#Mogged: Looksmaxxing at the End of the World

by Cat Gilligan, Arts & Culture Editor

Illustration by Lilly Beuthin, Contributor

A few weeks ago, Twitter user chromeheart600 finally asked the question that’s been on everybody’s mind; is ignoring the Foids while munting and mogging Moids more useful than SMV chadfishing in the club? This tweet became lodged in my brain almost immediately, mostly because Mr. Chrome is doing things with the English language that haven’t been attempted since Joyce wrote Finnegan’s Wake. More importantly, however, this post served as my first introduction to Clavicular, the socially maladroit alt-lite pretty boy currently taking the internet by storm.

For those whose brains have yet to be curdled by the discourse du jour, Clavicular is a 20-year-old streamer who is best known for popularizing “looksmaxxing,” a practice that originated on manosphere-adjacent internet forums. As the name suggests, “looksmaxxing” entails going to extreme lengths to alter one’s physical appearance in order to become more conventionally attractive. While some “looksmaxxers” engage in fairly standard self-improvement regimens (dieting, exercising, bathing, etc.), others like Clav take a more unorthodox approach. Although he keeps his full looksmaxxing routine behind a paywall (unfortunately, dear readers, I refuse to pay $50 to learn the ins and outs of the “Clavicular System”), he has disclosed that he maintains his physique with a cocktail of injectable peptides, anabolic steroids, and crystal meth. Even better, Clav is a self-proclaimed practitioner of “bone-smashing,” which, as the name suggests, is a looksmaxxing technique in which one hits themself in the face with a blunt object (preferably a hammer) in order to break their jawbone or cheekbones in the hopes that when they heal, they will have obtained a more “chiseled profile.” Outside of his tireless pursuit of physical perfection, Clav is known for chilling with Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, getting arrested for soliciting Adderall from patrons at a bar (been there, sister!) and hitting a man with a Cybertruck. 

As you can imagine, I have many thoughts on this freak. In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I was initially sort of charmed by Clavicular. In a vacuum, there’s something kind of cute and compelling about the whole “vain young hunk” schtick. He looks like he could be an extra in Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks. He’s Johnny Depp in Crybaby; he’s DeVeren Bookwalter in Blow Job; he’s the type of troubled beefcake who's meant to serve as some brilliant gay guy’s muse and die tragically at the age of 26. Moreover, for reasons that remain opaque to me, I felt an acute sense of pseudomaternal sympathy for Clav upon first encountering him online. Between the video of him desperately attempting not to flap his hands with excitement upon seeing a family of penguins at the zoo, to the clip of him tearing up when he realizes that his waiter forgot his chicken tenders at a restaurant, it’s difficult not to feel a certain level of pity, if not genuine empathy, for this wayward, insecure young man. Six months ago Clav was a college dropout working as a waiter, and now he’s a streamer with a cult following that he amassed by engaging in what is essentially a particularly silly form of self harm; he’s a sad clown with shriveled testicles and an eating disorder.

This is, of course, assuming that we take Clavicular at his word; given his naked ambition as an influencer and his willingness to debase himself for clicks, it’s entirely possible that the whole “bone-smashing-meth-snorting-asexual-freak” bit is just another ploy for attention.  Moreover, there is something insidious about both the philosophy Clavicular espouses and the political moment he represents. Although he made a brief foray into the world of online conservativism, as evidenced by his little boys’ night out with Fuentes, Tate, Sneako and Myron Gaines, Clav claims that he’s “not trying to do politics anymore,” and recently referred to JD Vance as “subhuman” in an interview with Michael Knowles (broken clock, etc., etc.). Even so, to say that looksmaxxing is a practice predicated on a number of very nasty ideological principles would be an understatement. Clavicular has asserted, as many looksmaxxers do, that attractiveness is an objective and quantifiable quality, and he frequently discusses the exact skull measurements necessary to be truly “good-looking.” When he’s not playing with his callipers, Clav is going on diatribes about “hypergamous foids” and female privilege, and/or regurgitating racial slurs on Twitch. While Clavicular may be too “blackpilled” to have any real convictions, political or otherwise, all of his content is colored by his cartoonishly  misogynistic and vaguely fascistic obsession with beauty. In this sense, Clavicular’s sudden stardom may simply be another symptom of the ambient cultural conservatism currently shaping the media landscape. 

Part of the reason why I find Clavicular so fascinating is because he is, in many ways, the ur-Zoomer; obsessed with being desirable but largely disinterested in sex, addicted to gray market nootropics and steroids and stimulants you can buy online, profoundly alienated, profoundly nihilistic, a self-loathing narcissist who is unable to hold a conversation for more than 30 seconds, a self-diagnosed “autist from the blackpill space” (his words, not mine) who spends most of his time on his phone, somebody who stumbled across a handful of unsavory internet forums during lockdown (which, FYI, began when Clav was in eighth grade) and is now permanently braindamaged. He has, by his own admission, no friends, no hobbies, and no interests outside of improving his appearance. He embodies every Zoomer pathology, everything that makes our age cohort uniquely atomized and solipsistic and insane. Although some small, perverse part of me wishes that I could give Clav some hot cocoa and a DBT workbook in an attempt to nurse him back to health, I suspect that it would be a futile effort; after all, at the end of the day, I’m just another person to mog. 

Illustration by Frances McDowell, Layout Assistant