, inevitably, authority over others) that we can lift our bootstraps and recreate ourselves as some kind of ubermensch. The pain and trauma inflicted are confused for progress and training. It's the seed of willfully disabling your ability to empathize (a weakness, in this view) and dehumanization and eugenics.

It's not just a silly grift fad for incels.
posted by AlSweigart at 5:22 AM

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Mewing is, of course, a complete crock of shit pseudoscience. You can't change your facial bone structure by pressing up on the roof of your mouth with your tongue. It's tragic to see young people posting their before and after photos that look god damn the same because they don't realize the effect is a trick of camera angle, lighting, and wish fulfillment.

Relevant: Youtuber and comedian Kurtis Conner tries Looksmaxxing (to take the piss).
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 5:47 AM

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If someone would just teach straight boys contouring, we wouldn't be in this mess.
posted by mittens at 5:57 AM

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TIL that you can swallow with your tongue pressed against the bottom of your mouth. I've always naturally swallowed with my tongue against the roof of my mouth and it seems like it would be hard and unnatural to change.
posted by rikschell at 6:22 AM

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I'm just sad this has nothing to do with acting like a kitten.
posted by advicepig at 6:55 AM

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oh man, that was not a pleasant experience to read about.
that said, underneath all the mewing stuff about your face looking good, there is some real science about our mouths getting smaller due to soft food and our airways becoming less functional as a result of bad diet or bad breathing habits.
regarding diet and teeth alignment/crowding->https://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2018/05/why-cavemen-needed-no-braces.html
regarding mouth breathing, face shape, and athletics->https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHaXu6grxPs
posted by danjo at 7:15 AM

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What a story.

I had oversized adult teeth, that weren't gonna fit nicely in my face. So 4 teeth were yanked and I had braces for a couple of years as a teen. Not fun. But I did end up with reasonably straight teeth for quite a while.

I'm a jaw-clencher/grinder, and it seems that I now have something called a "collapsed bite", and my front teeth are crowding again. There's no real dysfunction; i can talk and chew just fine. One option is orthodontics. So, here I am - retired, mid-60s - and contemplating braces, with a price-tag that's roughly equivalent to the price of a modest used 25ft sailboat, or 2 weeks of first-class rail travel for two in Europe, including flights, meals and good hotels. At the moment, Europe is winning.

The plastic appliances described in the story, with the tensioning screws... sounds hideous.

Mew.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:47 AM

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So basically every profession, practice and philosophy can be used by humans to damage other people. Great. That's not news, exactly, but crazy dentistry was not on my bingo card. Eek!
posted by Bella Donna at 7:50 AM

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For me, the most interesting part of an article about two deluded dentists was towards the end, when an anthropologist showed the reporter all those skulls and talked about how different they were from modern humans.
posted by Kitteh at 7:56 AM

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I thought that was a really compelling piece. The writer's voice struck me as quite unique and captivating, managing to balance on the sharp edges of deadpan humor, body horror, and resigned melancholy. As a horror fan, I was on the edge of my seat and I kept having to remind myself that this was a real thing that happened to a real person.

And what a perverse, weird, awful thing to happen. While this "dentist" may be fairly mild as far as unchecked psychopaths leading cults or quasi-cults go, the writer's psyche and sense of self was clearly injured and shaped in some else's image, just like his mouth was.

I also really appreciated the theme of not understanding "which plants are poison" as one learns about the world. I got sucked into a fundamentalist thing in my pre-teen years in precisely that way -- I had no idea what to really watch out for other than imaginary drug pushers on the playground that Nancy Reagan went on about
posted by treepour at 7:58 AM

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In a previous mefi post about Andrew Huberman, someone pointed out how there's a cultist segment of discipline/self-improvement that acts as a pipeline for fascism. Unfortunately, it was widely misperceived as saying "exercise = Nazi"

Thankfully, I was not in that previous thread. However, I totally see how self-improvement cults can be a pipeline for fascism. Fascism is rooted in social dominance, which in turn is rooted in sadomasochism: sadism for the dominator, masochism for the dominated. A self-improvement cult can become a vehicle for inflicting pain on yourself, where the goal is eliminating weakness, where "weakness" is defined as self-care, empathy for others, and non-toxic forms of masculinity.
posted by jonp72 at 8:06 AM

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But if crookedness lends a castle its beauty, it does the opposite to a face — and nothing concerns Mew more than the proliferation of ugly faces, which he considers a modern epidemic.

posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:10 AM

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(As a middle aged woman who is often idly hunting the wilds of the internet for some kind of way to stop looking the way I look, I have encountered "mewing" more than once and while I'm still a sucker for retinols and serums and hair vitamins, that one seemed cracked to me from go.)
posted by We put our faith in Blast Hardcheese at 8:13 AM

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In the context of these people being heroes to the incels, it's worth revisiting this post on the blue [CW: elective plastic surgery].
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:18 AM

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Incels WOULD have a celebrity dentist
posted by potrzebie at 8:45 AM

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I wonder if there is something about the type of people who go into orthodonty...I had a really weird ortho (whom I loathed) handlebar moustache waaaay before it was "cool" (ahem) etc., none of this sort of crazy, thankfully.

years later I heard he'd retired from orthodonty and become a sea captain. arrr.
posted by supermedusa at 8:48 AM

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I first heard about this when Michael Hobbes tried to teach Aubrey Gordon how to mew on Maintenance Phase. I never thought I would hear about it again, but here we are. I don't know how anyone can think they can change the structure of their face by where they position their tongue in their mouth.

