Meet Clavicular, a looksmaxxing influencer
On any given night, a 19-year-old boy is in his bedroom banging his face with a bronze trophy. He does it over and over until his cheekbones turn red. With dead eyes, he looks at himself on a monitor. He winces. “That’s starting to hurt, man. Let’s do a little bit more. No contraction of the face.”
This is Clavicular, real name Braden Peters. Clav, as his many thousands of young male fans know him, has dropped out of school to enjoy viral fame as a “looksmaxxing” influencer — and over the course of this year has become one of the best-known streamers on the platform Kick. During his marathon live recording sessions, clips of which often rack up hundreds of thousands of views when they migrate to TikTok and Instagram, this strange young American monologues to hidden viewers or chats with his posse about how to “ascend” — that is, how to improve your appearance, exert social dominance and sleep with women. Sometimes he ventures out to the streets of LA or Miami where he chats up or rates the attractiveness of women or talks to men about “body counts” and whether they would allow their girlfriends to dress like “sluts”. He negs potential conquests by telling women they have a “recessed maxilla”. He injects his own 17-year-old girlfriend with cosmetic peptides to zap what little fat pads out her cheeks. “Chat, we’re looksmaxxing her,” he says when a commenter in the livestream accuses him of shooting the schoolgirl up with meth. “Dr Clav!”
The logic of bonesmashing — repeatedly wounding bone tissue with low-level blunt trauma in the hope that your cheekbones and jawline grow back more desirable — is pseudoscientific at best. However, like Clav’s other looksmaxxing methods, it borrows just enough from the language of biology to get by. Clav is a snake-oil salesman, but it’s important to remember that he believes his snake-oil works. “I’ll just lay in my bed and secure my head so that there’s no CTE [brain damage], and then smash my zygos [zygomatic bones — cheekbones] so that they grow,” he explains. The vanity and extremity of Clav’s world seems unsurpassable, but it turns out there’s plenty of self-harm to go around. One of his specialties is advising fans how to “hardmaxx” (to undergo painful physical interventions) and rating their physiognomy. He tells one, without hesitation, to get a nose job. The delusional livestream chat seems to agree with Clav that the man’s nose has to go, despite it being quite clearly his most distinctive and attractive feature. “I’m not Jewish, chat, I’m Balkan,” flounders the fan. What a world.
An electrifying feature of these streams is that Clav himself claims to use either meth or cocaine throughout. Meth, he argues, helps him “hollow out” his cheeks: “I wanna get really lean, right, so I do meth. Models will do coke to get their appetite to go away, but meth just lasts a lot longer, and it’s way more fun.” He shows his abs. “Holy fuck, lean,” he says. Meth joins the dozens of substances in Clav’s cabinet which, combined with workouts, bonesmashing and cosmetic tweaks with makeup, have transformed his teenage face and body. In one video, he claims he is now “infertile” — the result of injecting himself with too much synthetic testosterone. As long as he looks good, he doesn’t care.
Clav is a walking ad for his own self-improvement course, called the Clavicular System. For the low price of 50 bucks, you can gain access to a “facial analytics board” with “symmetry scores”, a “derm-grade” skincare routine, and lessons in camera angles for “jawline exposure”. If you’re “tired of watching other guys who won the genetic lottery take what’s yours” — bodycon-wearing babes outside Miami nightclubs, judging from the accompanying clip — then this is the course for you. Once in, members are encouraged to drop $5,000 or more on executive packages, presumably for one-on-one coaching with Clav himself.
The course format is common in masculinity-influencer circles; Andrew Tate’s is the best-known and probably the best-selling. The fundamentals of incel ideology infiltrate these programs: that sexual attention from women is the ultimate entitlement but must be earned by looking and acting like a “Chad” (women being shallow and spoiled bitches). Most of them promise to help men scale the sexual hierarchy via a set of physical and social techniques. The problem, clearly, is that most of these techniques are completely arbitrary. They produce young men who bark out stock lines to “assert dominance”, or sit in heavily workshopped, butch poses, or limit conversation to hyper-niche incel takes that give away the game — that this is a man completely lost in the sauce of a bullshit pyramid scheme.
When it comes to Clav and his streaming collaborators — edgy internet personalities like Adin Ross and HSTikkyTokky — the results of their own “ascents” are unsettling. The prize of all this self-improvement seems to be impressing strangers in party cities or in comment sections; as ever, the manosphere is not about winning the approval of women, but that of other men. But the praxis is bleaker than anything I’ve seen on social media: 19-year-old boys nodding out after apparent four-day benders, staring emptily out of the windows of Uber Blacks on meth comedowns, caning it with saucer-eyed streamers, in constant communion with anonymous viewers. It’s Ballard’s Cocaine Nights on literal steroids: grim hedonism, self-hating vanity, dark and dour happenings among the palm fronds. These young men hone and abuse and drug their bodies for the illusory goal of status — an exhausting and pointless pursuit which has, over time, deranged them.
For the casual viewer, all this is deeply entertaining. Clav’s hardmaxxing lifestyle seems forever to be on the precipice of destroying him. The obsession has made a formerly articulate and attractive young man look and sound wildly odd. Most of those who watch the streams — and certainly the clips that make it to TikTok — are not in the manosphere’s self-improvement space at all, just normies poised for the next mad event or revelation. Seeing women confronted with an act so cynically calculated to melt them is strangely hilarious, like seeing a spaceship land on the dancefloor of a Floridian nightclub.
But Clav represents something else about youth culture — a bizarre novelty that would have seemed impossible just a short time ago. The painful, dangerous, obsessive, self-harming rituals of the teen girl’s efforts to be at peace with her own body have now traveled across the sexual divide. Once it was just girls who hunched over toilets making themselves vomit, or fastidiously dieting, or burning their way to a thigh gap at the gym. We were the ones who remapped our cheekbones and eyebrows with waxing and bronzer; we were the ones chucking back laxatives or bleaching skin or cutting wrists in school toilets; we were the ones frying in Hawaiian Tropic till our skin turned to leather. Our bodies were under constant surveillance and inflicted with continuous low-level pain. Now the boys are doing it; the only difference, it seems, is that rather than being the shameful secret of the teenaged bathroom — the blood, the hair, the tan-stained towels — the rituals of male looksmaxxing are shared, public, proud. But as anyone who was once a teenage girl knows, the dream of physical perfection is life-ruining: that way lies an endless pit of self-disgust, narcissism and madness. Boys, knock yourselves out.
