A Media Literacy Guide to “Looksmaxxing”
When internet phenemena becomes mainstream, we really should look deeper. Here is a guide.
[Originally published on my New Media Homework critical internet literacies newsletter]
A Portrait of the Looksmaxxer as a Young Man
It pains me to write about about the man known as Clavicular, but Braden Peters has completely broken containment and has been given the New York Times profile treatment, a GQ deep dive, and multiple appearances in popular media spaces. These pieces are well reported and colorful, but like any piece of media that surfaces a viral persona that currently represents over two decades of dark internet lore and mashes it into 3,000 words, its nuance is flattened and strained of its contextual derivations and its evolution from online culture to the mainstream.
The NYTimes profile of Peters, “Handsome at all costs,” was written by digital culture writer Joseph Bernstein and was widely shared by normal readers and the obsessively online alike. I can attest with certainty that many readers learned the term “looksmaxxing” for the very first time after reading that article and they were given very little guidance on what to do with the new knowledge. (Bernstein does an excellent job of being objective.)
Now, I don’t know if Bernstein is like me, but I often mistake my knowledge of internet trends as “common” knowledge when these thoughts are most definitely not common. In fact, no matter how clear I’ll attempt to be here, many explanations will continue to seem completely insane or ridiculous. (I made sure to add a lot of cultural deep dives for this subject in the Resources part that help explain this further.)
Thanks to word counts, editors, publication limitations, and framing, subjects like this are really tough to cover, especially when they use esoteric online terms like “mogging” “clipping” and words with the suffix “-maxxing” and this media literacy guide is attempt to analyze the uplift of a specific internet trend represented by a specific person profiled by the New York Times.
My point here is that internet-born content (which in this case includes Clavicular as he is a contentmaxxer (more on that near the end)) requires a fair amount of references to make it all make sense.
Joseph Bernstein is a long time internet culture journalist and I’ve cited him a few times in my published work. His 2017 reporting about the ways Bannon used Milo Yiannopolous’s gamergate tactics to uplift the alt-right was important work and super timely. I’ve cited his Harpers report, “Bad News, Selling the Story of Disinformation” in my book. But there’s something so strangely timed about putting a spotlight on Clavicular while we are still collectively enmeshed in the ongoing revelations about Jeffery Epstein. Why uplift someone like Peters now? As Emanuel Maiberg writes in 404 Media, “Peters is a bad person to wield any cultural capital because the lifestyle he’s promoting is deeply misogynistic, racist, and dangerous.”
Maiberg continues: “Looksmaxxing is a strategy that emerged among ‘incels,’ who themselves emerged out of the pick up artist (PUA) community. All of these philosophies are founded on a resentment of women, which they view as having easier lives because they think they have easier access to sex, and that they hate because they think women deny them that sex.” So among realizations that much of the current power operating the country (world?) was possibly influenced by a notorious sex trafficker and pedophile, we’re giving attention to a 20 year old problematic man?
Braden Peters, who, mind you has only been famous for a few months, is symbolic of a growing trend of male chauvinism that is profiting off the ongoing crisis among young men, which includes the celebration of drug use, promoting mental and physical health disorders, and language that is literally the jangly keys to MANY extremely problematic rabbit hole entry points.
To add to that, this trend has been blamed — as moral panic propagators are wont to do — on the internet, but in this case, Peters has been given validation in the paper of record. The amplification of these trends in the paper through the tale of a 20-year old livestreamer is unusual and unique, but in this cultural moment really requires context and a critical internet literacy approach to understand the subject. As I argue in my book, if we want to make significant societal progress, we cannot treat internet media, its content, and its creators as novelty. In my opinion, the mainstream media, which reaches the majority new consumers, has a significant responsibility to at least provide some referential context for readers.
Lastly, as a parent who has a background story of being radicalized/red-pilled in my college years, I find myself very invested helping other parents understand these dark pathways and how we can better navigate and negotiate our hypermediated present.
The following is not a knock against Bernstein, though GQ’s Kieren Press-Reynolds and I both agree that Clavicular was perhaps given a “surprisingly credulous” profile, it is a deep dive into how Bernstein tells the story of this looksmaxxer, whats missing, what we can learn from the piece, and how to use this knowledge to help others understand and increase their agency in this shifting moment.
