The Clavicular reality is nothing like his internet persona. Credit: Getty
“Black c—k loves you!” This was the early morning cry of two young, white TikTokers outside the looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular’s arraignment on Cape Cod. The TikTokers were the first “media” present in the parking lot of the Orleans District Court, where Clavicular — real name: Braden Peters — is being tried for a rape that allegedly occurred at his grandmother’s Chatham home in May 2025. The TikTokers filmed themselves while they waited, keeping to the edge of the cold grey parking lot like scared children, nearly in the woods, until a caravan of three rental cars arrived. Then they began to close in. But tentatively. They were nervous.
One could tell Clavicular’s lawyer by his jurisprudential profile, even before he got out of his car. Middle-aged, raincoat, grown-out and greyed Julius Caesar haircut and the confident, portly bearing of a lifetime of legal accomplishment. He was brash. You could feel how brash he was from behind the glass, how much Jameson he could put away in victory or late-night reconnoiterings. He opened his door and kicked his rumpled pant legs straight, before striding to the middle car and giving the window a curt knock of his knuckles. A young Jewish couple with a dog exited the other car on the left of the triumvirate. The man wore the largest yarmulke I’ve ever seen, so big you could see it from the front like a beanie. He and his girlfriend looked dressed for a high-school semi-formal in a Disney script. The TikTokers prowled some distance away as the lawyer and the dog-bearing friends converged on the middle car with Nevada plates. You knew who was in there.
First out was a dark-haired middle-aged woman who, I thought, could only be Clavicular’s mother. They looked alike: same nose, same flex to the high cheekbones when she clenched her jaw. She had a maternal concern and loving gravity about her, as she held the door open for Clavicular’s spray-tanned girlfriend, Lily Snyder. Snyder is one of the smallest women you could ever see. In addition to the proverbial 10 pounds, the camera must put on half a dozen inches. Then, out he came, Clavicular in the flesh, with a gaggle of tall dorkish pals who looked as if they’ve been slouching on their looksmaxxing regimens.
For more than a year, Clavicular, or “Clav” as people call him, has dominated social media — and even made it into the style pages of The New York Times — for encouraging young boys to chisel their jawlines by smashing their faces with hammers, grow their penises by hanging weighted shopping bags from them for hours, and take meth to curb appetite. This is called “looksmaxxing,” and looksmaxxing allows one to “mog,” which means to dominate or overshadow someone in person. It’s worth noting that the term “mog” was derived by recluses on internet forums, who spend as little time as possible in rooms with real people, where “mogging” might come into play. Clavicular teaches that you can mog someone financially, or with your height or looks. Clavicular thinks he’s so handsome and buff that he mogs everyone just by appearing in front of them.
The press casts a jaundiced eye on him but largely allows that he is handsome. But nothing can prepare you for how very, very small he is in the flesh. As he passed the windshield of my car, it looked like he’d been shirking on his own looksmaxxing. Or perhaps there’s not much you can do with his physique. There is no way this self-proclaimed aesthetic model of masculinity is six foot two as he claims. His shoulders are small and narrow, and not a hint of musculature was visible through his tight suit jacket. His obsession with bodybuilding suddenly seemed warranted: he has no body. He dapped up his Jewish friend with the dog five-foot-ninedly. The friend went into the dap with the energy of someone who has watched too much Entourage, saying something like, “Whaddup playa. Let’s get this, boi.” The group all turned to go get it, and the friend transferred the leash of the dog to Clav. They formed a posse 10 people deep, and Clavicular didn’t exactly stride to the courthouse doors; perhaps it isn’t within his gait to stride. He is so short his head floated among a barrage of shoulders.
There were no more than three local news stations and one national outlet at the doors of the courthouse, and yet as the Clavicular posse approached the steps, the lawyer screamed at the paltry sum of newscasters. “Let him through! Clear a path! Get out of the way! This is ridiculous! Let him through!” The dog began barking, and the media backed up to keep clear the already-open path. The young TikTokers came from behind and began shouting, “We’re with the BBC! Black c—k loves you, Lily! We’re with the BBC!” BBC, get it? They’d been practicing this accosting earlier. But rather than go into the courthouse, as is their constitutional right, they seemed frightened and peeled off from the group and ran back to the woods.
