Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
If you are the kind of person who might still occasionally open X, you were probably bombarded this week with a ton of tweets that appeared to be a bunch of gobbledygook. “Clavicular almost caught a CAREER-ENDING cortisol spike after a LARPMAXXED stacy tried jesterfying him on stream by calling him a good boy while he was mid-mog between 2 LOW-TIER NORMIES at ASU,” read one such post. “Clavicular ran into a frat leader at ASU and got brutally frame mogged by him,” read another. Not only did many of these original tweets go viral; they soon gave rise to a plethora of memes mocking this new vernacular, riffing on it, or just expressing a sort of dumbfounded awe. But don’t worry if all of this seems like a foreign language to you—I’m here to break it down and explain who this Clavicular figure is, what this all means, and why you should care.
Who is Clavicular?
While it admittedly sounds like something that’s a cross between a human bone and Roman emperor, Clavicular is the name used by 20-year-old online creator and influencer Braden Peters. The Miami-based streamer is big on the platform Kick (with about 170,000 followers) and TikTok (roughly 750,000 followers), where he has become the most famous purveyor of what’s known as “looksmaxxing” content. With a ripped body, defined chin, and mop of brown hair, he tends to post videos extolling his good looks, his physical transformation, and his ability to pull women—and declaring that you, too, can achieve the same (if you pay for his advice). This has apparently been very lucrative for him. On Kick, he is reported to have earned more than $100,000 in January alone, per court records seen by the Arizona Republic.
But Clavicular—or “Clav,” as he is known to some—is much more than your typical self-obsessed douchebag. After blowing up online in the past six months (and in mainstream culture over the past few weeks), Clavicular has come to embody, in a sort of terrifying yet fascinating way, what the internet has done to some young men in 2026. “It’s rare to see someone blow up so quickly nearly overnight,” the internet culture reporter Taylor Lorenz said of Clavicular in a video she posted in late December. “Clavicular’s rise reveals a lot about the current state of online culture and the growing influence of a Nick Fuentes–adjacent, blackpilled, nihilistic ideology that seems to be spreading across the internet.”
Why is he suddenly everywhere?
A few reasons. The most recent is that Clavicular was arrested in Scottsdale, Arizona, over the weekend for allegedly entering a nightclub despite being underage, while also being in possession of a fake ID, as well as an Adderall pill and an anabolic steroid for which he lacked prescriptions. On X, Peters complained he had been hit with two felony charges and had to pay $25,000 to bail himself out over the arrest, which he described as “straight-up political persecution.” On Wednesday, though, a spokesperson for the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office told Slate that the charges against him had been dropped because of what they described as there being “no reasonable likelihood of conviction.” Reacting to that news, Clavicular shared a screenshot of a 2017 story about a study exploring a link between men’s facial features and the severity of any criminal punishment. “You just gotta mog,” he wrote on X, using a popular slang term among looksmaxxers that is drawn from the acronym AMOG, meaning “alpha male of the group.”
All this followed an incident in December when he apparently ran over a man with his Cybertruck while livestreaming. Clavicular alleged that the man was a stalker and was recorded during the stream as saying he hoped he had killed him, but the man survived, and no charges have been filed.
Clavicular was also recently in the news for a couple of other big reasons we will get to: the hateful company he keeps and his political views (or apparent lack thereof). But the main reason for his sudden rise to mainstream fame—Clavicular has been the subject of pieces in the Atlantic, the Daily Mail, and the Bulwark, while the New York Times also looks set to publish a profile of him—is because more and more of his looksmaxxing content is going viral. (A spokesperson for Clavicular declined to make him available for an interview for this story and did not respond to a detailed list of fact-checking questions that they had first requested. They did, however, send a statement that mirrored in tone previous trolling responses they’d given to other outlets: “Grand Theft Auto 6 (GTA 6) is officially scheduled to be released on November 19, 2026.”)
OK, I’ll bite: What is looksmaxxing?
