What ‘looksmaxxing’ tells us about modern masculinity

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0:38A quick warning. This episode contains discussions of body dysmorphia, self-harm, sex, and drug use. And it references language that may cause offense. Pick one of the big pop culture moments of the last century. The rumble in the jungle, maybe. O.J. Simpson and his Ford Bronco. The launch of the iPhone. Well, earlier this month in Arizona, there was a new one, at least if you're extremely online. You got me by a lot. I stopped gymming. It's been christened the frame-mogging of clavicular. Pierce, the biggest news over the weekend was clavicular getting brutally frame-mogged by the ASU frat leader.

1:17Here's the deal. There's a guy called clavicular. He has muscles. And then someone with bigger muscles comes to stand next to him. He's obviously been gym-maxing. This is one of the most brutal frame moggings we've ever seen. And somehow this moment becomes a massive internet phenomenon. Clavicular was just frame mogged by an Arizona State friend. Dude, clabbed up frame mogged by an ASU student. Why are all these memes coming out of nowhere? And if you have no idea what we're talking about, that's okay. We'll explain it. Clavicular is a 20-year-old from New Jersey. He streams online for hours most days.

1:52He cares deeply about what he looks like. He says he's broken his own face with a hammer to make it look better. From the BBC, I'm Asma Khaled in Washington, D.C. And I'm Tristan Redmond in Paris. And today on The Global Story, who is the suddenly-everywhere clavicular? What does his fame tell us about the world we live in and the state of modern masculinity?

2:21My name's Matt Shea. I'm an investigative reporter and documentary filmmaker. I'm hosting the new BBC podcast, Top Comment, which launches very soon. And I've spent a lot of my time investigating stories around the manosphere, internet culture. Matt, it's so great to have you with us. We are here today to discuss all sorts of things that I have only just learned about. The use of the word maxing, but other ones like gesturing, jester-gooning, foids, munting, We're going to find out all about it today. Can you tell us, please, Matt, why does this story matter to people who are not terminally online?

3:05I think first we have to understand who Clavicular is, who's the person behind this interesting new language. What up, chat? Yo, yo, yo, yo, yo. Yo. He's a 20-year-old live streamer. I'm just going to put on some background music for myself. Can you guys hear me okay? who is a looks maxer, which means he's someone who's dedicated to looking as good as physically possible given his genetics. Looks maxing. It is becoming more and more mainstream. And before you know it, every one of your peers around you is going to surpass you. If you improve your looks, you improve every metric of your life. He basically does things like he smashes himself in the face with a hammer to make his bone structure appear more chiseled.

3:53Bone smashed, You smashed your face in and what did you do after? Like you went to the doctor and they reconstructed you? No, no, no, no. So it's just small micro fractures. He has taken, you know, methamphetamine plus taken loads of supplements. You know, he's taken testosterone since he was 14. Is there a specific moment that you remember where you were like, yeah, I'm just going to hop on testosterone when you're 14? I wanted to get to my goals as quickly as possible because I always thought the idea of, you know, telling people you work out and talking about all this stuff, but you're not big to be just kind of ridiculous.

4:24And he's essentially taken this looks-maxing world out of the shadows of in-cell forums online and into the mainstream. Start blasting those steroids and stop asking, what could happen if I hop on steroids? What could happen if I get that surgery? And ask yourself, what could you miss out on? What kind of love? What kind of salary? what type of every single type of improvement possible in your life could you be missing out on when did you first become aware of this person and what was your reaction i've been following the manosphere and it's kind of adjacent niches for a while now i wrote a book called clown world which is about andrew tate essentially a viral misogynist influencer who is alleged to have trafficked women, to have raped women, allegations he denies, but he's being investigated for.

