He goes by Clavicular. He's named himself after a bone. That should tell you something about what's happening here.
Braden Peters, 20, started looksmaxxing at 14 - ordering testosterone and fat dissolvers online, editing photos of himself in Photoshop to refine a physical ideal, and then working backwards toward it through extreme measures. Steroids. Appetite suppressants. Reportedly methamphetamine. A jaw he has suggested men consider striking with a hammer to reshape the bone underneath.
He has admitted he is now infertile as a result of the steroid abuse. He describes this without apparent regret.
Last month, he modelled at New York Fashion Week. The New York Times profiled him. He earned more than $100,000 from streaming platform Kick in a single month. His TikTok sits at over 760,000 followers and climbing.
Peters hasn't broken through despite his toxicity. He's broken through because of it.
What looksmaxxing actually is
Looksmaxxing is, on its surface, an extreme form of self-improvement culture. Young men, many of them teenagers, become obsessed with optimising their physical appearance - facial structure, body composition, skin, posture. The subculture exists primarily online, on forums and platforms like Kick, TikTok, and Reddit.
At its mildest, it's gym discipline and skincare. At its worst, it's what Peters represents: double jaw surgery, bone-smashing, steroid abuse, and a complete submission of identity to the pursuit of a physical ideal rooted in eugenic thinking and white beauty standards. Critics have pointed to the pseudoscientific ranking systems within looksmaxxing communities, which assign numerical "ratings" to faces and frequently correlate high ratings with whiteness, jaw structure, and height.
Peters dismisses accusations of racism as "dumb." He describes his repeated use of racial slurs as "not a racist thing."
The company he keeps
Earlier this year, a video emerged of Peters in a Miami nightclub with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, and Nick Fuentes - chanting along to Kanye West's "Heil Hitler." Peters defended it as "just a song."
He has also livestreamed footage that appeared to show him driving his Tesla Cybertruck into a pedestrian. He has described women as "targets," "slayables," and "foids" - short for "female humanoids" - and his online academy coaches paying members to "inch closer until your erection is her problem."
When Rolling Stone contacted him about whether these techniques constituted sexual coercion, he replied: "Who the fuck is rolling stone magazine LOL."
"He doesn't seem all that invested in the aims of the manosphere. His affiliation with Tate and Fuentes seems motivated by a shared love of shock value and online infamy."
That's the thing about Clavicular that makes him harder to write off than a straightforward ideologue. Peters isn't a true believer. He's a spectacle machine. His politics shift with whoever gives him "the fattest bag." He said he'd vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance because Vance was ugly. He called Sydney Sweeney "malformed."
He's not spreading an ideology. He's spreading a vibe. And a vibe is harder to argue with.
Why this matters beyond the freak show
The temptation with Clavicular is to treat him as a curiosity. A self-inflicted cautionary tale who somehow found an audience. Log off, touch grass, move on.
That framing misses something important. Peters didn't create the conditions that made him possible. He found a fracture that was already there and drove a Cybertruck through it.
Young men - particularly those aged 14 to 22 - are navigating a crisis of identity, purpose, and belonging with almost no institutional support. Mental health resources are underfunded and underused among young men. Educational systems consistently fail boys. The economic path that previous generations took - stable job, affordable home, clear social role - has closed for most of them. What's left is the internet, and the internet has filled the void with men like Peters who offer a legible, if grotesque, answer to the question: what am I for?
The answer looksmaxxing gives is: your face. Your body. Your "ascension." Reduce yourself to a measurable physical metric and optimise accordingly. It's the gym-bro version of the hustle-culture playbook - but instead of monetising your skills, you monetise your bone structure.
And the fact that a 20-year-old who admits to methamphetamine use and voluntary infertility just walked New York Fashion Week is not irony. It is a referendum on what we reward.
The vernacular as camouflage
Peters and his followers communicate in a language designed to be impenetrable to outsiders. If you "mog" someone, you're better looking. If you get "frame-mogged," someone has wider shoulders. "Jestermaxxing" means working on your personality - which is considered a pathetic cope. "Slaymaxxing" means having sex.
The jargon functions as in-group bonding, but it also functions as deniability. When the language is absurd enough, it becomes hard to hold seriously. Peters is genuinely funny sometimes. His live streams have the chaotic energy of a man with nothing left to lose. And that's exactly how his more alarming content gets laundered through - wrapped in a meme, tagged with lingo, passed off as bit.
His 760,000 TikTok followers are not all true believers. Most of them are there for the spectacle. But spectacle exposure is still exposure. The language seeps in. The framework of women as "foids," of personality as irrelevant, of physical dominance as the only currency that matters - it doesn't need to be believed sincerely to do damage. It just needs to be normalised.
What accountability looks like here
There's an ongoing debate about what to do with figures like Peters. Deplatforming has mixed results - Kick exists precisely because Twitch is stricter. Mockery amplifies. Earnest critique gives him more attention than he'd otherwise get.
The more honest conversation is upstream of Peters. It's about what we've failed to build for young men who are genuinely struggling. It's about why "become a physical object" has more cultural infrastructure behind it than "become a person."
Peters, for his part, is a product. A 20-year-old who started dismantling himself at 14 because the internet offered him a blueprint and nothing better existed. That doesn't excuse anything he's done. It does explain something about the demand that created him.
He called his story a "horror story" once. He meant it as a flex. He wasn't wrong about what it is.