Clavicular’s lost boys

‘Looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular hospitalised in Miami after suspected overdose’ is the kind of nonsense headline that will make you feel a billion years old.

As the Hollywood Reporter reveals, ‘Clavicular’ – alias of 20-year-old influencer Braden Peters – was indeed hospitalised earlier this week after a suspected overdose in a Miami nightclub. He was livestreaming on Kick with friends when he suddenly began complaining that he was ‘fucking destroyed right now’. One friend asks him ‘when did you last take blue’ (or OxyContin), before somewhat unhelpfully offering him some ‘addy’ (Adderall). The livestream went dead shortly after, but footage has since emerged on social media appearing to show Clavicular being carried out of the club and into an ambulance.

Sources have since claimed that Clavicular is in ‘stable condition’, so he may live to livestream another day. But it was really only a matter of time before something like this happened. After all, Clavicular has admitted to taking a regular cocktail of drugs, like crystal meth and Adderall, to suppress his appetite and keep lean. Other previous escapades of his include allegedly running over a pedestrian in his Tesla Cybertruck, injecting his then 17-year-old girlfriend with fat-dissolving peptides, and being arrested in Arizona for allegedly trying to enter a nightclub with fake ID and drugs. And just a few weeks ago, he was arrested in Florida, potentially in connection to a video that appeared to show him and others shooting at an alligator.

Such is the wild lifestyle of the looksmaxxing crowd, a group of mostly young men who have been consumed by the quest of making themselves more attractive. Clavicular is widely considered to be a leader of those self-absorbed Lost Boys.

Looksmaxxing in itself is a relatively straightforward concept, and much of the advice in these circles is pretty tame, if not painfully obvious for most normal people – ie, go to the gym, get a better haircut, take care of your personal hygiene. But it has a tendency to veer into the insane, to the point where some of the looksmaxxing acolytes are taking growth hormones and unregulated peptides, engaging in ‘bonesmashing’ (hitting yourself repeatedly in the face with a hammer) and seeking out chin-extending surgery. Clavicular even claims that he has performed ‘dick-ups’ by putting weights on his penis to lengthen it. As you can imagine, they’re not the most stable bunch – so it should come as no surprise that Clavicular is so often getting himself into trouble.

When they’re not giving themselves drug addictions or reinventing eating disorders from first principles, the most deranged looksmaxxers are railing against women for not wanting to sleep with them. The looksmaxxing community is deeply intertwined with both the so-called manosphere – that dark corner of the internet inhabited by the likes of the Tate brothers, Andrew and Tristan – and incel culture. These are two sides of the same looksmaxxing coin – male insecurity and pick-up-artist culture on the one side, and a hatred of feminism and ‘foids’ (incel-speak for ‘women’) on the other.

Clavicular himself rejects the assertion that he is in any way connected with inceldom. In an interview with 60 Minutes Australia earlier this week, he lashed out at journalist Adam Hegarty for asking if he identified as an incel. ‘Looksmaxxing is self-improvement, right?’, Clavicular scoffed. ‘So it’s about potentially even ascending out of that category. So that would be kind of one of the goals – to dissociate from being an incel and overcome that.’ When Hegarty followed up by asking why Clavicular hung around with people like Andrew Tate, he tried to suggest that Hegarty’s wife was cheating on him, before storming off and ending the interview. Hegarty is not married.

Clavicular may not consider himself an incel, but this is where the terminology and the ideas of looksmaxxing originate. And whether he likes it or not, he has become one of the main characters of the right-wing internet scene. He parties with the Tate brothers and white-nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, who has hailed Clavicular as a coming of the Nietzschean ‘overman’. So there is a delicious irony to the fact that Clavicular, Übermensch of the Very Online right and supposed saviour of the white race, is such a degenerate freak.

In fact, there is nothing aspirational about Clavicular in the slightest. He is incapacitated by insecurity. He admits that the reason he takes so many drugs is ‘just a cope trying to feel neurotypical while being in public’. His family are deeply concerned for his wellbeing. He spends eight hours a day on livestreams, talking to a cold, unblinking computer screen. If this is one of the leading Right Young Things, we are – to use an appropriately Zoomer phrase – absolutely cooked.

Clavicular is easy to poke fun at, because he is so ridiculous. But this is a fundamentally bleak state of affairs. The fact that looksmaxxing has broken into the mainstream is a disaster, dragging all manner of isolated, insecure young men into its orbit. These victims of narcissism will not be made happier by picking apart every aspect of their own appearance. Instead, they will be made more paranoid and more resentful. In the words of a certain Patrick Bateman, ‘You can always be thinner, look better’. If you’re not obsessing over having glass-clear skin, the thickest, shiniest hair or the physique of a Greek god, then you’ll soon drive yourself crazy over your biacromial width, chin-to-philtrum ratio, and your lack of a positive canthal tilt. The tragedy of the looksmaxxer is that your work is never done – you never truly get to ‘ascend’, to use their own terminology.

Looksmaxxing is a cult not of self-improvement, but of self-destruction. These little Dorian Grays will not become gods, gigachads or Nietzschean overmen. More often, they will become what the internet now seems to produce in industrial quantities – vain, joyless shut-ins, with sallow faces illuminated only by the white glow of their ring lights and social-media feeds.

Lauren Smith is a writer based in London.