Looksmaxxing is an online subculture that’s been around for more than a decade. Mostly led by and composed of men, looksmaxxers believe that the only thing in life worth investing any time, money, or work in is their appearance. “I’ve just come to the conclusion—based on anecdotes, based on numbers—that looks are the most important metric and it would be insane not to optimize them,” Clavicular said on the Jack Neel Podcast in November. Maxxing is slang for investing the most effort you can into something, so looksmaxxers like to compare themselves to those focused on moneymaxxing (a career focus) or jestermaxxing (those opting to instead build their personality), whom they see as subhuman idiots.
I use the word subhuman there intentionally—it is one of the categories looksmaxxers used on a scale they’ve devised to rate people based on their perceived facial attractiveness. Other categories include the godlike “Tera Chad or Tera Stacy” (for men and women, respectively), to “High-Tier Normie or High-Tier Becky,” to “subhumans” at the bottom because, per the main online forum for looksmaxxers, “their face could genuinely frighten people and they have almost no redeeming facial qualities.” This so-called PSL Scale—named not for the seasonal drink but for an acronym for three other now-defunct online forums—aims to provide an empirical assessment of one’s beauty (and thus worth) based on things like facial symmetry, facial balance, angles, and the harmony of these various features.
What makes looksmaxxing so disturbing, however, is the extreme lengths these men will go to in order to achieve their peak attractiveness. There are strict diets and extreme exercise, of course, but Clavicular has also been an advocate for using a hammer (or massage gun) on your chin to achieve a more defined jawline, injecting yourself with steroids (something he said he began when he was 14), and even using crystal meth to suppress your appetite and achieve “hollow cheeks.” (It goes without saying, but please don’t do this.)
A hammer? Does that work?
These are the aspects of looksmaxxing that tend to draw the most attention, for obvious reasons, but there is no scientific evidence that it works. The hammer idea, called “bone smashing,” is based on the false belief that creating microfractures in your chin will cause them to strengthen as they regrow, leading to a more chiseled look. Medical experts, though, say it will likely cause damage to soft tissue, airways, and the eyes, and jaw surgeons are already said to be treating bone-smashing patients with neurovascular injuries, facial deformities, and alterations in vision. In Clavicular’s case, while his jaw is certainly more defined than when he was a pudgier teenager, much of this can probably be explained by puberty and weight loss. In any case, bone smashing is not evidently enough for Clavicular, as he frequently talks about his desire to undergo a double jaw surgery procedure.
Another less dangerous practice looksmaxxers like to engage in to achieve sharper jawlines is called mewing, whereby they press their tongues to the roofs of their mouths. Experts, though, say that this is also based in bunk science.
I’m still stuck on the “using meth” of it all.
Understandably! Clavicular claims he uses meth by inhaling it through his nose—rather than smoking it—in order to become leaner. (Again, don’t do this.) But that’s not the only drug he claims to use. One viral video shows him listing his “top drugs” as “meth, ketamine, Adderall, steroids, [and] peptides.” Another video of him, speaking to a Times reporter last week, has him listing the various drugs and supplements he currently takes, including testosterone, the acne medication Accutane, and the weight-loss drug Retatrutide, among several others.
Clavicular told Jack Neel that he doesn’t care about the possible side effects or any social judgment that might arise from his drug use. He views them simply as “cheat codes” that can help him achieve his goals faster.
Yeah, I’m not buying it. How seriously should we take these claims?
They are fairly wild—and just the sort one might make in an attempt to get noticed and build an audience. Although there are videos of Clavicular bone smashing, we haven’t seen him snort meth on camera. (In November, though, the streamer Adin Ross said he had witnessed Clavicular inhaling the drug through his nose.) Lorenz, the internet culture reporter, noted that Clavicular has said he is neurodivergent and has claimed that the methamphetamines he uses are prescribed by a doctor. Clavicular also told Neel he began taking steroids without his parents’ permission after visiting bodybuilding forums, and that they eventually gave up trying to prevent him from doing so. (The Clavicular spokesperson told Slate that some clips online of him were deepfakes or distortions but did not provide any comment or corrections to those listed in this story.)
Where on earth did this looksmaxxing movement come from?
You can trace the seeds of looksmaxxing to old bodybuilding subcultures online—Clavicular himself has said he was active on these forums as a teen—which have also given rise to a plethora of fitness gymfluencers on social media who, despite not being as dangerous as looksmaxxers, still pose a threat to young boys’ mental health because they bombard them with content that can cause them to develop body-image issues or eating disorders.
