The Captivating Derangement of the Looksmaxxing Movement
The French, in all their Continental wisdom, have a word for people who are ugly in theory yet beautiful in practice. Someone who is jolie laide (literally, pretty-ugly) ought by rights to be unappealing, but, somehow, she isn’t. Her features are strange and unexpected—and all the more compelling for their divergence from the usual tidy symmetries. Canonically jolie-laide celebrities include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbra Streisand, of whom her “Funny Girl” co-star Omar Sharif once said, “The first impression is that she’s not very pretty. But after three days, I am honest, I found her physically beautiful, and I start lusting after this woman!”
As far as I know, no one has made much of the inverse phenomenon, yet it, too, is in ample evidence. If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful, people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma. And no one is more laide jolie, more sculpted and faultless, more wooden and sexless, than the paradoxical figure who goes by the name of Clavicular.
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 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. Not content to stick to D.I.Y., Clavicular intends to get a rhinoplasty and a double-chin surgery, and he has even floated the idea of a limb-lengthening procedure, which would elevate him from a perfectly adequate six feet two to a frankly excessive six feet six. He talks about “pharmacology” with alarming casualness and rattles off compounds and peptides purported to whittle the waist or tan the skin with the fluency of a chemistry professor.
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. Their methods range from sensible (a creator who goes by Rorz, one of the saner voices in the community, urges his followers to frequent the gym, cut back on processed fare, and dress more fashionably) to fanciful (many influencers recommend “mewing,” pressing one’s tongue to the roof of one’s mouth in the hope of honing the all-important jawline) to downright demented (an eerily smooth looksmaxxer who calls himself Nocturnal Kent swears that he altered the shape of his face by eating five hundred grams of sugar per day). Some gurus counsel their followers to “softmax” by getting more flattering haircuts or moisturizing; others advocate “hardmaxxes” like surgery.
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.”
The “very objective” and “very well researched” taxonomy in question is the P.S.L. scale, named for three of the most infamous forums from the incel epoch: PUAHate (Pick-Up-Artist Hate), SlutHate, and Lookism. The P.S.L. scale has eight points and sorts men into three tiers: subhuman, normie (subdivided into low-tier normie, mid-tier normie, and high-tier normie), and Chad (subdivided into Chadlite, Chad, and giga Chad). The preponderance of the population can aspire to high-tier normiedom at best. The happy few with a score of more than 7.75 are quasi-religious figures, “True Adams,” more legends than actually existing human beings. Per one popular guide to the P.S.L. scale, “this designation is reserved for mythical figures like Adonis or Apollo, as well as religious icons such as angels or prophets.” The scientific pretensions of the looksmaxxing community are belied by its reverent term for those who have succeeded in scrambling even a small way up the scale: a man who becomes beautiful is said to have “ascended,” as if he had been spirited up into the skies.
The moral objections to looksmaxxing are numerous, severe, and obvious. A system that designates any person as “subhuman” is beneath contempt, and that’s to say nothing of the racial slurs to which looksmaxxing stalwarts help themselves regularly, or the crucible of virulent misogyny in which their outlook was forged. (Their favorite word for women is “foids,” short for “female androids.”) In a recent interview, Clavicular makes a damning moral case against himself when he approvingly notes that Brad Pitt “mogs” Mother Theresa, a claim that is both true and monumentally beside the point. Writing in The Atlantic, Thomas Chatterton Williams sums up what I assume to be public opinion, concluding that “the so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion.”
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. In 1963, the critic Susan Sontag speculated that the idiosyncratic French mystic Simone Weil obsessed her contemporaries because she was refreshingly insane. “The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois,” Sontag wrote:
She might have been speaking of Clavicular when she wrote of “a life . . . absurd in its exaggerations and degree of self-mutilation”—a life that appeals because it at least has the temerity to be forthright about its distortions and debasements.
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.
Marx had a term for a product that becomes so familiar that it is as if nobody had made it, as if it had appeared ready to consume: commodity fetishism. When we see models beaming down at us from advertisements, their beauty can look like a fait accompli rather than a complex attainment. In one fell shot, a lacquered photograph erases the plastic surgeries, the dermatology appointments, the gruelling workouts, the perilous diets, the makeovers, the haircuts, the lotions and serums. For all their faults, looksmaxxers are intent on de-fetishizing this particular commodity, revealing beauty to be the product of strenuous (and often deranging) labor.
But we are also drawn to Clavicular and his ilk because, in their warped and wrongheaded way, they are fumbling toward a kind of genuine value. No one is obliged to be beautiful, and no one who fails to be is worth any less. But, even if it is more commendable to be Mother Theresa than it is to be Brad Pitt, Brad Pitt’s beauty is not without significance. Beauty is a lesser good, but it is a good all the same.
The problem is not that looksmaxxers want to become beautiful but that they are wrong about what beauty consists in. On a recent podcast, Clavicular proposed that good looks are “a huge numbers thing,” “almost like the Fibonacci sequence.” On yet another stop on the relentless podcast circuit, he was at pains to stress that we must disavow our prejudices and predilections in the interest of impartial judgment. “When you actually know the objective measurements, it doesn’t become about sexual attraction, it’s about mathematics,” he insisted. “You’re able to be a lot more analytical with rating people.” But who wants to be analytical about rating people? What is beauty if not precisely the property that provokes us to abandon all pretense of analytic remove in our desperation to draw closer? As Clavicular’s skeptical interlocutor, the podcaster Adam Friedland asked him, “What’s sexy about math?”
Looksmaxxers are in search of an invariant formula for beauty, a rule as reliable as the algebraic injunction to perform the same operations to both sides of an equation, but there is no such thing. When Clavicular avows that the B-list actor Matt Bomer is the closest thing we have to a True Adam, with a “harmony score” of ninety-four per cent, he sounds even more ridiculous than those dusty mid-century guides to literature that promise to provide definitive rankings of the classics. It is unsurprising that he is utterly incurious about aesthetics more generally and, in particular, about art, the success of which is notoriously difficult to predict or gamify. He told Friedland, apparently without compunction or self-reproach, that he hasn’t heard of Bruce Springsteen and doesn’t do anything for fun. Only grudgingly did he concede that he “can put up with” watching movies every “once in a while.” It is no wonder that such a person should long for a world in which everyone looks exactly alike, with an optimal midface ratio and a positive canthal tilt—and no wonder that he should regard beauty as a science rather than an art.
Clavicular is probably unaware of the phenomenon of jolie laide—and, in turn, of his own anti-eroticism—because it is anathema to his thirst for simple, if draconian, guidelines. It cannot be calculated and therefore cannot be easily mastered; it is often the result of a genius for dress or a feel for self-stylization—in short, of the difficult cultivation of taste. “There is only one recipe” for developing this faculty, Henry James once wrote. It is “to care a great deal for the cookery.” Clavicular’s palate has a long way to go. ♦