Teachers in London are reporting a new sort of epidemic infiltrating their classrooms. It only affects boys, it tends to occur in years five, six, and seven, and it is extremely, mind-numbingly annoying. It’s called mewing — the process by which a person places their tongue on the roof of their mouth in an effort to secure a sharper jawline, named after its orthodontist creator, Dr John Mew.
If it sounds familiar, that’s because it was adopted by incels as one of their pro-masculinity techniques a few years ago. Now, it’s made its way to young boys.
“That bloody face,” says one exasperated teacher working in a North East London primary school. “I did a year five residential two weeks ago and it was very much two nights of that.” A teacher working specifically with year five in the same school adds: “I think they mostly just use it as a silly face to pull in silly situations.”
Obviously, as children, this ends up being near constantly. “They tried to do it in our school photo and I had to tell them not to ruin the photo for their parents,” the year five teacher says. A chemistry teacher based in an East London secondary school agrees, and confirms its prominence in the younger year groups. “I’ve only ever noticed it in year sevens,” he says, “often not overtly, apart from one time when a year seven asked me, ‘Sir, do you mew?’”
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Orthodontia-wise, mewing has very little merit and has mostly been debunked by the dental community. “The reality is that like any oral exercise, it has to be performed for hours and hours and hours,” says the President Elect of the British Academy of Cosmetic Dentistry, Dr Sam Jethwa. “We're talking hundreds of hours consistently with possibly no breaks. So it's unlikely to do anything.”
Pulling a face that doesn’t do anything might not sound like much of a problem, then, but mewing also comes with some other worrying behaviours. Firstly, the boys who reference mewing tend to use it as an excuse not to talk or to disrespect the teacher’s authority. When asked a question, boys will place their forefinger over their lip before tracing it over their jawline as if to say “Shhh, I’m mewing.”
Secondly, teachers are reporting a sudden interest in the language of incel culture, with many boys discussing whether they are “alphas” (strong, traditional males who lead the pack) or “sigmas” (lone wolves). “They speak to each other a lot about wanting to be sigmas instead of alphas,” the North East London primary school teacher says. “And when they celebrate for anything, even if it’s getting a high score in an arithmetic test, they do the mewing face.” The secondary school teacher adds: “I asked a pupil how they were doing once and they said ‘I’m feeling sigma.’”
Whether they actually know what it means is one thing, but what’s certain is that boys as young as nine are being influenced by incel-adjacent content on the internet. “I’ve asked them multiple times if they know what it means and they definitely don’t. They say they’ve just seen it on YouTube or from their favourite YouTubers,” says the year five teacher. “I think it definitely relates to incel culture, but they just don’t have a concept of what it’s actually connected to [...] And it just alienates the girls further because they don’t understand it either.”
So does it worry their teachers? “One hundred per cent,” says the chemistry teacher. “I’m painfully aware that while it may currently be a joke, they have clearly engaged with and been influenced by that culture. It's also entirely possible that some pupils may take it more to heart than others who do view it as a joke.”
The primary school teacher agrees. “It’s one of those things where you see that it is very innocent at the moment, but it’s something we’d always mention to parents as at the very least it means they’re accessing more mature content on YouTube,” she says. “It’s similar to Andrew Tate being such a big name in my year four classroom last year… they just liked his Bugattis but the very mention of a name like that rings alarm bells.”
Teachers are hopeful that, like Tate, mewing is just the strange trend du jour. And given that the boys don’t even know where it originates from, it may be more innocent than we think. “Again, it’s just a funny word that they’ve seen online, and seen older people use in a humorous way,” says the year five teacher, “they’ve just picked it up in the wrong context.”
For now, let’s hope it all stays as out of context as possible.
