What does it truly mean to ascend as a looksmaxxer?
It can start with increased workouts or more time spent in the sun. But somewhere along the lines, the innocuous nature gets lost.
The suffix -maxxing, in general, comes from the role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, which urges players to maximize a character’s strengths by sacrificing less important skills. In a similar fashion, looksmaxxing encourages men to accentuate facial features in accordance with beauty standards — a sharp jawline, a symmetrical face and vascularity — to help them advance in life, whether that be romantically or professionally. The difference between this and self-improvement is that looksmaxxing must be achieved by any means necessary. To attain his ideal facial structure, Braden Eric Peters, more commonly known online as Clavicular, has repeatedly hammered his face, fracturing his jaw and cheekbones, to help them grow back more defined. He has also taken methamphetamine to leanmaxx and help curb his appetite to lower his body fat.
Just as in min-maxing game strategy, looksmaxxing requires you to optimize your looks, but at the expense of other features such as your well-being. A brainchild of the broader manosphere, looksmaxxing weaponizes self-improvement with the sole intention of attracting women and enhancing social status.
Although pioneers of the looksmaxxing movement strongly argue against it having any political ties, the rhetoric tidily repackages alt-right extremist ideals through memeified popular culture references. Once young men adopt a mindset that pushes for the purification of the body, it becomes easier to accept the purification of a country.
Sites and forums at the forefront of this ideology, such as Reddit, 4chan and looksmax.org, grew dramatically during COVID-19, when students and young adults found themselves socially isolated with nothing else to do. Among these new subscribers was the now infamous Clavicular. Shortly after succumbing to looksmaxxing rhetoric — getting expelled from his university for possession of testosterone — Clavicular took to the internet to showcase his aesthetic transformation, quickly becoming an online sensation.
Although looksmaxxers have existed long before Clavicular, he has greatly contributed to the culture’s resurgence, especially for younger generations. He is uniquely positioned as a figurehead for a much larger movement.
Clavicular’s palatable messaging serves as an on-ramp to viewing far more harmful content, starting with his early live streams of clubbing that quickly transitioned to broadcasting an overdose, luring underage girls into public view and hypersexualizing them for the internet to see.
Although these manospheric subcultures have varying characteristics, many boil down to one simple claim: Do not trust the system. Encouraging people to eat raw meat, drink diluted borax and raw milk, and take high amounts of anabolic-androgenic steroids is a clear indication that subscribers of these groups believe that their knowledge supersedes that of any professional. While Clavicular would likely deny the existence of this pipeline, looksmaxxing lingua franca is deeply intertwined with Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) and many other pseudoscience health extremist movements.
This strand of the right’s ideology, emphasizing the notion of traditionalism that purifies one’s body, is commonly referred to as Granola Nazism, an all-encompassing term that includes controversies surrounding tradwife culture, vaccines, interracial marriages and organic diets. A rejection of modern medicine and dietary recommendations requires these individuals to outsource their information to like-minded influencers and speakers across media platforms. Once they subscribe to one conspiracy, it becomes easier to join many — this is how online extremist echo-chambers are created.
Healthmaxxing is merely an introduction to the manosphere as a whole. In 2025, researchers developed the Digital Subcultural Diffusion Theory, which outlines how extremist views, such as many of those expressed in involuntary celibate (incel) culture forums, are “repackaged” for wider audiences until they become mainstream.
What makes this diffusion especially dangerous is that it urges subscribers to enact these ideologies on their bodies. The concept of self-improvement has evolved, for some, to reflect the way this ideology is practiced and performed every day, and in some ways, the Granola Nazism ideology becomes permanently tied to flesh. Healthmaxxing and looksmaxxing frame the body as a venue of resistance against a system they believe wants to suppress a man’s natural potential.
This ideology that prioritizes rigorous discipline, purity and primality is not unique to the 21st century. The language that reverberates within these open forums mimics that of the fascist “New Man.”
Benito Mussolini’s “New Man” was a model citizen — defined in virtue of his virility. To better understand what the “New Man” represented, one also had to know what the “New Man” was not. Historically, the “New Man” stood in opposition to modernity and sentimentality and physically resembled heroic, mythologized figures, such as extremist political leaders and Roman statues.
Like looksmaxxing, the term leads to binaries of pure versus impure, optimal versus suboptimal and strong versus weak. There is additional messaging that cautions looksmaxxers against those who do not subscribe to their ideology: jestermaxxers. Jestermaxxers are considered individuals who regularly perform tasks that don’t directly improve outer appearance, from engaging with women normally to critically thinking about politics.
In language that eerily reflects’ the ideology of looksmaxxing, Mussolini spoke in-depth about what the “New Man” sought to replace: cowards, liberals, undesirables and men weakened by the woman’s gaze. He was clear that such qualities made a person less Italian, and his rhetoric effectively disenfranchised the voices of men who were not militant enough. Openly, his hardline attempt to draw lines was motivated by his belief that hard-core men would make for more abiding citizens under his dictatorship.
We laugh at what often seems like looksmaxxing jargon — mogger, ascend, descend, Gigachad, Subhuman — but these are the terms that sort men into a new hierarchy. These terms must exist to establish who is softmaxxing and who is hardmaxxing — who is willing to go all the way regardless of consequence and who will stop short.
Collaborations with far-right groyper Nicholas Fuentes — as well as self-described misogynist and human trafficker Andrew Tate — prove that despite Clavicular’s attempt to stay fully neutral on “jesterlike” matters such as politics, he inherently draws young, insecure men who are susceptible to the politics of Fuentes and Tate.
The inherently political nature of Clavicular’s messaging to his young fan base is reflected in the fact that many of his fans also support figures like James Fishback, one of the candidates running to be Florida’s governor. A young, digitally-savvy right-wing nationalist who virally claimed a Black man “should be lynched,” Fishback has recently gained traction in the upcoming gubernatorial race. Though he is currently polling in the low single digits, his emergence is closely tied to the strength of his youth following and his digital presence, which is exemplified by his heavy emphasis on prioritizing college campus visits. Given the interconnectedness of the larger manosphere, it logically follows that Fuentes would endorse a candidate like Fishback, and that Gen-Z men are the online masses driving the popularity of both of these figures.
When these young men become eligible to vote, they will vote in ways that align with the values of figures like Clavicular and Fuentes, creating a positive feedback loop that produces elected candidates who also reflect those very preferences.
As a result of these influencers stoking the flames of mass distrust in the system, soon Fishbacks of the country will no longer be polling in the single digits, and voters will line up to support extremists with sharp jawlines and harmful politics. This will happen at an accelerated rate. America is already polarized, with its democratic foundations eroding under two terms of a man who rose to power by exploiting unaddressed grievances of the masses. The normalization of popular culture rhetoric that reinforces purity and extremism should be a blaring alarm for what’s to come in future elections, unless we decide to draw the line and vehemently oppose those who will work to make our politics more dangerous.
Audrey Green SC ’27 is a hopemaxxing Wasian. Jun Kwon PO ’28 is a joymaxxing Korean.