All their talk about the BBC was directed at Clavicular’s tiny little girlfriend, Lily Snyder. In Clavicular’s world, where the libido and sexual expectations have been formed entirely by the internet and porn, every woman is assumed to ultimately prize penis size above all else. And who, pray tell, has the largest penises? Not Clavicular and his friends, who film themselves discussing Gaussian distribution probabilities that prove conclusively that every girl they meet has had sex with at least one very large penis. Penises much larger than their own. They despair about it.
That’s why Clavicular hangs shopping bags full of weights — or produce, it’s unclear — from the end of his penis. But we’re not there yet.
This was a revelation of the full scope of the Clavicular algorithm, internet pathology breaking into the real world. A premier brand of Vixen, one of the largest porn companies in the world, is “Blacked,” whose content focuses on white women cheating on their white husbands and boyfriends with black guys with very large penises. Clavicular’s content lives algorithmically within this cuckolding pathology. If you watch his videos on Twitter, say, to learn a little more about him before covering his rape arraignment, suddenly your video feed is filled with cynical slop podcast clips about penile insecurity, interviews with vapid white pornstars talking about the biggest black penises they’ve ever filmed with, how they recover afterwards with ice and days on the couch, and then those horrible softcore-porn fruit videos, in which AI-generated fruits have hypergamous sexual misadventures. (Those horrible, horrible fruit videos.) There’s also him consoling a depressive friend, who was recently cuckolded by a black sex performer after he lost a pathetic “boxing” match to him. You are but one thumb flick away on your feed from Clav to the “cuck” chair.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is the mainstream young-American algorithm. At any rate, Clavicular does not have a very large penis; he has a normal penis, and he’s insecure about it. In Clavicular’s world, you can “mog” someone with your face or your finances, but there is no outmogging a very large penis. The frightened TikTokers have tried to symbolically “cuck” him, before cucking themselves by running away into the woods.
We filed into the court and sat in the pews. There is a court-house physiognomy: faces that only a cop, military vet, or armed guard possess, and such faces abounded. There is also a physiognomy of the arraigned — the actual people who may or may not have committed some crime, assembled here. They appear sad, tired, nervous, accommodatingly polite, hopeful. A protester came in with a roller suitcase. Everyone looked at it and then at the guards with the same thought: it’s a bomb. The protester had tried to film himself arraignment-maxxing outside the courthouse. That is, he filmed the film crews and complained about how there was no story there. “Most journalists are Ivy-League educated and here they are sitting around doing nothing. Nothing’s going on here.” He refused to turn his mic off in the courthouse, and the guards escorted him out.
Clavicular’s lawyer waddled in at high velocity. With him was the woman whom I took to be Clavicular’s mother, but no Clav. The “mother” was very pretty but very thin. Out of vanity, she has made herself too thin as she deepens into middle age. She has a kind of beauty that is negated at the wrong turn or vantage, but amplified at the correct angle. This is the physiognomy that becomes obsessed with the camera, obsessed with its intimate angles. She knows what her good side is.
She has the same nose as Clavicular, the same cheekbones, the same frame, the same vanity. Even with Clavicular out of the room, I felt they were webbed together. I could feel the genealogical join. She looked like she had done some crying leading up to this date, tears she had kept to herself. Courtrooms are asexual spaces, but any large gathering of humans will create a sexual field. She had the only sexual presence in the room.
Suddenly, out he came, walking in on his little legs alone, no average-sized males towering over him. We’ve seen him before, of course, but optimized for the American internet stream and not with our own eyes. I’ve long believed that Clavicular did not come to look the way he does through one-man hammer parties in his bedroom, but by the archaic process known as aging. But this belief did not hold up to scrutiny in the courtroom: he looks like he’s never aged. Clavicular looks like a little boy. But a chiseled little boy. Imagine a cherubim making gains at the gym without growing a day older, and you get a sense of the confused physiognomy he’s cut the ribbon on. His testosterone levels are not exactly in orbit. He has no physical presence. There is no sexual energy about him. He is, after all, infertile (he says so himself) and one can feel it in his anti-magnetism. His arms are weird, and his biceps sit oddly high and near the armpit as if the structure was never meant to develop them, and his musculature is bewildered as to where to place them. I took back everything I had ever thought: his looksmaxxing is completely warranted. His frame was never meant to be big. He had to do something about how small he is. He has no legs.
