Clavicular is 6-foot-2, weighs 180 pounds and has a 31-inch waist. His biacromial width — basically the span of the clavicle, from which the 20-year-old streamer gets his name — is 19.5 inches. He has a midface ratio, which is derived by dividing the distance from the pupil to the mouth by the distance between the pupils, of 1.07. His chin to philtrum ratio is 2.6.
According to Clavicular, these calculations make him handsome. Just not as handsome as the actor Matt Bomer.
Clavicular is a Looksmaxxer, the first star from an online community that holds male attractiveness as the key to worldly achievement. He considers Mr. Bomer to possess the most harmonious man’s face in existence, beyond even his own. That’s where the bimaxillary osteotomy, also known as double jaw surgery, comes in. The streamer wants one.
Because, like all Looksmaxxers, he believes any step toward increasing his beauty to be virtuous. But it’s a certain kind of beauty. The Looksmaxxing community prefers people who look like Mr. Bomer: lantern-jawed, symmetrical, white. (A Black man who attempted to make looksmaxxing content was racially harassed, Wired reported last year.)
Clavicular dismisses concerns that the subculture is racist as “dumb.” Since the age of 14, Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, has injected and ingested dozens of controlled substances to “ascend” — Looksmaxxer lingo for becoming more handsome. He has a single goal in mind, and his philosophy requires him to get there as fast as possible. If most people regard self-improvement as a pleasant hike to a more attractive destination, Clavicular’s version of it resembles a grim speed test on a salt flat.
Clavicular’s extreme methods, bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status, have in recent months made him a social media sensation. Uncanny clips of him “mogging” other men — that is, standing next to them and making them look common by comparison — and mercilessly appraising women’s looks have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Videos of Clavicular have become so ubiquitous on X that its head of product recently threatened, jokingly, that he would shut down the site if he saw one more.
By any definition of internet celebrity in 2026, he has ascended.
And yet, padding around his Airbnb on a recent morning in Tempe, Ariz. — where he had been streaming in the vicinity of Arizona State University, renowned among his set for its licentious coeds — Clavicular seemed a bit worse for wear. He had slept only three hours the previous night.
“I was slaymaxxing,” he said: having sexual intercourse.
Clavicular was preparing to stream, which he does most days for upward of eight hours. He’s especially known for “IRL” streaming: going out in public and interacting with strangers in an attempt to create viral moments that can be clipped and distributed over social media. He makes more than $100,000 a month from Kick, his preferred streaming service.
After a breakfast of chicken fingers, Clavicular decided on his first activity of the day: a date. These one-on-ones with female admirers had become a popular recurring feature among his young, male audience, for reasons Clavicular articulated with typically savage candor.
“People watch them because they can’t get girls,” he said.
Everyone in the Airbnb — Clavicular, a security guard, a cameraman, a tanned Spanish looksmaxxing friend, Ioritz Eguileor — climbed aboard a Sprinter van. After a short ride, it stopped to pick up Mia Kirk, a 24-year-old student. Ms. Kirk was a longtime fan who identified as a looksmaxxer herself. As the van sped along the highway, Ms. Kirk held her phone to her face, watching the stream even as she starred in it.
“I knew you when you only had 15,000 followers,” Ms. Kirk said to Clavicular.
Her presence seemed to produce conflicting feelings in the famous streamer. On the one hand, Ms. Kirk was an attractive woman who demonstrated a keen interest in him. On the other hand, her use of the looksmaxxing vernacular struck him as unnatural. His was a subculture for abject men hoping to change their lives — not for women, who produced many of the feelings of inadequacy behind looksmaxxing in the first place.
“It’s a male space,” Clavicular said, having earlier pronounced of Ms. Kirk, “My culture is not a costume.”
‘No more politics’
Clavicular may have introduced looksmaxxing to popular culture, but he still seemed to be working out whom, exactly, it was all for. The young men of the very online right have claimed Clavicular as their own. And he has given them good reason to do so: Just last month, he partied at a Miami nightclub with Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist commentator, and the influencer Andrew Tate — who faces charges of rape and human trafficking — producing a kind of manosphere cloutbomb. (This despite Clavicular, months earlier, criticizing Mr. Tate’s appearance: “Not a good-looking guy by any means.”) In videos that spread widely online, the three men were seen chanting along to the Ye track “Heil Hitler.”
Then there was his chronic use of a racial slur. He has been called out for it on the street during IRL streams; during one such encounter this year, Clavicular said: “It’s not a racist thing. It’s just a fun word to say.”