As AlSweigart noted above, Michael Hobbes also pointed out the weird uber masculinity to fascism pipeline. It's very creepy.
posted by ceejaytee at 8:57 AM

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I had the full-on 80s-era metal braces + rubber bands experience, and faithfully wore my headgear at night, and so on. All four wisdom teeth out. It was fine, if annoying. But nobody ever purposefully aimed prongs at my cheeks to make me hold my face a certain way, or swallow "properly" or what the fuck ever. Pretty sure I would not have been able to endure that.

People do get their jaws reshaped for various reasons, but they do it via surgery, which is still painful and expensive but isn't some kind of years-long torture via headgear.
posted by emjaybee at 9:12 AM

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that said, underneath all the mewing stuff about your face looking good, there is some real science about our mouths getting smaller due to soft food and our airways becoming less functional as a result of bad diet or bad breathing habits.

The worst types of pseudoscience play on, or have a link to, real developments or facts. They rely on you accepting a true premise and then extrapolate out to win your support for demonstrably false theories, knowing that the average person is less likely to reject the entire package because they don't want to appear unreasonable.
posted by fortitude25 at 9:18 AM

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What I'm taking away from this is that it is not, in fact, safe.
posted by non canadian guy at 9:19 AM

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However, I totally see how self-improvement cults can be a pipeline for fascism.

For those who don't quite see it, here's a (very) rough outline:

1. The conservative mindset is based on hierarchy. There's always a bigger fish. (And "you" don't have to be winning. It's enough to self-identify with the winning team.)

2. This view means you don't measure by doing well, you measure by doing better than others. Better than "those people."

3. This promotes non-zero sum thinking. Good things for "those people" must have come at a cost to you and your group. There are no win-win situations and compromise means losing.

4. Therefore, good things never just happen. No pain, no gain. Focus on your individual improvement; solidarity with other people for systemic change and collective benefit is liberal bullshit. They just want free stuff (from you.) If you are feeling pain, you must be achieving something in return. You must. That's how the world works.

5. You learn to ignore your pain. In fact, pain is a good thing and to be expected. Self-flagellate to signal your virtue. The wages of sin is death. Softness and mercy are weakness. My dad smacked me around as a kid, and it made me the man I am today.

6. You learn to ignore other people's pain. Practice disabling your empathy. Practice dehumanizing the other. Hey, if you think about it, they'd do the same to you.

7. Arbeit macht frei

(Yes, it's more complicated than that. Yes, plenty of evil has been done in the name of "the greater good." But there's a reason there's so much right-wing overlap between self-improvement gurus, Alex Jones selling brain pill supplements, MLMs/crypto ponzis promising "financial freedom", Make America Great Again rhetoric, and plain ol' racism and religious bigotry.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:49 AM

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(Edit: Promotes zero sum thinking, not non-zero sum thinking.)
posted by AlSweigart at 10:03 AM

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I wonder if there is something about the type of people who go into orthodonty supermedusa

There are indeed some "types" in certain dental professions. Literally everyone in dental school wants to become an orthodontist: tons of money, only deal with teen patients mostly, no blood/surgery/etc. Very easy schedule. I'd say it's even the most competitive specialty in dentistry.

Prosthodontists, on the other hand, always seemed to be anal retentive types.
posted by readyfreddy at 10:16 PM

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The book "Breath" talks about eating hard foods to stimulate the roof of the mouth because stem cells are made there and it will help open up the breathing passages over a few years. This should help with sleep apnea and allergies. So eat carrots, really crusty bread etc.

And I swear I can tell if someone is British (vs Canadian or American), or French just by their FACE. This is skin color agnostic. It's the shape of the mouth and jaw placement which is shaped by the accent / vowel placement over time (like 30 years of living). Add a Scarf with a euro knot and I have like 99% accuracy.

That is to say, using our muscles repetitively will of course shape our bodies over decades, but individual results will vary and I'm in no way condoning that kind of crazy "fix just this one thing and people will finally love me" predatory nonsense. I'm just saying there is a grain of truth to the idea.
posted by St. Peepsburg at 10:54 AM

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TIL that you can swallow with your tongue pressed against the bottom of your mouth. I've always naturally swallowed with my tongue against the roof of my mouth and it seems like it would be hard and unnatural to change.

That's why you're so damn good looking and have such a prominent jawline!
posted by slogger at 12:16 PM

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