‘Did you ever think that maybe there’s more to life than being really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking?’ So asks Derek Zoolander, before pulling his trademark pout, exhibiting cheekbones that look like they were engineered by Brunel. Zoolander came out a quarter-century ago, but now looks prophetic. Ben Stiller’s gullible, self-obsessed moron would fit right in to today’s world of extreme male vanity.
You must take methamphetamines, inject testosterone aged 14 and spend $35,000 on a double-jaw surgery
Of course, humans, and, dare I say it, especially a certain type of man, have always been vain. However, for all the time Louis XIV or Rudolf Nureyev spent on their appearance, they did have other strings to their bows. Not so the young men in thrall to the surreal online subculture of ‘looksmaxxing’. The very name sounds like it was devised by the functionally illiterate, probably because it was. The basic tenet of looksmaxxing is that all that matters in life is enhancing your physical attractiveness by any means necessary. The cult’s high priest is a 21-year-old from New Jersey called Braden Peters, known by his alias Clavicular. The TikTok streamer claims he chose his name because he is, in his own words, ‘an online autist’. We might speculate that his choice of name, inspired by the Latin for ‘a little key’, reveals more intimate details than he intended.
For all that looksmaxxing is a modern phenomenon – dependent on social media and the particular insanity and inanity of our age – it also feels close to some sort of gnostic creed from a millennium past. Clavicular describes it as ‘the furthest extent that you can take self-improvement’ and encourages his followers to join him in ‘ascending’ to higher modes of being. Imagine what Buddhism might have become if its founding prophet had been Jedward.
How do you ‘ascend’, according to Clavicular? Well, if you are following his example, you suppress your appetite with methamphetamines, begin injecting testosterone aged 14 and spend $35,000 on a double-jaw surgery. By his own account, he is now infertile due to testosterone replacement therapy, recalling the actions of the 3rd-century theologian Origen, who castrated himself in a fit of ideological obsessiveness. Clavicular also practises ‘bonesmashing’ – whacking his cheekbones with a hammer to sharpen facial definition. Here is a man who has evidently chosen collagen over college.
For all that looksmaxxing claims to offer the apex human experience, there is a strange inhumanity to it. Clavicular’s obsession with facial symmetry not only excludes most human faces, which, were they completely symmetrical, might look odd, but also encourages deranged thinking. In one interview, our prophet rates the looks of actress and sex symbol Sydney Sweeney in hilariously clinical terms: ‘I would say that she’s pretty malformed, her upper maxilla is extremely recessed.’ This is attraction measured not by heart or hormones but tape measure and TikTok.
This is the tragedy at the heart of looksmaxxing, and in particular the career of ‘Clav’. He cannot help disproving his own ideology. Whenever a video shows him actually meeting a woman, the interactions are stilted. Most of his followers are not young men with real love interests or even female friends, but the sad legions of the terminally online who cannot see that his advice is making it less likely that they get laid. It’s not just about looks; you need personality too. Clavicular is endearingly incapable of dissembling and admits: ‘I’m on my computer all day. I wouldn’t really have time to be an interesting partner for any woman.’
The male attractiveness movement isn’t actually for attracting women at all. There is less homoerotic subtext in Brokeback Mountain than in the average Clavicular video. His stated aim is outcompeting other men in getting women; not, however, for the sake of spending time with or even just sleeping with them – Clav doesn’t seem that bothered about either – but for besting (‘mogging’) other men. The question ‘Who is this for?’ isn’t convincingly answered by any looksmaxxer in a way that doesn’t sound a bit, well, gay.
None of this is necessarily harmful when restricted to one man’s weird inner monologue, but the problem with Clavicular is that he is an evangelist, and an effective one. He has millions listening to him, and perhaps taking seriously his belief that looks are the only metric for success. Indeed, he claims he would vote for Gavin Newsom over J.D. Vance if both ran for president solely because Newsom is better-looking. (Were we to apply this mad calculation to British politics, it would make our most successful monarch a toss-up between hyper-randy Edward IV and micro-penised Nazi sympathiser Edward VIII, while Anthony Eden and Lord Bute would vie for top PM.) Clav recently went on a night out with Andrew Tate and other manosphere bros, where they draped over one another in the back of a limousine and sang along to Kanye West’s ‘Heil Hitler’. If anything, it was more Ernst Rohm.
As such a political alignment suggests, at the heart of the movement is an addiction, common in young men, to extremes. Looksmaxxers would argue that they are merely responding to a culture that enshrines unrealistic expectations, especially in the brutal world of online dating. A survey by the app Bumble found 60 per cent of female users set their minimum height filter to six feet. Few women, surely, would have such exacting demands in real life. Looksmaxxing fits our era of extremes; from Ozempic-fuelled anorexia on the red carpet to Hollywood’s Marvel-influenced expectation that male leads must have the physique of an MMA fighter.
A combination of unrealistic standards and the internet bringing together those who are too weird to function in real life, affording them influence an offline world never would, has provided a perfect breeding ground for Clavicular and his madnesses. Ultimately, though, this infertile young man with a broken face is a sad figure. It isn’t even worth asking Zoolander’s question of Clavicular: he’s already answered it.
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