In Profile: Clavicular

Staff writer Woody Jeffay investigates the mainstream growth of Clavicular and his role in the phenomenon of “looksmaxxing”

If you spend much time online, you might have heard some variations of the internet’s latest tic: “Clavicular brutally framemogged by ASU frat leader.” This pressing news isn’t the main focus of this article. Nor is the focus on how the encroachment of incel and looksmaxxing culture into the mainstream means that us normal people are increasingly subjected to their surreal jargon (framemogging, jestermaxxing, bonesmashing, chads/stacys, chuds/foids). Instead, I want to discuss the rise of looksmaxxing culture, and its emergence from a strange cocktail of influences: incels, gym culture, and the manosphere.

The incel community has been well-documented; emerging in the late ‘90s as a group of predominantly straight men who for various reasons weren’t able to get laid, the community became more explicitly hateful, misogynistic, and nihilistic, and their worldview—that “unattractive” men are doomed to a life of loneliness, and this is the fault of feminists—has driven many incels to violence, most notably the 2014 mass killing perpetrated by Elliot Rodger, revered by incels as Saint Elliot.

The group has been steadily squeezed out of the mainstream: their subreddits banned, their forums shutdown, and the stigma around labelling oneself as an incel increased significantly. They’ve been forced into the depths of the internet, but from their ashes the manosphere emerged: a loosely connected network of pick-up artists, men’s rights activists, anti-feminists, and others, now increasingly mainstream. Figures like Andrew Tate have spearheaded their growth, and in recent years we’ve seen a popular resurgence of his aggressively misogynistic kind of masculinity. Meanwhile, the looksmaxxing community—itself a subculture of the manosphere—has become ubiquitous in mainstream internet culture, and we can chart the growth of looksmaxxing through the astronomical rise of Clavicular.

I first came across Clavicular—the stage name of 20-year-old Braden Peters—in January, when videos emerged of him, Andrew and Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and others singing along to Ye’s song Heil Hitler. The group were seen Sieg Heiling in a limousine and then again in a Miami nightclub. Peters has stated that he is apolitical. Good one.

But Peters has been present on the internet for years, and he has a rather storied past. He was expelled from his university for illegal possession of exogenous testosterone. A Video emerged of him in December of last year hitting a man in Miami with a Tesla Cybertruck. Only a few weeks ago, he was arrested on suspicion of possession of a fake ID and illegal drugs: amphetamines and anabolic steroids. And the last few months he’s been everywhere. You may have seen a recent profile of him in the New York Times and in GQ. You may have seen the incessant copypasta that is “Clavicular brutally frame-mogged by ASU frat leader”. You may have also seen him on The Adam Friedland Show.

Fundamentally, Clavicular angles himself as the figurehead of the looksmaxxing community, and his fame is the final proof that looksmaxxing is well and truly mainstream, but what is looksmaxxing then, and how has it broken into the mainstream after years in the digital underworld?

The looksmaxxing mythology is primarily concerned with what they call “Sexual Market Value.” Borrowed directly from incel culture, the logical extreme of this mythology is the blackpill—a range of beliefs concerning society, the sexual marketplace, and men and women’s place in it. The blackpill tells believers that looks are deterministically important, and a person’s life is ruined if their appearance isn’t up to a certain standard. Many incels blackpill (verb) each other. For instance, a budding new incel might post a photo of themselves and the upper echelons of incels will remark on all their minor physical flaws: “your wrists are too small; it’s over for you,” “your nose is too big; it’s over for you,” “your canthal tilt is suboptimal; it’s over for you.” Blackpilled individuals sincerely believe their lives are ruined, and they want to share this gospel with every who will listen.

Where looksmaxxers diverge from traditional incel thought, is in their concept of ascending. That is, becoming handsome through looksmaxxing’s interventions, and reaping the rewards with the opposite sex. They aim to alter their appearance through a range of measures. Soft interventions include practising hygiene, good grooming, dressing better, and the harder interventions range from the bizarre, to the pseudoscientific, to the expensive, dangerous, and invasive. For instance, many looksmaxxers promote the practise of mewing—the (pseudoscientific) idea that a certain tongue posture can reshape your jawline. Others argue for expensive facial surgeries. Others still encourage shorter men to wear lifts in their shoes or, if all else fails, go to Turkey for limb lengthening surgery.

