Clavicular’s cult of ‘looksmaxxing’ speaks to the narcissism of our age

Don’t you hate it when you’re mid-jestergooning, and a group of foids comes and spikes your cortisol levels? We’ve all been there – and it raises the valid question of whether ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids is more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club.

If those words are completely incomprehensible to you, that means you are enviably offline. A brief translation: ‘jestergooning’ is a derogatory term for the act of making a woman laugh in an attempt to sleep with her. A ‘foid’ is a woman and a ‘moid’ is a man. To have one’s cortisol levels spiked is to be aggravated and stressed out. To ‘mog’ someone is to intimidate them, usually by way of superior physical attractiveness. ‘SMV’ is an acronym, standing for ‘sexual market value’ (how attractive people find you). ‘Chadfishing’ is a play on ‘catfishing’ – trying to fraudulently convince others you are a ‘chad’, or a desirable male. ‘Munting’, as far as I can tell, has no meaning in this context at all.

The above wordsalad came from a now legendary viral post on X about a 20-year-old online influencer and streamer known as Clavicular (real name Braden Peters). He achieved fame – or, more accurately, infamy and ridicule – for being a ‘looksmaxxer’. That is, a member of the online subculture-come-cult dedicated to making oneself more physically attractive, by any means necessary.

Despite their attempts to ‘chadfish’, looksmaxxers are a delusional and deeply insecure bunch. Clavicular calls himself Clavicular after the clavicle – like an anorexic teenage girl, he sees visible collarbones as the central indicator of thinness. And, like an anorexic teenage girl, he is willing to stop at virtually nothing to achieve his perverse, ‘ideal’ body image. That includes, among other things, taking crystal meth and a cocktail of other drugs to stay trim, and hitting himself in the face with a hammer – a practice straightforwardly referred to by the looksmaxxing community as ‘bonesmashing’, which some of the more deranged looksmaxxers believe helps to mold the face into a more aesthetically pleasing shape.

Clavicular maintains his precarious status at the top of the fickle looksmaxxing hierarchy by undertaking increasingly outlandish stunts, like injecting fat-melting peptides into the cheeks of his then girlfriend (who was 17 years old at the time). Or by allegedly running over a pedestrian in his Tesla Cybertruck, as he reportedly did during a livestream on Christmas Eve last year. The victim recovered from the incident, narrowly avoiding a case of Clavicular manslaughter.

This week, Clavicular was arrested after he was alleged to have illegally entered a nightclub in Scottsdale, Arizona. Local police reportedly recommended he be charged with several offences, including possession of dangerous drugs, possession of a forged instrument, and using a fake ID to enter a liquor establishment below the legal drinking age. Posting on X, Clavicular described the arrest as ‘political persecution’. We can only assume that Scottsdale Police were sent by the deep state with orders to stop young men from jestergooning and chadfishing at all costs, due to the threat this poses to the political establishment.

This episode, like all of Clavicular’s content, suggests a man teetering on the edge of madness. Like a modern day Narcissus, he has been driven insane by his own reflection. The great irony of all this is that Clavicular is by no means an unattractive young man. Even without all the bonesmashing and the steroids and the various pick-up artist reverse-psychology flirting tricks, it’s hard to believe he would have much trouble attracting women if he behaved normally.

You might now be thinking, why should we care about the lunatic ravings of a meth-head who smashes his own face with a hammer, anyway? It’s not as if the likes of Clavicular wield significant influence over young people. He has become, to introduce yet another piece of internet lingo, something of a ‘lolcow’ – an online personality who achieves fame by making a fool of himself, while lacking any ounce of self-awareness.

So why then has this face launched a thousand thinkpieces? Largely because, Clavicular is seen as a player in the Very Online right. Indeed, an evening he spent at a Florida club with Groyper princeling Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan, where they bopped along to Ye’s ‘Heil Hitler’, became headline news. Clavicular also runs with an assortment of unsavory characters – anti-Semites, Christian nationalists, ‘redpilled’ acolytes of the manosphere.

But looksmaxxing itself is not an ideology. It is an absence of ideology, a vacuum filled by insecurity. Clavicular is best understood not as a right-wing thought leader, but as a kind of male-to-male transgender influencer. He, like Fuentes, the Tates and all the rest, are caricatures of masculinity.

Clavicular might fancy himself as a kind of Overman (or Overchad), but his reality is far more humiliating. He is the butt of a joke that he isn’t in on – but one that millions of strangers on the internet are laughing at. Everyone except him knows that real men do not call themselves ‘Clavicular’ or give themselves drug-induced eating disorders, only to be ‘brutally frame mogged’ (outdone in the looks department) by a random fraternity leader at a party, as another recent viral tweet put it.

If Clavicular weren’t so vile, it would almost be sad. Or, as the kids say, Clavicular is a chopped chud who got mogged and ratio’d so hard, he achieved negative aura. It’s time he took the L.

Lauren Smith is a writer based in London.