5:24He was sort of the most famous person to come out of this part of the internet called the Manosphere. And within the Manosphere, there's lots of people. There's pickup artists. There's men going their own way who are men who have kind of decided that they should no longer have any sort of meaningful relationship with women at all. but all of them share this attribute which they referred to as being red-pilled and being red-pilled means that you've awoken to the notion that feminism is a lie essentially and that men actually have fewer rights than women okay so that's being red-pilled look maxing comes from a kind of darker more nihilistic version of red-pilling called black-pilling to be black-pilled is to not just have the realization that feminism is supposedly a lie, but it's to have this realization that your entire worth is genetically predetermined and life is this kind of Darwinist nightclub where you're competing with other men for sex and for women's attention.

6:26And that if you are born kind of not good looking or with low musculature, then you're essentially doomed and you will always be an incel, an involuntary celibate, someone who believes that they will never have sex with women because women will never find them attractive. Now, Clavicula is sort of post incel and he's saying rather than accept your fate that women will never like you, you can, in his terminology, ascend. You can make yourself look better. You can look smacks. Okay, I should point out here that, you know, women have been doing all sorts of things for years to try to improve their looks.

7:05That's just kind of baked into our culture. There's entire industries built around women trying to improve their looks. Botox, lip filler, I could go on and on. But I get the sense that what clavicular is selling is really different. And I have a lot of follow-up questions here, Matt. But I want to begin by just asking, what does clavicular actually look like for the uninitiated? So he is rarely wearing a shirt. He has a very lean body, high muscle mass, chiseled jawline, kind of perfect hair. And he is mainly known for these live streaming videos, it seems, where he kind of is either brutally rating women's attractiveness or mogging other men.

7:50Okay, what does it mean to mog? So mogging comes from AMOG, alpha male of the group. I feel like you're describing literally lexicon to me. Like I'm speaking a foreign language sometimes, but please continue. Well, it's okay. So to mog someone is to portray yourself as superior to them, especially to another man. Clavicular famously got brutally frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader. So the meme that most people came to Clavicular through was a picture of him stood next to a fraternity leader who had a wider muscular frame than him. Okay. And the caption said that this frat leader brutally frame-mogged Clavicular by having a wider frame.

8:41And so to have a wider frame is presumably seen to be more attractive. Exactly. So you can attach any prefix to mog. So like you can face mog, you can frame mog. We were going to do clavicular on top comment, but you could say that you news mogged us by doing it in this podcast. Please don't take that personally. Okay, so Matt, you keep referring to this guy as clavicular, but I feel like we should spell out that that's not actually his birth given name. It is a chosen name. Yeah, so clavicular was born Brayden Peters. He grew up in Hoboken, New Jersey. he, he says that he struggled socially in high school and often caused himself an autist, despite no official autism diagnosis.

9:25At 14, he became obsessed with improving his looks. So he ordered a testosterone kit online. I was never worried about side effects. I was just worried about progressing, right? So that's kind of always been my mentality. I'm all or nothing with everything that I do. Parents initially threw the drugs away, causing a hormonal crash. My parents would confiscate them. So it was hard at first, but eventually they started to realize that there was nothing that they could do about it. At some point, he becomes a frequent poster on the forum looksmax.org, where he kind of masters the lingo and slang and starts kind of speaking in terms of these grievances about the unfair biological advantages held by tall and muscular men.

10:05In terms of what you can get away with, the threshold goes through the roof as you get better looking, right? You can do things that unattractive people can never fathom. Clavicular is a reference to the width of his clavicles. Is this your clavicle, here to here? Yeah, it's your collarbone, essentially. Interesting. So the width of your collarbone is seen to be a sign of attractiveness. Yes. So all of this comes from the kind of incel look-smaxing belief in hypergamy. And hypergamy is the term that's used by biologists to describe how animals pick a mate. Now, they apply this to humans, and they believe that women seek higher status men in order to increase their kind of social and economic standing and the genetic potential of their offspring.