This month, the X account for the Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering posted an image of a grinning soldier with the caption “Low cortisol. Locked in. Lethalitymaxxing” — a sign that, at least among the social media managers of the Trump administration, Clavicular’s sensibility holds sway.
But Clavicular himself seems as much as anything a calculating product of a hyperactive digital culture that rewards the violation of taboo. And he’s adamant that the only cause he truly cares about is his own.
During a discussion of potential 2028 presidential candidates on a recent episode of the conservative podcast “The Michael Knowles Show,” Clavicular said he would vote for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat, over Vice President JD Vance because he preferred Mr. Newsom’s looks to Mr. Vance’s.
“It wasn’t, like, a political statement at all,” Clavicular said later of his criticism of Mr. Vance. “I was just saying he’s fat.”
Of late, Clavicular has begun to refer to all politics as “jester” — an insult in the looksmaxxing community that refers to a foolish waste of time. And in a show of diplomacy, he said he met with several prominent Jewish club owners in Miami over the “Heil Hitler” incident. (“No more politics, just mogging,” he wrote on Instagram.)
Back in the van, Ms. Kirk asked Clavicular if he thought looksmaxxing was “inherently right-wing.”
“No,” he said. “At the end of the day, I have such an influence over the movement that I could bring it in any direction I want.”
Eventually, the van pulled up to an aquarium. Clavicular’s dates often take place in such incongruously wholesome places: Disney World, the zoo. Outside the entrance, smiling families played in the sun.
“I can’t believe people do these activities,” Clavicular said, as he looked for the ticket counter.
Inside, under the eye of a docent, Clavicular petted a sturgeon. He recoiled. (“It’s like when you drop your phone in the toilet,” he said, later excusing himself to “hand-sanitizer-maxx.”) He and Ms. Kirk wandered into a section called “Bizarre and Beautiful.” They pressed their noses up against a tank of luminescent jellyfish.
But they didn’t touch. Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility. Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which “is going to gain me nothing.”
“It’s a big time saver,” he said.
Back in the aquarium, asked whether she was on a date, Ms. Kirk paused to consider.
“I think so,” she said.
‘Ascending’ on social media
Clavicular grew up in Hoboken, N.J., the son of a businessman and a stay-at-home mother. He didn’t like high school, where he had a tough time with social cues and small talk. (Though Clavicular has never been diagnosed with an autism spectrum disorder, he frequently refers to himself as an “autist” and calls his way of seeing the world a “gift.”) And he didn’t like the way he looked, which he wanted to change, fast. Shortly before his 15th birthday, he ordered testosterone off the internet.
“It’s like a cheat code,” he remembered thinking. “Why would I not do this?”
When his parents found his stash, they threw it away, sending Clavicular into a hormonal tailspin. He began to order his supplies to a post office box — steroids, fat dissolvers, biodegradable sutures. Eventually, he said, his parents gave up.
“They realized that there was kind of nothing that they could do to stop my ascension,” he said.
He became a frequent poster on the forum Looksmax.org, where he mastered the sensibility — a mix of 4chan slang, grievances about the unfair biological advantages held by tall and muscular men and a touch of vulnerability, as teen boys asked other posters to rate their attractiveness as harshly as possible. In long posts filled with scientific terminology, Clavicular discussed his journey. He spent hours adjusting his image in Photoshop to see what he might look like after surgeries to push forward his upper jaw and lengthen his legs. Sometimes, he took meth to suppress his appetite.
In the fall of 2024, Clavicular started at Sacred Heart University, a small Catholic school in Connecticut. According to Clavicular, several weeks into his freshman year, he came home from class to discover campus police officers turning his room upside down. As he tells it, trolls on the Looksmaxxing forum had called the school to tell officials that Clavicular had steroids in his dorm, and he was expelled.
Out of school, he took a restaurant job, lowering him to the status of what he called a “wagecuck”: someone who works for a living. In his spare time, he posted videos on TikTok and started his own stream, rating other people’s looks.
“I never expected any of it to go viral or myself to become a public figure,” he said.
Then, in October of last year, Clavicular appeared on the stream of Cheesur, a popular persona on Kick, to advise him about balding.
(“Is this OK?” Cheesur asked, pulling back his bangs to reveal a prominent widow’s peak. “No,” Clavicular responded.)