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First, the Frame
The New York Times is considered the paper of record or the grey lady for a reason. It’s a bastion of traditional — meaning objective — media reporting. Objective storytelling, contrasting points of view often given equal weight, intense factchecking, and almost no speculation. It is a paper I deeply respect and I’m pretty honored any time a Times reporter calls me. The Times has an important role in society and US news media. To that end, its role as the most mainstream of publications and the newspaper means it holds a huge responsibility for informing the public. And unlike, say, the Washington Post under its current oligarchic rule that has crushed its reliability, the New York Times persists.
In the Times, if you are to read about internet phenomena, you’d likely either find it the Style section (which would frame the piece around some fashion (Clavicular is featured in a fashion show at the end of the piece)), the Technology section (which would often frame pieces around a specific emergent tech angle) or even occasionally in the Business section (frame self-explanatory). To be clear, the NY Times does not sequester internet culture stories in print editions, lots of internet culture reporting makes it to the front page.
The importance of the NYTimes covering internet culture is immense. It was nearly twenty years ago when I started my path into internet culture research after Stephanie Rosenbloom published “The Beta Males Charms” about the webseries “We Need Girlfriends.” I’d known about the series and its success because I know the creators well, but the validity of the Times justified my academic inquiry (1). (Fascinatingly, the framing in Rosenbloom’s 2008 piece is not too dissimilar from Bernstein’s Clavicular profile.)
The Times has been criticized for leaning too far to the right on issues that are deemed progressive, and Bernstein’s profile of Peters doesn’t help that argument. Peters is a Kick streamer, an alternative streaming media app that caters to the far-right. Similar to Rumble, Kick has far lower content moderation than mainstream social media. These apps are actually not that popular among everyday users-slash-NYTimes readers. On Kick, Peters gets about 10,000 concurrent viewers on his livestreams.
Compare this to Hasan Piker (who has been profiled by the NYTimes as well) who gets three times that amount on the much more mainstream Twitch and YouTube. Even considering the fact the Democratic Party has spent over 20 million looking for the “Joe Rogan of the left” only to straight up ignore Piker altogether, there are very few left leaning content creators who could garner viral fame anywhere near that of Peters. Clavicular’s insane acts and his dada-esque maxxing language make him algorithmic gold, even if the language is packed with coded messages of harm.
To that end, it’s hard to see anything other than a fulfilled prophecy by Bernstein himself in his February 2025 piece about the Manosphere becoming all-encompassing. Bernstein’s subtitle then: “A ‘boys will be-boys’ sensibility has jumped off the internet and into the halls of power. Are you surprised?” — Well, no, not surprised, here we are. Therefore, Bernstein’s profile of Clavicular is treated as “normal” because, as I’ve argued for years, the manosphere has become culture.
That all said, the irony is not lost on me that Bernstein refers to Peters throughout the piece as Clavicular, his drag persona, rather than his government name. This was cleared by editors and legal and it is an admirable and sly covert way of acknowledging the reality behind the story.
Terms-maxxing
Something that fascinated me outright in Bernstein’s piece was the lack of definition for the main term Looksmaxxing. Considering the word is literally the framing device and the reason to highlight Peters, it seems odd to not explain the term or the fact it comes from incel culture. In fact, the word “incel” doesn’t appear a single time in the article (and I have no idea why).
Looksmaxxing is the current term (2) that represents an issue that emerged in the early 2010s inside of incel forums. The term incel was actually coined in the late 1990s by a queer woman named Alana but was reappropriated by young men who gathered in angry niche forums online. Incels consider themselves “blackpilled,” a sad, nihilistic derivative of the misogynistic “red pill.” In blackpill forums, men shared their woes of being undateable and “inferior” and started to strategize new and really problematic methods of “self-improvement” believing the only way to attract women is through reconstruction of their appearance — not their personality.
Following years of wallowing and celebrating incel “heroes” who commit atrocities, they shifted their tactics following the pandemic lockdown era. (I argue in my book that the lock-down digital overload period transformed us collectively — a benefit to Silicon Valley, a loss to society at large.) During this period, young men found decades old pseudo-scientific self improvement tricks like “mewing” to reshape their jaws and “new-age” remedies to improve their status.