10:52What is true about women is they are hypergamous. They're dating above their looks level. and if they're not if they're better looking than the guy it can 99 of the time be attributed to either money or status and it's within this world of hypergamy that these genetic specificities like the width of your clavicles or the distance between your eyes and your nose and mouth are important people like clavicular are obsessed with this to the point of body dysmorphia clavicular says that he's been taking testosterone since he was 14 and is now infertile because of that i want to ask you about that though, because if the idea of looks maxing is to break out of your in-cell fate, so to speak, if the end result of looks maxing is, as is the case with this guy Clavicular, that you end up infertile, well, to what end?

11:41So Clavicular has himself said that sex or slay maxing, as he refers to it, is actually less important than the goal of mogging other men. By that, he means that the competition within the social hierarchy for other men is the main game. Okay, so in fact, the end result is not to have sex, it's just to better other men. Is that right? For some of his followers, and let's be clear here, he is selling a course where you can learn to supposedly ascend like him through using his methods. A lot of the men who do take that course, they will be looking to sleep with women. But in the kind of caricatured extreme form that clavicular represents, looks maxing is not about, you know, attracting a mate anymore.

12:30It's about the attention and the virality that it gets you within that social hierarchy on social media. Matt, this is the part of our episode where we do a practical exercise. So one of our producers have shared with Asma and I a message that was posted on X. And we would like your help, please, in translating this message. So I'm going to read it out loud. Clavicular was mid-jester gooning when a group of foids came and spiked his cortisol levels. Crying emoji. Is ignoring the foids while munting and mogging moids more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club? What does that mean? okay that sentence translated is clavicular was acting humorous when a group of women came over and stressed him out is ignoring women while insulting and presenting yourself as superior to other men more useful in the sexual marketplace right now that gives you a window into what looks Maxing is about into this world of hypergamy about how to compete with other men for female attention, but also for other male attention.

13:49But I think we shouldn't look at that sentence and think that there's like a bunch of young people who are actually talking like that, right? It's in itself a joke. Like to do that meme is kind of performatively participating in the discourse in a way that's itself funny. And actually us discussing it like on a BBC podcast that kind of like bestows a legitimacy onto it that makes it even more funny and makes it go more viral what would be the vocabulary used to discuss what we are doing right now on the global story it's a freestyle exercise now come on let's go well we're we're sort of brain mogging the whole the whole clavicular thing we're munting and mogging social media by journalism maxing.

14:40That's what we're doing here. So to be clear, they're just jester-gooning on social media. We're news maxing.

14:56Hi there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond. And together we're the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For those of you all who might be new to our show, We here at The Global Story dive deep every weekday on one big story at the intersection of where the world and America meet. And you can now watch The Global Story on the iHeart app. Catch every brand new episode every weekday. Just tap into iHeart to start watching. And we hope you enjoy the show.

15:29I mean, look, we've been laughing at points during this interview and talking about this being part of an online discourse and meme culture. And yet, it's not just existing in this online world. There was this clip of him hanging out in a club in Miami with other notable Manosphere figures like Andrew Tate or Nick Fuentes. my understanding is they were playing this song that glorifies Hitler. It's by the artist formerly known as Kanye West. What was happening there and why did this clip blow up so widely? So this was a kind of clout bomb of all the top Manosphere and far-right influencers in one night club.

16:10It was like a glorified bachelor party, but for the Manosphere of streamers. And it all took place on Clivacular's stream. A Miami Beach nightclub catching heat, accused of celebrating hate with a song about Hitler. Absolute disgust. Disgusted, horrified. I cannot believe we're even seeing this and witness a Miami Beach. The same men seen in the club, known as controversial influencers, are also in a video from a limo. In that one, they're singing and one of them is performing a Nazi salute. Essentially the most algorithmically primed gathering in history because it's so offensive. Everyone in that group has such a huge following that it was guaranteed to kind of blow up the internet, which it did, which made them all more famous to whatever end that serves for each of them.