Thus began a rapid conquest of social media, including an appearance streaming with Mr. Fuentes during which the two discussed “the disenfranchised young man.” They had been connected after Clavicular and another Looksmaxxer insulted both Mr. Fuentes and the liberal streamer Dean Withers for being involved in politics at all.
“I’m on the side of looksmaxxing, self-improvement,” Clavicular said, introducing Mr. Fuentes. “You’re on the side of politics. Which one is the better path to take?”
Asked what he thought of Mr. Fuentes’s political views, Clavicular said that he did not have an opinion.
Today, 10,000 people regularly watch Clavicular’s stream concurrently, some of whom are paid by Kick to clip short videos. But his influence can also be measured by the extent to which his elaborate lingo has caught on as a meme far outside the stream itself. “Clavicular just cracked the code: JESTERMAXXING at the club is officially the new meta,” read the caption on one viral clip posted on X last month of Clavicular dancing — it roughly translates as “Clavicular figured out that having fun at a club is now a normal thing to do.”
X users have compared Clavicular’s slang, alternately, to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Middle English; James Joyce’s “Ulysses”; and Nadsat, the alienating dialect of the nihilistic goons in “A Clockwork Orange.”
Clavicular insists that his jargon isn’t a put-on, that it’s simply second nature after so many years as a poster. On his streams, it’s sometimes a source of humor.
“I said, Oh, let’s start second-floor-maxxing while we’re at the mall,” he said. “And people in chat were just like, You’re such an idiot, dude, just say ‘go upstairs.’”
Police run-in
Because Clavicular has made very little effort to hide his location when he goes out in public, security is a major concern. He’s frequently approached by “stream snipers” — smaller content creators who hope to gain fame by appearing with the better-known streamer, or by provoking him into a confrontation.
In December, footage surfaced of Clavicular pointing a gun at a car of strangers who had tracked him down to what was then his residence in Miami. Also that month, Clavicular appeared to run over a man who had leaped, phone in hand and raving, onto the hood of his Cybertruck. With incidents like these in mind, Clavicular recently moved into a condo owned by his friend, the streamer Adin Ross.
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.
At the same time, he may simply be ahead of the curve. This month, the fashion influencer Laura Reilly introduced High Touch, a newsletter dedicated to new aesthetic frontiers, citing her current routine of peptides, obscure supplements and light therapies. In her announcement, Ms. Reilly mentioned “maxxing” as a “once fringe” pursuit that had grown to include a much broader set of consumers.
That night, Clavicular had promised to host a party at the Varsity Tavern, a multistory club in downtown Tempe where the drinks are neon and the bartenders wear lingerie. Inside, it wasn’t clear whether he had many fans, exactly; at the same time, people were definitely there to see him.
“On one level, he’s funny,” said Roger Gardner, a 21-year-old student at Arizona State University. “But on a deeper level, he’s kind of a demon.”
Other guests had more practical reasons for being there. Hunter Thrasher, a 22-year-old UPS driver, had come with a group of friends because they thought Clavicular would draw the opposite sex.
“This guy is going to pull up and attract a lot of women,” Mr. Thrasher said. “And we thought we would capitalize off that.”
But around 11 p.m., word began to spread in the bar that Clavicular had been arrested. Mitchell Jackson, his publicist, took a hurried phone call to confirm: The Scottsdale police had taken his client into custody, and would go on to charge him with two felonies, possession of a forged instrument and possession/use of a dangerous drug. A judge forbade him to leave the state.
Mr. Jackson sensed an opportunity.
“I want this to be an iconic mug shot that can be sold on T-shirts in malls,” he said.
The streamer had been arrested for being inside a Scottsdale bar underage with a fake ID. When the police searched him, the officers found two pills: an Adderall pill and an oral steroid. The police report mentioned that the manager of the bar had told the police that he had received special dispensation to have Clavicular there as a 20-year-old.
The next day, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office declined to prosecute based on what it called “no reasonable likelihood of conviction.” Clavicular was free.
Which was fortunate, because he had plans. On Thursday night, he walked in the New York Fashion Week show of Elena Velez, a designer known for her use of controversial internet microcelebrities as models. (He held his phone on the runway.)
Clavicular, characteristically, attributed his good luck with the criminal justice system to his looks. “You just gotta mog,” he posted on X, above a screenshot of a news headline.
“Men’s facial features may sway criminal sentencing,” it read.
Joseph Bernstein is a Times reporter who writes feature stories for the Styles section.
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