How Clavicular is Harming the Next Generation
By Xavier Chavez
Looks-maxxing. Mogging. Bone smashing.
Canthal tilts. Hunter-eyes. Mewing.
Double-Jaw Surgery. Ascension. Normie.
What the **** are these words and how are they related?
In any normal person's world, this is a bunch of nonsense. In the world of a teenager with online access to the streaming website Kick.com, it is everything.
Braden Peters, known online as Clavicular, has been surging in the online media realm, garnering over $110,000 in Jan. 2026 alone. This is due to his massive following of over 287,000 subscribers on Kick, and his 50,000+ live viewers who tune in to every stream.
This massive following seemed to happen overnight, due to a viral situation that occurred on Dec. 24, where he ran over an alleged stalker in his Cybertruck. This occurred after the person jumped on top of the hood. Despite the live footage, Peters was not charged with any wrongdoing.
Before this event, Peters still had a presence online in different forums through his main claim to fame, which is the concept of “looksmaxxing”. This construct is not new, as one can find evidence of it going back to the mid-2010s.
Peters has brought it to the forefront of the modern day and has admitted to being involved in these manosphere spaces since a young teen. The original definition of looksmaxxing is not anything to be afraid of, as it is simply working out and bettering oneself through physical appearance.
Regardless, looksmaxxing can take other forms and is now commonly synonymous with the definition of hardmaxxing. This sub-definition calls for dangerous and extreme measures of body enhancement that involve major reconstructive surgery, such as double-jaw surgery, which delivers a chiseled jawline.
Just a few months ago, a Reddit user created a thread detailing their hardmaxxing journey, even linking to a different previous post from a couple of years ago where they had spent over $30,000 on cosmetic surgeries.
An article from The Guardian interviews a man sucked into this strange phenomena of looksmaxxing with his own personal story from 2024.
“I was learning about problems I hadn’t even noticed.” He began to learn a strange code that members used to compare their characteristics: IPDs (interpupillary distance, the gap between the eyes); canthal tilt (the angles of the eyes); mewing (a tongue exercise that supposedly improves the shape of the jaw). “The ultimate goal is to improve your SMV,” says James. Sexual market value, that is.”
What James is referring to is known as the PSL scale. This attractiveness rating system is what has turned a simple compliment of “oh she is pretty”, to a confusing, darker “Stacylite with ability to upgrade to a true Eve if she sheds some weight and fixes her recessed jawline”.
They are all a bunch of buzzwords for if someone is hot or not, along with “subhuman” status if you are rated below a five out of 10 from random strangers' view of beauty.
Not only that, but Peters has admitted to taking it even further in an interview with GQ.
“He claims to have smashed his face with a hammer to make bones regrow sharper, smoked meth to curb his appetite, and performed “dick-ups” by placing weights on his penis to maximize girth and erection strength. At age 14, he said, he began injecting testosterone he’d ordered from the internet, with no parental or medical oversight. Now his body can’t naturally produce it; he believes he’s currently infertile.”
Spewing these non-researched claims and methods in the name of “looksmaxxing” to an impressionable audience on Kick that is largely composed of males through the 18-24 age range, will harm this generation of men for years to come.
Despite this already harmful sentiment, we as a society have seen this play out before, back in the early 2000’s. Media such as America’s Top Model and Cosmopolitan were peaking and their audience was mostly impressionable young women becoming adults.
Cosmopolitan magazines were one of the hottest-selling magazines during that time period, selling 400,000 magazines a month at their peak; oftentimes speaking on ways to appeal to men and become sexier rather than bettering yourself for your own self-gain.
Unsafe headlines read atop the magazine or on the sidebar, such as, “So you ate a cupcake? Fast moves to burn it off!” They created a paradox of unhealthy body standards under the guise of actual self-improvement.
Looking back on it today, the lasting effects can be seen in a reddit thread that poses the question, “how do you think the early 2000s, a time of Victoria Secret models and "heroin chic" affected your self image and dieting?”
Many women in the comments talk about their experiences seeing their peers try to hit 100 pounds on the scale or wanting visible hip bones. As if that was not a damaging goal within itself, trying to achieve that through biting food, chewing it, then spitting it out like food is an enemy might be even worse.
By the time people caught up with the harmful rhetoric and sales declined, Cosmopolitan was trying to earn back the trust of the reader, but it was too late.
Another form of media that was poisoning the minds of young women through television was the infamous “America’s Top Model” which ran from 2003 to 2018. Beauty standards were constantly changing and models were routinely criticized for not having “the look” for whatever the judges' standards were.
One of the worst examples of this verbal abuse happened when a contestant by the name of Keenyah Hill was fat shamed to the point of judges asking for her to pose as “gluttony” and an elephant.
All these experiences culminated in insecurity, with their looks or their era’s beauty standards being imposed on them unfairly and cruelly. It is clear that within this century, we have circled from the destructive early 2000’s beauty norms to more of the same, just now under the guise of the 2020's popular term, looksmaxxing.