16:59I mean, it does seem absolutely extraordinary to me that you might be singing a song glorifying Hitler just as a publicity stunt. Is that what's going on here? Absolutely. I mean, this is essentially the tried and tested formula of the manosphere and of the far right, extreme political online world, which is say outlandish things, become famous, meet with other influencers who have also said outlandish things, cross pollinate, make each other more famous, and then translate that into whatever you desire, whether that's selling a course to make money or whatever. But the key thing is that all of the things these people are saying and doing are algorithmically primed to be successful, to reach as many people as possible.

17:45Because if you engage with Clavicula or Andrew Tater and Nick Fuentes through criticizing them, you are still engaging with them and the algorithm likes that and it pushes it more. If you engage with them because you like it, same thing. But we basically live in a world right now where social media rewards and gives huge platforms to the most outlandish offensive people. We were just talking about Clavicular at this club with some other members of the manosphere who are seen to be part of the far right. And I want to ask you about Clavicular's politics because they seem less clear cut to me. Help me make sense of that.

18:25And since then, Clavicular has sought to clarify that he's apolitical, that he doesn't care about any of this stuff, and that he's nihilistic. And, you know, it's all about mogging, not politics, is what he said. Mr. Ickiller, it's wonderful to have you on the show. Thank you so much for having me, Mike. In December last year, Clavicular went on a podcast with the conservative political commentator Michael Knowles, where he was asked about who he might endorse in the 2028 presidential election between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Vice President J.D. Vance. Who's going to win? It's going to be Gavin Newsom against J.D.

18:58Vance because J.D. Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom-Uggs. J.D. Vance is subhuman? Yeah. What makes you say that? He's got a very short total facial width to height ratio. He's obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like 6 '3 Chad. In saying that, he must be aware that that's funny, right? A lot of what he does is intentionally funny. I mean, this is a guy who uses the term second floor maxing to refer to just going upstairs, right? So he must be aware that what he's doing is kind of clowning in a way. Is he truly not ideological in what you've seen from him? I would say that he's genuinely nihilistic.

19:39but i think that that that is in a way more scary um the idea that your nihilism has reached such an extent that it isn't an issue for you to chant how hitler in a nightclub while filmed and use the n-word which he has done multiple times for attention is very worrying if if like even a portion of his followers share that same nihilism that is very worrying does he use the n-word because he espouses a racist ideology or quite simply just for attention? Again, I would say that he probably would say that he isn't racist and is apolitical and just wants to focus on looks-maxing. But that doesn't mean that he's unintentionally espousing a racist ideology.

20:27So we got Nick Fuentes here. We're going to be discussing the disenfranchised young men. For example, Clavicular also appears on a podcast with the far-right commentator Nick Fuentes, and the two of them talk about the importance of, quote, saving European culture. Like, if you want Europeans to, like, to mog, it's going to be through autogenous hormones and surgery and all the stuff that I'm talking about. Where Clavicula's ideology, if you could call it that, crosses over into racism is in the same way that the kind of social Darwinism and hypergamy that surrounds the whole incel, lux max culture combines with race science.

21:10In his course, he offers consolation to, quote, ethnics who got the, quote, short end of the phenotype stick and encourages them to follow his godly coloring routine. So ethnics being anyone who's not white he's referring to or who are ethnics? I think you could safely assume that. And Clavicula said the concerns that the looks maxing subculture is racist are, quote, dumb. But people would be right to be concerned when you look at the fact that he has said things around evolutionary biology, which refer to a kind of idealized male form and pose questions about is that supposed idealized male form a Caucasian male form?

22:01and the fact that he is, you know, doing a video in a nightclub with a famous white nationalist chanting Heil Hitler, whether there is a danger that this looks-maxing world that we're now seeing has a lot of crossover with eugenics. And we know statistically that men around the world are more concerned with how they look physically than they have been at any point in recent history. Male body dysmorphia is on the rise. Instagram and social media play into that. Things like dating apps play into that hugely. The idea that you're constantly swiping and no one's swiping back on you all contributes to this sense that you are competing in this sexual marketplace.