Incels (among others) on TikTok used these problematic improvement methods to sort of hijack the algo as their videos resembled the aesthetic and algorithmic magnetism of makeup artistry and workout videos. The videos of men reshaping their face became a curiosity cabinet and the term “looksmaxxing” appeared among a more mainstreaming of far-right language like the “-pilled” suffix (you can attach pilled to anything you’re super into).
“Maxxing,” the term and the suffix, means to “go hard” and fulfills what Adam Eleksic, known as EtymologyNerd explains, part of invented language thanks to a “lexical gap” where a neologism is required to properly express a feeling that lacks a current term. “Looksmaxxing” then becomes literal: increasing your looks by going hard into improvement. This includes literal eating disorders, illicit/illegal drug use, reconstructive surgery (aka gender-affirming care), and dangerous DIY versions of “self-care” that Peters allegedly does like using a hammer to fracture his face or clavicles to reshape them (3).
The other terms in the article are a bit less loaded than looksmaxxing, but are part of the same niche. “Mogging” for example just means “outperforming” someone standing near you. It comes from the term “AMOG,” or “alpha male of the group.” Jestermaxxing, or just jester, simply means wasting time, most specifically wasting time that should be dedicated to looksmaxxing or mogging in all its facets.
And even though those terms are included, the term “clip farming” is only referred to as “clips” in Bernstein’s piece. Clip farming is an engagement tactic both by creators and opportunistic aggregators to find the most viral bits of a stream and repost them for engagement. Kick — and X — literally pays creators to clipfarm other streamer’s streams for additional engagement.
One of the most odd trends of the looksmaxxer community is derived from a weird TikTok obsession about face shape and micro-expressions that have to do with barely perceptible changes in cortisol, the stress hormone. Looksmaxxers believe they should control their stress (avoid “cortisol spikes”) to maintain sharp jawlines and recessed cheeks. However, looksmaxxers inject steroids because allegedly reduction of cortisol is one of its side effects. Not good advice for young viewers by any means.
Though there’s dozens other words incels and looksmaxxers use, the one absent from the piece that matters most to someone like Peters is the word “foid,” a portmanteau of “female humanoid,” a disastrously misogynist term reducing women to objects. (The deeper meaning is far worse and is completely dehumanizing and extremely hateful to women.)
Terms and language that are formed in niche communities are intentionally weird because they are purposely designed to create in-group belonging and attempt to resist mainstream uplift. That’s why most of these terms become memetic as they remain an online first language that signals both an attachment to a digital community and lets the listener know you are fairly online. Again, this is why context matters, because lots of people learned these terms for the first time from the Times.
Remember: all these terms are coded… All of them. Which means using them, even ironically, signals an awareness of far-right media coded with layers of deep misogyny, racism, and intense social insecurities. These terms can be reappropriated (4) since the maxxing suffix still really just means “goes hard” but it is something that should be contextualized. This all may seem, and honestly be, very camp, but it is still very promote without the context and depth of the dark background.
Being More Critical of the Coverage of Clavicular
It’s important to be critical of Bernstein’s piece because, to paraphrase 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg, looksmaxxers are losers and amplifying them gives this tiny group of people power to shape culture. It’s bad enough that the cringe fascists that run this government are tacky enough to uplift this shit into official messaging, there’s really no need to perpetuate this hatred otherwise.
That said, it’s already happened so we should dedicate some time to applying both media literacy and critical internet literacies to the subject. There’s no need to do a close reading of Bernstein’s piece because the text itself is more banal than one would expect for such a niche subject. It’s banality does make sense in the context of the Times, considering any increased interrogation would lead to either extended word count (as you see here) or more colorful and descriptive prose, pulling it above the 8th grade reading level.
In all, the NYTimes profile story is the outcome of that weird trend of manifestation. Clavicular tells his parents there’s not really anything they can do to stop his “ascension” (incel slang to begin with) and five years later, he’s in the Times with the author of the piece explaining Clavicular’s goals. If there’s any merit to the constant drum beat of the “men’s loneliness crisis,” it seems wholly supported by the mainstream systems that uphold that type of power dynamic. In other words, it’s not social media so much as men’s rights activists are using the system that is already built for extremely average men like Braden Peters who got famous using “one weird trick.”
