The darkness behind looksmaxxing

0:01Noel King:By now, you've definitely heard that Clavicular got brutally frame-mogged by an ASU frat leader. Yo, Clav, two words. Frame-mogged. Maybe you heard that he mogged the Dime Square Jester Gooners. You probably know that Clavicular, Little Man Tate, and whitish supremacist Nick Fuentes danced to Heil Hitler in Vendome, and then Clav got fight-mogged in the club during Fashion Week in New York.

0:27Noel King:Or maybe you're lucky and you have no idea what I'm talking about. A remarkable new online subculture has young men clockwork-oranging, bashing their faces with hammers and snorting crystal meth to drop weight, all in the interest of being the most handsome boy. Coming up on Today Explained, clavicular and the looks-maxers.

1:19Noel King:Transcription by CastingWords Use Harvey. Learn more at Harvey.ai.

1:52This is Today Explained. My name is Charlie Wurzelt, and I'm a staff writer at The Atlantic and the host of its podcast, Galaxy Brain.

2:01Noel King:Charlie, who is clavicular? Oh, great question. The question of our age, really. Let's see. Clavicular is a young man. He's in his 20s. What up, chat? How's everyone doing? He started posting on the internet as a teenager around when he was about 15 years old on these looks maxing forums, which are forums that are dedicated to making yourself as aesthetically perfect as humanly possible body modification. I'm getting otoplasty and rhinoplasty during the surgery. So they'll pin the ears back, do the mastoid tie. So I'm already getting that. It's all included. And so he started posting there. His real name is Brayden.

2:50And he basically toiled in obscurity for a really long time until he allegedly hit someone with his cyber truck while he was live streaming on Christmas Eve of this past year. Oh, my God. Is he dead? I don't know. Hopefully.

3:10Noel King:Tell me about the Luxmaxers. What is their deal? The looks maxers are complicated because they are in an overlap with lots of other communities online, right? There's the involuntarily celibate community known as incels, right, that have links to violent extremism. But really, there's this core feeling in looks maxing that the only thing that matters in all of life is how good you look. that that is tied to your self-worth in every way and that what you should be doing is trying by all means necessary, whether that is breaking bones in your body, whether that is chewing on a rubber ball for hours a day to get your jawline to be straighter, whether that's steroids or drugs or anything to get a leg up.

4:07You need to do that because the best thing that you can do is go out in the world and look better than everyone else and document the heck out of it.

4:17Noel King:Those examples sound extreme, but I suspect you're going to tell me they're not. What do we know about what Clavicular has done to himself? Well, we only know what he tells us, right? So, you know, unreliable narrator, perhaps. but he has said on various podcasts etc that he has smashed his face with a hammer uh the the the theory there is that uh when your bones break they grow back stronger i'm saying that's his theory not my theory i'm uh certainly not endorsing this how does it work so you're you're bracing yourself you don't have to do it and then you're hitting real hard and what this is doing is this creating micro fractures and according to wolf's law the bone is going to grow back stronger and not only that but you're also getting a lot of inflammation and swelling um so it makes your cheekbones look a lot bigger and so he has smashed his face his jawline in order to strengthen it to make it look better um he started according to him taking testosterone when he was around 14 or 15 years old i started taking exogenous hormones testosterone um when i I was 14.

5:27I thought, why would I work out as a natural, take years to make the progress that I can make in months? It didn't make sense to me at all. Which is also not recommended by medical professionals. And that is in order to, you know, speed up his puberty and get his body looking like an adult man's. He's said he's taken methamphetamines in order to hollow out his cheeks. For three days, I spammed a combination of Adderall and methamphetamine for appetite suppression. And I literally went on a three-day fast and stayed awake the entire time. Which is certainly a choice. Like I said, guys, I'm not going to sit here and act like I'm some good influence.

6:19Don't do that. Don't do that. That's what I did. I'm crazy. Right. I'm the crazy guy. And all sorts of things. This this thing, again, chewing on a on like a rubber ball. It's called a mewing is the phrase and helps helps structure your jaw, sort of like curling your biceps or something like that. So there's all kinds of things that he has done, supposedly, that are that are extremely extreme.

6:46Noel King:One thing that I find so fascinating is this is like a society in a way. And so the Luxmaxers have their own language, which I think is very compelling. Can you define a couple of the terms? The white nationalist streamer Nick Fuentes made fun of me recently for using this language as a loser millennial guy reporter. An old person. Because I'm just like, and it's true. And I think that's actually part of it. Like, every generation has their own language. And, you know, this language is very influenced by online message board communities and places like 4chan, etc. But part of it is, as it always is, right, is to make the older people have to say it and look like true losers.

