The No Laughing Matter Era Is Over
After a decade of men in dresses being too sacredly stunning and brave to joke about, meathead looksmaxxers are fun to make fun of.
The New Yorker takes on Looksmaxxing, but misses the joke that it exists within a comic eco-system:
CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK
THE CAPTIVATING DERANGEMENT OF THE LOOKSMAXXING MOVEMENT
by Becca Rothfeld
Becca Rothfeld joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in February, 2026. Previously, she was the nonfiction book critic at the Washington Post.
March 7, 2026
In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty.
… Né Braden Peters, Clavicular is an exquisitely contemporary creature—a streamer, a TikToker, and a platform-hopping influencer famed for the dramatic lengths to which he is willing to go to attain physical perfection. In interviews, his flawlessness is uncanny. His arms, enhanced by daily testosterone injections, bulge out of the tight sleeves of his polo shirts; his superbly proportioned face is oddly inflexible, even when he is speaking emphatically or attempting to make an expression. Watching him, I could not shake the feeling that he has a smooth mound where his genitals are supposed to be, as if he were a giant Ken doll (and, indeed, he has acknowledged that his punishing testosterone regimen has shrivelled his testicles and perhaps even rendered him infertile, a price that he is willing to pay for the privilege of becoming the world’s most handsome man).
“Great achievements always require fanaticism,” Flaubert once wrote, and Clavicular is nothing if not fanatical. His methods are drastic and often dangerous. He microdoses methamphetamines to stay lean (or so he brags), injects his girlfriends [yeah, right] with substances that he claims will dissolve the fat in their faces, and promotes “bone-smashing,” which is, regrettably, exactly what it sounds like: in a masterstroke of literalism, “looksmaxxers,” as they’re sometimes called, seek to secure chiselled jawlines by bashing their cheeks with hammers.
… Clavicular is the poster child—though by no means the most extreme representative—of the looksmaxxing movement, the latest permutation of an ideology developed by too online misogynist misanthropes in the twenty-tens. Incels, short for “involuntary celibates,” tempered the acid of romantic doomerism with a dash of pseudoscience, most of it culled from the controversial discipline of evolutionary psychology. On the darkest corners of the internet, they elaborated a theory designed to explain why none of their romantic misfortunes were their fault. Their bad looks, a genetic bane, consigned them to the bottom of the male hierarchy and, therefore, to a life of ostracization and sexual isolation. Because they posited that heterosexual women were “hypergamous,” or hardwired to pursue mates of a higher status, they concluded that men of average or subpar attractiveness had no chance in a competitive dating market. The only rational response was to opt out of love altogether: the incels who made this fateful choice described themselves as “taking the black pill,” an allusion to the 1999 film “The Matrix.”
Looksmaxxers prefer a different pill—or, ideally, a whole stack of pills, injections, infusions, creams, “biohacks,” and surgical interventions. They accept the premise that appearance is destiny but reject the incels’ resignation to congenital ugliness. Instead of reconciling themselves to their lot, they devote all of their resources to improving their looks and, accordingly, their romantic and financial prospects. …
The nominal aim of all these tactics is to increase the maxxer’s S.M.V., or sexual market value, to women, but in fact the whole enterprise smacks of barely suppressed homoeroticism. As Clavicular recently told a New York Times reporter, he would rather relish the knowledge that he can score with a woman than actually go through with the deed. “It’s a big time saver,” he explained. Presumably, he would prefer to spend the hours he saves rating other men’s faces on looksmaxxing forums and “mogging” his rivals, the community’s term for upstaging male competitors.
“Mog,” a transitive verb, derives from and supersedes “AMOG,” a now obsolete acronym for “alpha male of the group.” It is one of many terms of art in a rapidly metastasizing idiom that combines irreverent online informality with pseudoscientific jargon. Looksmaxxing forums are peppered with technical-sounding phrases like “canthal tilt” (the angle at which the eyes slant at the outer corner), “interpupillary distance” (the space between the eyes), and “midface ratio” (a calculation involving the distance from the eyebrows to the bottom of the nose). In interviews, Clavicular makes suspiciously insistent mention of “scientists” and “phenotypes.” “It’s all very objective,” he doth protest on a recent podcast. “It’s all very well researched.” …
Why, then, are we so captivated by what we ought to condemn? Lately, Clavicular has become unavoidable, shooting to the top of news feeds and dominating algorithms, perhaps because the terrible and transfixing extremity of his project suits the terrible and transfixing extremity of life in Trump’s America.
Zzzzzzzz …
… But the drastic measures that looksmaxxers are willing to take are lethal to one of their own foundational myths—the myth of natural beauty. If our fates were inscribed in our genetics, why would anyone bother to maintain a skin-care routine, much less go to the trouble of jamming his tongue against the top of his mouth or whacking himself with a hammer? “Being natural is bad,” a beefy looksmaxxer who calls himself Androgenic declared, bluntly, in a video about the delights of steroid abuse. From this insight, it is only a short step to the conclusion that being natural is not possible. Guzzling five hundred grams of sugar a day, misguided as it may be, is a tacit admission that there is no such thing as a natural body, that merely to live is to actively shape how we look, that we are all artifacts of what we inject and imbibe.
You know, it’s almost as if both nature and nurture matter … F. Scott Fitzgerald observed:
…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
But when it comes to simple nature and nurture paradoxes about whether the glass is half-full or half-empty, so many of our intellectuals freeze up.
OK, the reason these looksmaxxer maniacs have gotten attention lately is because they are fun to make fun of. I have no idea what fraction of what The Algorithm shows me about them is serious, parody, or self-parody. For example, when a social media feed shows me an “Official Chad Ranking” that begins more or less:
George Floyd
ASU frat leader
Hitler
Will Stancil
Clavicular
Piers Morgan
Androgenic
I’m stumped. Is “ASU frat leader,” …
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