The most curious thing to me about Bernstein’s piece is that he allows Peters to dictate the narrative. Peters has been pretty consistent about saying he’s “apolitical” and his views could be malleable, but there’s very little evidence he’s anything but a far-right actor, or worse, a tool for far-right activism. In the section about his politics, Bernstein writes that the young men of the online right claim him as their own. For those who may not have noticed before the Times piece, Clavicular’s real “ascension” was part of a party night in Miami with the most prominent and horrible misogynists alive (5). Andrew Tate is undeniably the most infamous and named in Netflix’s Adolescence. Fuentes is a known incel leader and literal holocaust denier. I could go on, it doesn’t matter.
Peters is not apolitical unless the word simply means “aggressively stupid” and if that’s the case, Bernstein fails to pressure Peters into admitting as such (6). This aside, there are two revealing points that make the profile valuable. First, Bernstein reveals (over halfway through the piece) that Peters became radicalized (Bernstein uses the word “sensibility” here) via looksmax.org, a site that should not be promoted by the paper of record. Looksmax.org very much undergirds the modern grievance media industrial complex that acts as a major part of the Manosphere.
As Aidan Walker, the brilliant researcher behind “How to Do Things With Memes,” notes in his piece about Clavicular’s mindset as a “contentmaxxer” — meaning living solely for content creation and algorithmic optimization— we “shouldn’t see these figures as disengaged from ideology because they treat the real world solely as a field in which to sow content and reap online engagement. Instead, Clav’s total submission to content is an ideology in itself — and an increasingly influential one.” That is not apolitical, it is a new politics for an increasingly desensitized and politically disengaged audience.
There is one paragraph in the piece that really should have been used as the closing statement rather than jammed neatly into the part about Clavicular’s run-in with law enforcement. Bernstein writes: “Guns, drugs, misogyny, body dysmorphia: The miasma of nihilism swirling around Clavicular has made him an irresistible symbol of social decline — a freakish avatar for the hopelessly fallen, social-media-addled state of the young American man.”
Would have been a perfect ending.
But it’s not because it’s followed by this sentence that makes me consider Parenti’s idea that the mainstream media reifies a reality supportive of existing power: “At the same time, he may simply be ahead of the curve.”
The actual conclusion is far more necessary to analyze because it reveals a fairly meta hyperlink that further normalizes the looksmaxxing community as a ticket to privilege and fame. The story concludes with Peters getting arrested and released for holding a fake ID and possession of his pills. Bernstein notes that Clavicular tweeted about his release saying “You just gotta mog.” But the tweet in question is Bernstein’s reporting and the article headline Clavicular posts is a journalism resource piece about legal bias toward attractive people. This, in many ways, is the opposite of holding truth to power.
The Frame Revisited — More Literally This Time
Overlooked in the article is an underlying reality of looksmaxxing which is visual dominance over others around you, especially in the frame of the cropped image. Aidan Walker notes that the reason Clavicular’s content went viral when he was “brutally frame mogged” by an ASU frat guy is because “what happens in the frame is more important than what happens inside of the room.”
Clavicular’s namesake is derived from his body frame itself, a representation of his shape in a world of lenses, not people. The wider his clavicles, the more frame he occupies. He is and of the cropped image; his clips are and of the algorithm. If there was an analog to fictional Neo’s role as a remainder in the Matrix, it is Clavicular, living on both sides of the digital world. He is both the image and the person simultaneously. And in that “ascension” from looksmaxxing to NYTimes profile, he drags with him the far-right ideologies silently encoded in all his cells. Whether he likes it or not, he is the issues of the manosphere in viral media.
And that leads us to the most important of the takeaways from the mainstream uplift. As Sarah Laurent notes in her Americana newsletter: (7)
There are also interesting things to say about the looksmaxxing community and Clavicular in relation to the “crisis of masculinity,” a topic usually favored by mainstream American media such as the New York Times . Several studies report that cases of body dysmorphic disorder are on the rise among young people, and boys and men are increasingly affected by this problem, which once seemed primarily a female issue. The term body dysmorphic disorder is merely mentioned in the article, without being explored. It would have been worthwhile, for example, to ask an expert what could drive a 15-year-old boy to take a daily cocktail of steroids and methamphetamines and spend his days on looksmaxxing forums, being insulted by others, sinking further into despair and distress.