7:32So that's yeah. OK, so there's there's stuff like I mean, looks maxing is its own. Right. Mogging is like, you know, looking better than someone looking looking hot. And it actually what I found is it comes from it's like a sort of an acronym, but it's it stands for like alpha male of the group and then male of the group mog mogging. So mogging is essentially just, you know, outperforming them, looking better than them and just sort of dominating. Right. So there's this like, you know, alpha, beta dominance, go back to the jungle, you know, Darwinian kind of thing going on. They could money mog you.

8:14They could status mog you. There's all kinds of words that they're just making up on the spot to write like like jester maxing. I think of it like you're this big jester, like doing these silly like activities. Don't be jester maxing at the club, getting mono for six months, getting AIDS. Just lock in.

8:33Noel King:If the point of looks maxing is to be as hot as possible, I get it. It's understandable. You're young. What is the objective of being hot? What is the purpose of all this? It is social dominance, really, or just dominance in general, right? This idea of mogging coming from this alpha male of group acronym, the alpha part of that and the male part of that are both extremely important. And so going out in public as an extremely hot person is not just to show how beautiful you are, but it's to be dominant over other people, right? You want to make other people look bad. You want them to feel bad about themselves based off of how unbelievably attractive you are.

9:24And you also want to basically conquer women. It is about, you know, how many, how many quote unquote chicks can you pull, right? But all of it is in this sense of conquest, of domination, of making everyone else subordinate to you. All right.

9:49Noel King:So I've read your pieces and I listened to your podcast. And there's a thing that I think you both say directly and kind of dance around, which is clavicular and the gang seem stupid. This seems stupid, but it isn't actually stupid. Explain what you mean. Well, I think it's stupid on the content level, right? It is. It's pretty. Gosh, it's lacking in substance is how I would put it. There is there's a clip of Clavicular. I believe he's in Miami. He's with this streamer, Sneeko, who's very popular. And Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist griper leader, also streamer. Is it a white guy? Is he 5 '8"?

10:39Does he have aura? That's Nick Fuentes. And they are in a living room somewhere in an apartment. There's, like, people walking around in the background. They are just, like, pulling up old computer chairs and sitting awkwardly in front of this camera and having a conversation that is, like, incredibly stilted, just incredibly vapid. We saw our section last night and the way that me and Seiko do it. Like, it's impossible to not, like, mock. You know, we mocked every single person. Dude, yeah, for you guys. Dude, what are you doing? There's just, like, not a lot being exchanged there. Clavicular seems to react with just, like, he has sort of like one of those, you know, wind-up dolls.

11:23Like, you pull the string and there's, like, five different reactions, right? So, like, one of them's like, oh, dude, that's so based. So based. Sick. I have a wiki page. Wiki page based. That was based last night all around. All right, based. Next segment, yeah, based. Based. Let's call it a girl. And so on the substance level, there's that. Then there's the element of what he means, what that vapid content means, what the popularity of someone like Clavicular means. And I think that that is not stupid. Like the fact that I'm writing an article about him in the Atlantic because he's hanging out with these people.

12:10The fact that, you know, he was able to leverage his popularity into this situation where he is meeting with Andrew Tate, the manosphere influencer. All right. Well, fellas, I think we should probably start heading over to Tate's. It's about time. But dude, that was a good sit down segment. I thought we, you know, talked about some interesting topics. W, yeah. Yeah, W's in the chat for that. How many people are we going to...

13:01you know, basically apologize on behalf of the city for letting this happen. These guys are extremely effective attention hijackers. And that's, that is important.

13:24Noel King:The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel. Ahead, Charlie comes back to tell us how the Luxmaxers are taking over the real world. Thank you.

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17:22next segment yeah today explain based based let's call a girl

17:29Noel King:i'm noelle king we're back with the atlantic's charlie warzel okay charlie there's a world in which this is just kids being kids you call it nihilism in your piece but then you point out Others have pointed out it is not just kids being kids because it is influencing, really, our political leaders. Tell me what you've seen of this bleeding into politics. Yeah, I think that we are in the middle of a crisis of nihilism. And it's a very online phenomenon to some degree. but some of the original message board spaces 4chan is probably the most popular one which came out of this other forum something awful it was populated by a lot of kids and young men who felt really disaffected who were bored who felt like they weren't living up to their potential they gathered they found community here and and one thing that they developed was this incredibly robust ironic culture right it was this idea that given their own insecurities if they could believe in nothing if they could hold nothing in their hearts than they were invincible, right?

18:59You couldn't hurt them. You couldn't insult them. You couldn't make fun of them for living in their parents' basement, right? And so there became this way of, you know, trolling people, of really having no ideology other than chaos that really has bled into all kinds of culture over the last, you know, two decades. And the Trump movement in 2016 was a huge leap forward for these people feeling like they had representation, but also that their culture was fusing with a type of politics. And that has grown and grown and grown year over year over year. And what you see now in the second Trump administration are a lot of these people or people who are fluent in this in the language of those places now occupy positions in government.

