Meet Clavicular, the Looksmaxxing, Drugged-up Streamer Taking Over the Internet
He lives in a roided-out hell of his own devising. Now we’re stuck in it with him.
HAVE YOU EVER BEEN MID-JESTERGOON when a group of foids try to chadfish you? Have your cortisol levels spiked erratically as you munted with moids in the club? Do you have fever dreams at night about being frame-mogged?
Do any of these words make sense to you?
If not, that’s okay. But it’s probably still worth sitting down to read this piece. Because they’re likely where the discourse is heading.
Internet users this month have thrilled to the antics of “Clavicular,” a 20-year-old livestreamer who pals around with far-right figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate. Clavicular (real name Braden Peters) is probably the country’s most famous “looksmaxxer,” the name for an online community of young men who will do anything to look hotter—or, to put it in their terms, “max” their “looks.”
Clavicular has gone to extremes in his pursuit of “ascending” to the level of an extremely handsome guy like his idol, White Collar actor Matt Bomer, whom he describes as the “true Adam” for his high “facial harmony” score.
He has said that he started taking enormous doses of steroids at 14, to the point that he claimed he no longer was able to naturally produce testosterone. He has likewise claimed to have smoked crystal meth as a “stimulant” to make himself leaner. He wears lifts in his shoes, then positions boxes discreetly around his home so that he can stand on them and prevent new “slays” from noticing his real height when he takes off his shoes. He often talks about saving up for a $30,000 double-jaw surgery, and pummels his cheeks with a hammer or his own fist in a (medically dubious) act known as “bonesmashing” to give himself heightened cheekbones.
For Clavicular and lesser looksmaxxers, all of this is justified by the rise of “hypergamy.” It’s an idea that online dating and other aspects of contemporary romance allow a small sliver of wealthy, handsome, or high-status men to maintain sexual relationships with multiple women at once, while every other man is left to be an “incel”—involuntarily celibate. As the looksmaxxers see it, their only choice is to go to extremes to improve their physical appearance so that they can ultimately land in that lucky slice of promiscuous men.
They depict this not just as a conquest but as a burden. In a rant aimed at his fans last year, Clavicular described his life as a “horror story” twisted by the unfair demands he claims women have placed on the men pursuing them.
“That’s led me to unreasonable things,” the then-teenager said. “That’s led me to usage of amphetamines to prolong my fasting.”
In a sea of fellow looksmaxxers, Clavicular has managed to stand out. Much of the interest in him has been driven by his fans; more specifically about the strangely compelling looksmaxxing lingo that they use to talk about him. On X, posts about Clavicular are often accompanied by talk about “foids”—a shortening of “femoid,” a dehumanizing word to describe women. There’s also mentions of “jestermaxxing,” meaning trying to appeal to women with humor or personality rather than with just a razor-sharp jawline (Clavicular frowns on this, although even he will jester in a pinch).
But the most common (and important) word in the Clavicular discourse is “mogging.” It derives from “AMOG,” an acronym in the looksmaxx community for the “Alpha Male of the Group.” To “mog” someone—whether “heightmogging” them by standing a few inches taller, or “frame-mogging” them by having a broader, more muscular build—is to achieve dominance in our modern, savage social media landscape.
Mogging extends to politics. In an interview with the Daily Wire last month, Clavicular predicted that California Gov. Gavin Newsom will handily defeat Vice President JD Vance in the 2028 presidential race. The reason: Newsom is far more attractive.
“JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom mogs,” he declared.
The comments raised several questions. Among them: Why did the Daily Wire interview Clavicular at all? Yes, it’s clickbait. But his platforming on these channels also points to something larger happening here: Right-wing media is fully entering the spectacle-driven nihilism phase of the internet. And it’s going to change our culture, our discourse and, yes, our politics for years to come.
Through a spokesman, Clavicular declined to comment.
“Giving comment to The Bulwark is not moggable,” the statement read.
WERE WE ALWAYS destined to enter this place?
Probably. But it was not always clear that Clavicular would be our avatar for this particular moment. His tumultuous life might well have veered off in other directions.
Around 3 a.m. one morning in December 2024, just after his nineteenth birthday, he plowed his car into