Clavicular himself has endorsed several of these measures and preaches many others: bonesmashing—literally taking a hammer to your face to chisel your bone structure; the use of pharmaceuticals including testosterone, diuretics like Ozempic, anti–hair-loss medication, peptides, etc; the misappropriation of student loans to pay for cosmetic surgery—do with that information what you will; and the use of methamphetamines in order to stay lean.

Beyond the misogyny and hatefulness of the looksmaxxing community, there’s something remarkably sad about their entire project. An entire culture brainwashing themselves into believing that they—many of them perfectly normal-looking guys—are irredeemably ugly and need to smash their bones with hammers or fork out hundreds of thousands on cosmetic surgery. When looksmaxxers talk of their sexual conquests, it’s clear there is no joy or love in these relationships; it’s all about status.

Listening to Clavicular on podcasts, you notice a certain a certain emptiness in his words, a sadness underpinning the whole Clavicular persona. Morbid curiosity drove me to watch some of his streams, and he is quite possibly the least charismatic man on the planet. He strolls around shopping centres and the strips of Miami, and he speaks languidly about how cringe everyone else, about how superior he is. He has very little going for him other than his superficial attractiveness. He doesn’t really watch films, he doesn’t enjoy music, he has no hobbies. He’s twenty years old and is interested in nothing but millimetres of bone, body fat percentages, and canthal angles. One commenter referred to him as a “Boring Patrick Bateman.”

This is a crucial issue with looksmaxxing: in holding looks as the apotheosis of male existence, lookmaxxers sideline their personal development and become boring, stunted, uninteresting, and utterly vapid. Far more than any minor physical flaws they might be able to point out, they exclude themselves from meaningful relationships because they talk in gross neologisms—referring to maxxing and gooning, they obsess over millimetres of bone, they call women femoids, they are constantly engaged in the dick-measuring contest of mogging one another, and they have no real interests.  Perhaps if these guys focussed on pursuing their hobbies, passions, and interests, they might have more luck at forming fulfilling relationships.

Looksmaxxing, along with some of the nastier elements of gym culture that see boys as young as sixteen taking pharmacies worth of PEDs, stems from an insecurity pervasive within Gen-Z and -Alpha. More than any previous generations—largely thanks to social media—young people are preoccupied with appearance and status. Constant, unfiltered exposure to the internet, and the relentless propagation of unrealistic body ideals, means that young men enter puberty—already a period of acute self-consciousness—feeling unprecedented anxiety about how they look. Looksmaxxing influencers have exploited these vulnerabilities, and what was once confined to obscure online subcultures has steadily migrated into the mainstream, gaining traction on platforms like TikTok—mewing for instance, a long time favourite of looksmaxxers, entered the Gen-Z lexicon both in ironic and sincere form in 2019. Clavicular himself is explicit in trading on these insecurities, telling his followers that appearance is the be-all and end-all, and that failure to meet his impossible standards condemns them to eternal loneliness.

I worry for the people that are influenced by figures like Clavicular. It’s a sad state of affairs when many young people are so insecure with their appearance that they result to the extreme measures outlined in the gospel of looksmaxxing.

Moreover, I doubt that those who dip their toes into looksmaxxing will have their insecurities magically solved. Most interventions espoused by Clavicular are illegal or prohibitively expensive, and those that aren’t are pseudoscientific and ineffective, so when his recruits realise that mewing and bonesmashing aren’t going to make them look like Henry Cavill anytime soon, many develop patterns of disordered eating, body dysmorphia, and depression, and many sink deeper into the manosphere, imbibing incel culture, misogyny, and blackpilled doomerism.

It’s a nasty circle. Clavicular began his journey as an insecure fourteen-year-old on lookmaxxing forums, and now he, more than anyone else, is grooming young people into this weird cult. Who knows where it will end.