19:55The person who is controlling the Department of Homeland Security's account on X or the White House's account on X, the person who's doing the day-to-day posting is posting in a way that is indistinguishable from how someone was posting on 4chan in 2014. And I'm not like actually genuinely indistinguishable. It is trolling. It is dog whistling to white nationalists and other bigots. It is trying to make one's political enemies feel absolutely terrible. But also there is this feeling that there are no rules anymore. There are no adults in the room and we are in charge.

20:46Noel King:Let me ask you about something that surprised me. So I think of these guys, and again, I had a shallow knowledge two weeks ago, but I think of these guys as having right wing politics. And then I go online one day and I see that Clavicular has said J.D. Vance could not win an election, a presidential election against Gavin Newsom, because Gavin Newsom mogs J.D. Vance. He's hotter. Yeah, but I mean, like this next election cycle, who's going to win? It's going to be Gavin Newsom against J.D. Vance because J.D. Vance is subhuman and Gavin Newsom-ugs. They know that I literally sent his fucking campaign down the shitter.

21:25Like, wait, literally, now he's just known as like this loser fat guy because he went everywhere, like on Twitter.

21:30Noel King:And that might have been nothing. But then I saw people who I take seriously saying, oh, this is really actually a problem for J.D. Vance, that this influential young guy is calling him fat and ugly. Forgive me for saying it, but that was what was happening. And it made me wonder whether – does Clavicular actually have right-wing politics? What is this brand of commentary? What is he doing? You know, there's a way in which if you say he doesn't, right, and then he pals around with Nick Fuentes, there's a way in which that sounds like that's excusing him, right, or saying he doesn't have any agency.

22:07I think it's really important to say these guys are making choices. They have full agency. They should be taking full responsibility for the fact that, like, Cliff Giller says the N-word a lot on stream. like he is doing things that are racist that are bigoted he's palling around with people who are racist and bigoted but as far as his actual ideology i think it's like politically i think it's completely incoherent huh and i think that this is something that a lot of people are having trouble dealing with and this is a bit of that nihilism as it relates to our political moment I'm really just trying to diminish any political movement, any like populist like movement whatsoever, just by having like men trying to like self-improve.

22:58Like there's a million things I could I could name that are a better use of time to accelerate yourself as a male than anything to do with politics. Clavicular politics in so much as that they exist are about attention. Right. And I think that you see this in so many different varieties. I'm not linking clavicular directly to the types of mass shooters that we have seen. But there is a similarity, there's a similar flavor in the sense of you see some of these mass shooters going into places, doing these big manifestos. Right. Some of these manifestos contain a whole bunch of anti-Semitic and white nationalist screeds.

23:45But then they also have a bunch of stuff, you know, making fun of Donald Trump. They write stuff on their bullets that the whole point of it is to get attention, to get people to go on a wild goose chase, to understand who they are, to hack the media, to hack the attention. and at the end of it that is what matters to them that is why they are doing this and I think you can kind of tie that to this guy the reason he's doing it is because it gets him the attention that he wants it's helpful to his project which is to be the you know the guy who goes in and you know quote-unquote mogs people on stream everyone uh who I've talked to uh about clavicular who knows

24:28Noel King:who he is, who has a son or a nephew, really wants to know if it is too late. Like if internet nihilism has gotten to the point of no return and this is just where we are now. Do you think this is our future? I don't. I mean, when I wrote that piece, a lot of people reached out to me very despondently and and one thing that i that i that i feel like saying about my job writing about technology and the internet is is it feels a lot like being like a foreign correspondent to me right like i am reporting from a place and in the sense of the manosphere or you know whatever we're calling where clavicular hangs out all the time that's kind of a dark place that's a that's a place where there is i think this like this nihilistic crisis that is that is happening i don't think that's that's everything right uh i mean if you look at what's happened in the twin cities in the last month or so and the way that the the citizens of that city have responded to what's what's been going on and banding together and sort of the neighborliness and solidarity, it is the exact opposite of this, right?

25:53It is the exact opposite of like, lol, nothing matters. It is, no, we are like, we are, you know, all cohabitating in this place together and we're going to look out for one another and we're going to build these networks of resiliency. It's showing up. It's going to the local community center and sorting groceries and then delivering them to people, right? It requires that physical effort in the real world. And so I really think that people can fall into these spaces, but there is actually this very rich world around us that sort of has the more you spend time in it and are present in it, it actually has the exact opposite effect of what all of these streamers are messaging, what all of this online community is messaging.

26:48That's trying to keep you further isolated and alienated. Whereas, you know, community, I think, is the antidote. It's actually invigorating in a different way.