As mentioned, not only was I shocked by the timing of this piece amid the Epstein news, but it is also timed where Congress is considering multiple acts to censor the internet for young people [and usher in a authoritarian surveillance state]. There would have been immense value for this piece if it addressed the very valid concerns about young people’s mental health.
But we can’t lay blame solely on the New York Times for this, it’s our responsibility to be tuned into this as well. While the Times gave oxygen to the amplification, we relish in the novelty. We see this dude and his shtick and yearn for Ellen to bring him on her show, act exasperated because he’s not a little yodeler, and exhaust his aura as he dissolves back into the background hum of the internet.
But no, we are living through a period of time that is reactionary to the previous decade, so Clavicular is the dominant actor. The 2010s internet language was shaped by Tumblr feminism and AAVE slang. The emergence of the manosphere is reactionary to that moment and has become so influential, we too share in the linguistic treats it dishes out.
We’ll likely hear our children say “mog” or “maxxing” more often, detached from its origins and like “6–7” and it’ll eventually be sadly co-opted by parents. But unlike the absurdism of 6–7, looksmaxxing is an issue we have to contend with because it’s mycelia-like tendrils are wrapped throughout the internet, from bodybuilding.com to 4chan to the actual Secretary of Defense of the United States.
It is weird, but what part of the world isn’t at this point? Now that Clavicular is out of containment and in our frame, let’s talk about it maturely and help others, especially children, realize they belong in the world and are loved.
No hammers needed.
Resources, links, New Media Homework
Start here:
I recommend QAA quite often and it is technically a more “inside baseball” internet culture podcast, but this episode is explained by the terminally online Liv Ager and she and Julian play the fluent brain broken very online to Jake’s nearly completely normal person who has never heard of any of this. If you want to literally laugh out loud at this very serious issue, listen to this episode.
Analyses:
Internet vernaculars of body modding: Clavicular’s algorithmic rise — Idil Galip
Clavicular, le “parfait” influenceur d’extrême droite (Clavicular, the “perfect” far-right influencer) — Sarah Laurent
The Mainstream Rise of Looksmaxxing — by Welcome.jpeg
Clavicular and contentmaxxing by Aidan Walker
Clavicular mogged the Dimes Square jestergooners — Ryan Broderick, Garbage Day
The Ugly Ideology Behind ‘Looksmaxxing’ Subcultures featuring Annie Kelly on Posting Through It. Annie Kelly is an expert in the mens rights activism spaces and did her dissertation on the subject. Another good listen.
Understanding the Meaning of Maxxing in Slang: Explained | TikTok
Understanding the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy in Culture | TikTok
Primary sources:
Incels, Looksmaxxing, and the Surgical Design of the ‘Chad’-vertised Body — Ozan Félix Sousbois, 2025 — Sage Journals
Inside Clavicular’s Thirsty Tour of New York City by By Kieran Press-Reynolds and photography by Taryn Segal. This is worth the read because it is more like gonzo journalism of the subject by a Press-Reynolds, an excellent writer.
Looks Aren’t Everything? Clavicular Begs to Differ. — The New York Times — Primary source.
Confessions of a Black Looksmaxxer | WIRED — Important read.
Notes:
- Then, and now, academics sometimes bristle at studying internet phenomena as an media analysis. Many would rather see it as “amateur” media not worthy of uplift. The Times helps justify the argument.
- Regardless of what someone like Jonathan Haidt wants you to believe to sell his books, looksmaxxing is not new.
- This is too dangerous to even say if it works or not, it’s best to assume it does not work. Here is a responsible GQ guide on the tactic of “bonesmashing.”
- See Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s Friction-Maxxing piece for The Cut as an example. (I’ll be doing my talk at the Salzburg Media Academy this year on this subject.) This piece is technically the friction-maxxed version of the subject.
- I do not mean this lightly. I mean they not only hate women, but consider violence against women to be normal. See also: Laura Bates’ Men Who Hate Women.
- Peters’ appearance on the Adam Friedland Show reveals an incredible amount more about Peters than the Times piece and reveals him to be quite the sad human being.
- Sarah is an incredible journalist who covers internet culture for a primarily French audience and you should always seek views from people reporting for other countries than the US.
This post is shared here because it most resembles work I’ve done in my book, Critical Internet Literacies: Reconsidering Creativity, Content, and Safety Online, available at Routledge. Please also subscribe to New Media Homework for more analyses like this!