He was small and nervous. There was a long, dry, white stain running down the bag of his right trouser leg — raw milk, semen, the possibilities are endless with a character like him. You could see it clearly when he stood up. He stood between his lawyer and the woman I thought was his mother. They are the same exact size. They have the same muscle mass. Clavicular has the body of a too-thin middle-aged woman. He sat down and stared ahead. He was handling himself well, but you could see a nervous twinge every now and then. When his lawyer bent over to whisper to him, he thought he was supposed to stand and jerked almost to his feet, but his lawyer indicated he could stay seated. He was such a little boy, I felt almost sympathetic.
Finally, the judge strolled in 20 minutes late, and we all rose. It felt a bit like the opening of a Catholic mass, and then we sat back down. But Clavicular was up first, so he and his lawyers stood back up. He had already surrendered his passport. The bail was set at $10,000. The judge asked if he understood all this. “I do, Your Honor.” There was neither contempt nor apathy in Clav’s voice. He was nervous, polite, good-willed, scared. He was a scared child trying to be polite. The judge rattled off more procedural prose, and Clavicular leaned into his microphone and said eagerly, of his own respectful volition, “Thank you, Your Honor.” But the judge was shuffling papers and missed this act of a respectful little boy on his best behavior. This tugged somewhat at the heart. The judge mogged Clavicular.
The woman I thought was Clavicular’s mother turns out to be Melinda Thompson, a lawyer. But I do not throw my psychoanalytical intimation out with the bathwater. Standing side by side, the way she looked at him, I maintain there was something libidinal in her gaze. She saw herself in him. She loved him. And if this woman can love Clavicular, can gaze upon him with concern and worry, can I do that too?
I can’t. You see, Clavicular’s birth name is Braden Peters, and while Peters is something of a surname glowdown from “Clavicular,” that “Braden” carries vital information directly to the American gut. If we knew nothing about Braden but his name, we could intuit with no small accuracy his class, his bearing, his destiny: solvent, suburban, no personality, generically handsome and insecure about the size of his penis. If nomen est omen, then the Clavicular arraignment was really the story of the American “Braden.” The facts of his biography and the allegations of the case are all things a Braden would do.
First, Braden was born in New Jersey. This is not a crime, but an affluent genesis in Hoboken — with a businessman for a father and a stay-at-home bodybuilder for a mother — does not bode well for the development of a personality. He attended a private all-boys Catholic high school, was bullied for being very small, and started experimenting with testosterone — formerly known as “going through puberty.” However, Braden belongs to a generation that has distinguished itself by thwarting the course of puberty and outsourcing it to third parties, and so he began taking testosterone, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and attaching weighted shopping bags to his penis. You know, to permanently stretch it.
Braden was kicked out of Sacred Heart University in — you saw this coming — Connecticut, for selling drugs after just three weeks. This sounds halfway promising, until one realizes Braden was not inviting classmates into his room to get high, but to take off their pants and bend over so he could shoot them in the buttocks with steroids and help them make big gains in the gym. Expelled, Braden worked at a restaurant, polishing his 18-pack, hitting himself in the face with hammers, and microdosing meth to curb his appetite. Without college, Braden was sexually educated by porn and, insecure about his penis and having never seen Austin Powers, he got earnestly into penis pumps and began diversifying his natural penis-enlargement techniques from the rudimentary weighted shopping bag.
As all people do who are going up in the world, Braden went down to Florida and started streaming his life on Kick, the medium that has replaced reality television and monetized boredom. His manosphere predecessor is a bald, closeted delta male who feigns wealth by renting luxury cars and mansions. I’m speaking of Andrew Tate who, now caged and whimpering from jail for sex trafficking, has left Braden the last unwittingly self-satirical protagonist among the internet ruins; the lone voice expressing nausea at cunnilingus and explaining that attempts at producing a female orgasm are a bad ROI — better to optimize one’s ejaculato praecox.