22:48And that is fundamental to incel and lux-maxing culture. And that leads to people doing all sorts of extreme and crazy things. Lux-maxing is one of them. However, I think we have to be careful not to overanalyze clavicular. And I think there's a huge tendency when a living meme like clavicular arises for the think pieces to come out. I saw New York Times compared Luke's maxing vocabulary to James Joyce's Ulysses. There's a tendency to say this thing is happening. What does this say about young men as a whole? But I would be cautious to say that this is a trend affecting a majority or even a large number of young men.

23:40I think the reason he's famous isn't because loads of young men are smashing their faces with hammers to increase their chiseled bone structure look. They're sharing him because they find it funny and ridiculous. So clavicular is the epitome of a world of social media and algorithms where we afford a giant platform to essentially the stupidest, the strangest, the most outlandish things on the internet. And if there is a kind of portrait in the attic that's aging for clavicular, It's that. It's that, you know, he is helping usher in this world in which people are encouraged to do whatever it takes to become internet famous, even if that means, you know, chanting Heil Hitler at a nightclub with Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes.

24:28Matt, we made an episode in January about a kind of gender chasm which is opening up in South Korea. Now, there's a political divide between men and women, which has been developing partly driven by the internet in that country, but it's a phenomenon which has been happening elsewhere in the world. There's evidence that this process started around about the late 2000s. Are we moving into a situation where men and women socially might become more and more segregated from each other? And if that happens, how serious could that damage be for society? Until recently, women and men have voted along similar lines according to generation or other demographic factors like socioeconomic status.

25:17Now, especially amongst young people, there's more of a divide in terms of their gender. So women are voting more progressively and men more conservatively. However, we're already seeing those young men switching up and Donald Trump is losing support amongst young men in the US. But perhaps more important is how young men today perceive feminism and equality among the sexes. Young men are more likely than any other group in society to see feminism as a threat. But there has always been people like Clavicula or Andrew Tate in the sense that there's always been pickup artists. What's different now is they've kind of metastasized into a political movement that not only wants to teach people how to have sex with women, but feels that it's owed that sex and feels that it was denied it by feminism.

26:15And that becomes very problematic. Now we're entering into territory where women are seen as the enemy. And these people like Clavicula and Andrew Tate come in to offer them the solution, which ends in misogyny. So it's evolving essentially from being a social issue to a political and a culture wars issue. Is that what you're saying? Absolutely, yeah. Well, thank you so much, Matt. We really appreciate you taking the time to walk us through this all. Yes, thank you, Matt, so much for decoding all of this for us. Matt's launching a new show on Friday with the BBC's Mariana Spring. Matt, tell us about the new show.

26:57So Top Comment is our new podcast, and it's going to be covering stories in the news, in politics, internet culture, all through the lens of how social media distorts, alters, and creates the mainstream news agenda. Brilliant. Well, we're looking forward to it. Thank you so much, Matt. All good. Thank you. That was Matt Shea, journalist, documentary filmmaker, and co-author of the book Clown World, Four Years Inside Andrew Tate's Manosphere. And that's it for the global story for today, friends. A quick recommendation before we go, if you're looking for the latest news from around the world, then check out our sister show, the Global News Podcast.

27:38You can find it wherever you listen. Today's episode was produced by Zandra Ellen and Aaron Keller. It was edited by James Shield and mixed by Travis Evans. Our studio manager was James Piper, and our senior news editor is China Collins. I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redman. And thanks, as always, for tuning in. We'll talk to you again tomorrow. Cheerio.

28:11Hi there, I'm Asma Khalid. And I'm Tristan Redmond, and together we're the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. For those of you who might be new to our show, we here at the Global Story dive deep every weekday on one big story at the intersection of where the world and America meet. And you can now watch the Global Story on the iHeart app. Catch every brand new episode every weekday. Just tap into iHeart to start watching. And we hope you enjoy the show.