Clavicular didn’t invent ‘looksmaxxing’ – gay men have been at it for a long time

There’s plenty to doomscroll in 2026, but one man stands out as an avatar of existential dread. Braden Peters, a 20-year-old influencer from Hoboken, New Jersey, who goes by the name Clavicular, ascended to social media celebrity in December after hitting a man with his Tesla cybertruck while livestreaming, and then wishing him dead. But as clips of the incident went viral, so did his philosophy, known as “looksmaxxing”, espoused on online forums where Clavicular began posting obsessively at age 14. Looksmaxxers seek to improve their physical appearance by any means necessary in order to gain higher social and economic status. Statistics back up the notion of “pretty privilege”, but Clavicular’s ruthless superficiality has taken it to some ugly places.

Clavicular claims he has been taking testosterone he orders online since age 14 and believes that overusing it has made him infertile. He’s said he has smoked meth to suppress his appetite and stay thin. Most controversially, he has touted “bonesmashing”, the practice of hitting himself in the face with a hammer to create microfractures that reset in more supposedly appealing ways. All of this is pitched to his 180,000 viewers on Kick and 760,000 followers on TikTok in the trollish, self-referential argot of looksmaxxing forums, which blends pseudoscience and 4chan slang. Followers celebrate when Clavicular “mogs” strangers (the verb derives from the acronym for "alpha male of the group") or is caught on camera standing beside someone they deem less attractive than him. They plot ways to “ascend”, or get hotter, and (without apparent irony) deride the “jesters” who prefer to clown around instead for attention.

This language frequently veers into racist, misogynistic and homophobic territory. Clavicular has defended his right to use the N-word, and last month was filmed at a Miami nightclub singing Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler” with far-right edgelord Nick Fuentes and manosphere influencer Andrew Tate.

According to Looksmax.org’s 2025 survey, 90% of active forum users are under 21 and 99.5% of them are male. More than two-thirds identify as white and 90% as heterosexual. Although many are self-described “incels” who hope that by improving their looks they will become more attractive to women, their beauty standards were devised without female input.

The primary bond of this pitiless fraternity is a shared desire to be considered hot by other men.

Clavicular identifies as straight but, by his own admission, would rather not deal with women. In a recent interview with the podcaster Adam Friedland, he boasted that he lasts around “one minute” in bed. “I’ve gotta get back to work,” he said. Looksmaxxers refer incessantly to “sexual market value (SMV)”, but they don’t seem especially interested in having sex.

Clavicular is happy to take credit for inventing his self-destructive routine, but gay men have already been at it for a long time.

Meth and steroids have had a toxic stranglehold on my community for at least 30 years, and their mainstreaming to LGBTQ+ minors should be treated as a public health emergency. According to the ONS, LGBTQ+ people are nearly three times as likely to die of an overdose. The signs of addiction will be familiar to just about any urban gay male: the hollow-cheeked, wide-eyed muscle men relentlessly circling the dancefloor at parties, the monosyllabic messages on dating apps at inappropriate times of day or night. For a while, it seemed as if everyone I knew was on anabolic steroids. Several men attributed their “gains” to the deadly date rape drug GHB. The goal of this was clear: to increase one’s number of sexual partners, or what looksmaxxers refer to as their “body count”.

On a recent livestream, Clavicular shared that Peter Thiel has been inviting him to parties, leading to speculation that the gay, right-wing tech billionaire might be secretly funding him. (Clavicular has said that he is not.) Reflecting wider economic anxieties of gen Z, he decries full-time employment as the domain of “jesters” and “wagecucks”. Instead, he makes $100,000 a month on Kick, where the viral rage bait in his livestreams can be clipped and reshared for a fee.

Clavicular’s politics are harder to pin down. He certainly shares a Social Darwinist ethos with his bro Nick Fuentes. Yet in an interview with the rightwing podcaster Michael Knowles, he said he would vote for Democrat Gavin Newsom over JD Vance to become the next US president because Donald Trump’s veep is “subhuman”, while Newsom is a “6 ft 3 Chad”. This strikes me as more of a troll than a manifesto. It’s hard to believe Clavicular will vote at all – leave that to the ballotcucks. Either way, his language has entered political discourse: in January, an official X account linked to the US Department of War posted a meme of a grinning soldier with the slogan “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing.”

I’m reminded of the words of a certain ancient gay. In the dialogue Alcibiades I, Socrates chastises his handsome ex-lover for being “wedded to ignorance of the most disgraceful kind”. Trading in looks rather than intelligence, happy to mog his rivals rather than search his own soul, Alcibiades presents an especially “evil case”: a young man too foolish to admit what he does not know. “Embark upon civic affairs having first exercised and learned what needs to be learned, but not before then,” Socrates warns. On the internet, everything’s public and everyone’s an expert. In this sense, Clavicular is the ultimate jester, laughing his way to the bank.

Photograph by Nadja Sayej/ AKGS/ Backgrid