But looksmaxxing evidently also has much darker origins, having arisen at the same time the so-called involuntary celibate/incel movement grew online. Both these subcultures are inherently misogynistic and view women as fickle individuals who care only about a man’s appearance. They believe that women will trade any partner for a more attractive man—a theory called “hypergamy”—leaving only the sexually satisfied men on top and the rest as involuntarily celibates.
Looksmaxxers like Clavicular may seem vain, but they also see themselves as victims, blaming their worldview on women, whom they often refer to as “foids” (a shortening of the derogatory word femoids). In one message to fans, Clavicular described his life as “hell” but said he had to looksmaxx to “deal with the burden that women in today’s hypergamous dating market have put” on him.
How did Clavicular rise to the top of the looksmaxxers?
Clavicular’s journey to online fame is both a tragic and fortuitous one. His first (albeit unintentional) viral moment came a couple of years back, after he posted a photo in a looksmaxxing advice subreddit in which he flexed shirtless for the camera while an uninterested-looking older woman (presumably his grandmother) angled the cellphone camera toward the bathroom mirror.
But his real viral success came because of the manner in which he took looksmaxxing ideas off those subcultural forums and spread them onto social media writ large. Internet culture researcher Aidan Walker, the new media manager at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told Atlantic podcast Galaxy Brain that Clavicular had shown great innovation by combining looksmaxxing content with more standard TikTok videos that might show young men going out to clubs and hitting on women. “He’s kind of married the two together,” Walker said. “He’s one of probably the first really big, famous looks-maxxers to kind of break through into a category of more general fame—which probably says something about the derangement of our society.”
Clavicular also has a penchant for speaking about looksmaxxing in extreme and shocking ways that are almost designed to go viral—something common among reactionary influencers. “He really said he doesn’t care if he dies early to achieve this,” Lorenz said. “He says looks are the only thing that matter.”
In addition, Clavicular has sought to align himself with others who enjoy even more internet fame than him among young men, like the misogynistic accused sex trafficker Andrew Tate and Fuentes, the white supremacist incel leader of the “Groyper” movement. In January, the trio were among a group of influencer chuds who filmed themselves dancing in a party bus to Kanye West’s pro-Nazi song “Heil Hitler,” before successfully getting a DJ inside a Miami club to play the same track.
So Clavicular is far right too, then?
It’s not that simple. While Clavicular is undeniably a misogynist who thinks women shouldn’t be in the workforce and a racist who frequently takes great glee in using the N-word, he’s also said he doesn’t care about politics at all and would support whichever side pays him the most. “I hate politics, so whoever wants to give me the fattest bag, let’s be real,” he said. “I’ll go each and every way.” (Your move, Democrats!)
This is why Clavicular recently made headlines when he used an interview with the Daily Wire to state that he’d support Democrat Gavin Newsom over Republican J.D. Vance in a potential 2028 matchup because the vice president is an obese, ugly “subhuman,” while Newsom “mogs.”
If you were to summarize his political worldview in one word, it would be nihilism, or the belief that nothing matters. Like other young people, Clavicular has grown up in a world that’s dying, an economy that doesn’t support him, and a political culture that rewards lies and bad-faith attacks. In such an environment, he’s decided that the only thing that matters and which he can control is his appearance. (Incels are also nihilistic, describing themselves as having taken not a red or blue pill, but a “black pill” that has caused them to accept their “perceived subordinate status.”)
This all sounds kind of sad. Why should I care?
Some of these looksmaxxers are barely street legal, which hints at how deeply their influence might affect young people. Clavicular was a teenager up until last year. He claims to have started taking steroids when he was 14. This is a kid who was probably deeply lonely, chronically online, and in need of some healthy role models. Instead, he found his way into something dark and continued to sink as far as he could. As the hit Netflix show Adolescence reminded us all last year, the internet, and the world we built for our kids, created this monster. As nihilism spreads among young people, it’s going to continue to play an influential and destructive role in our politics and our culture. We can no longer ignore where some young men’s minds are, or pretend that what they see in the mirror doesn’t, in some ways, reflect back on us.
First Appeared on
Source link
Leave feedback about this