This brings us to the innocence of Cape Cod. One summer during his rise in fame, when tiny little Braden was still 19, he filmed himself getting a 17-year-old girl drunk on his stream. (Correcting for Gen-Z psychology, they were then 13 and 12, respectively.) Braden had Ubered her over to his grandmother’s seaside McMansion with the promise of helping her become famous. According to the police report, the girl said hello to Braden’s grandmother and mother before climbing the stairs to Braden. Braden, she alleges, instructed her to say she is 18 on the stream and to pretend the vodka he gave her was water.
On the stream, she becomes visibly flushed and intoxicated and says to Braden, leaning in for a kiss a floor above his granny, “Wait, I’m so drunk, though,” to which Braden says, “It’s OK,” and kisses her.
After the camera turned off, Braden allegedly took the drunk young woman to his bed and began “throwing [her] in different positions,” as the criminal complaint alleges. When she woke up the next morning, it was to Braden already having sex with her and “pushing her head backwards.” When he was done, the complaint continues, he “coldly” ordered her the Uber home she’d expected the night before and — we imagine — gazed out over the ocean, brooding on the size of his penis.
The world in its present form would not exist without the internet. We wouldn’t have the 1,001 gender identities without the fractalizing sales funnels of technocapitalism’s targeted marketing and audience segmentation. We wouldn’t have cancel culture without the medium from which to be canceled and through which to lodge anonymous protest. We wouldn’t have President Trump without Twitter’s creation of a “public forum” and Trump’s presence and aptitude in such a place. And finally, we wouldn’t know who Braden Peters is without this ecosystem. We wouldn’t, in an analog world, open up the newspaper and find an interest piece on a guy named Clavicular going around to obscure college campuses encouraging young men to put their penises in tubes and vacuum pump them. In a parallel, still-analogue world, “Bradens” are still allegedly inviting young women to their grandmother’s McMansions, getting them drunk to have sex with them, waking them up in the morning by having sex with them, and then coldly whisking them away — we just don’t hear about it nationally.
The defining feeling of this century and driving force of technocapitalism is boredom. Mankind’s attention span has been caged these three decades in the visual medium of the internet, whose momentum relies entirely on monetizing the metadata this boredom gives off. Boredom and brief reprieve from boredom: ejaculation. The video gamer takes a break from gaming to ejaculate to porn. The pornstars — Sky Bri, Mia Malkova — now take a break from porn to stream themselves playing video games, oftentimes with dorkish video gamers. It was inevitable that the pornstar would find her way into a deeper intimacy with her true audience. Clavicular would not exist without the internet, but he also would not exist without porn. If porn is tails, Clav is heads, and together they make the Janus-face of the internetic structure.
Outside of figures like UnHerd’s Yanis Varoufakis, most of the Left has never woken up to this reality: when automation replaces labor, the exploitation of user metadata replaces the exploitation of labor. In so doing, we continue widening the frontiers of what we outsource to the computer: we have outsourced natural memory to the “download” and the “file save”; we have outsourced public discourse to tweets; writing to podcasts; sex to masturbation and pornography. If we are indeed building a machine god through the internet and AI, porn is its cybernetic libido and sexual imagination. This is Braden’s world. Braden’s “stream.” He is a next-gen narcissus staring at his reflection. You are driven by boredom to his stream, and he makes money off your observation. But you are not looking at him, you are looking at his reflection. Braden Peters is making money staring into the mirror and you’re staring in it with him. Marshall McLuhan clarified the meaning of the Narcissus myth in Understanding Media: the viewer does not see their reflection as their reflection, but confuses it for an external object. Clavicular, a tiny little fella, has conclusively confused himself for his buff internet image. I went into this wanting to push his face into the water. But the tenor of our age is irresolution, and I must say I’m not bored by what I’ve seen. Not at all. In fact, I think I’ll come back Nov. 24, for the next hearing on probable cause, in the flesh, for the human observation of Braden Peters. I don’t want his face to fall through the water just yet — not until society is ready to give him a swirlie.
Heading out of the courthouse, Clavicular is height-mogged by everyone: his friends, the guards, the newscasters. His tiny head bobs in a sea of normal-sized people. He is asked for comment from his right. He turns his head so far right that he gives the newscaster his left profile all the way behind her. Jawlines and profiles become very important to people so shy they can’t look others in the eye.
His lawyer is chewing everyone out again. “Clear a path! Let him walk!” And the TikTokers meet him at his car. They yell: “BBC owns you! BBC owns you!”
BarneysRubble0