‘Looksmaxxing’ in the Age of Trump
The so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion. As the name suggests, looksmaxxers share a monomaniacal commitment to improving their physical appearance. They trade stories of breaking their legs in order to gain extra inches, “bonesmashing” their faces with hammers to heighten their cheekbones, injecting steroids and testosterone to inflate their muscles, and even smoking crystal meth to suppress their appetite. If you had to pick a single corner of the internet that best captures the vices of the Trump era, you couldn’t beat the looksmaxxers. Perhaps more than any other group, they reveal the depth of the moral crisis that confronts young men today.
Although many looksmaxxers support Donald Trump, they defy neat political classification. The community is simply too nihilistic. Its newest star, Braden Peters, made this clear during a recent podcast interview with the conservative commentator Michael Knowles, in which the two discussed a potential 2028 presidential contest between California Governor Gavin Newsom and Vice President J. D. Vance. Peters said he disagrees with Newsom’s politics but would vote for the governor anyway because he’s more handsome—or, in the group’s parlance, he “mogs” Vance. The governor is a “Chad” and the vice president is “subhuman,” Peters explained to Knowles, who was gobsmacked.
On social media, Peters goes by the moniker “Clavicular,” a reference to the unusual importance that looksmaxxers place on the width of their clavicles. The white 20-year-old, who was expelled from college, has quickly become the most recognizable member of the movement thanks in part to his constant presence online. Perhaps his most viral moment came on Christmas Eve. While livestreaming from Miami, Peters appears to run over an alleged stalker with his Cybertruck. “Is he dead?” he asks the girl riding in the car with him. “Hopefully,” he adds.
[George Packer: The depth of MAGA’s moral collapse]
According to TMZ, local police determined that “there was no criminal element that took place,” but few details have been reliably reported. Some viewers suspected that the incident had been staged. Others claimed to have identified the supposed stalker and said he survived. Whether it was real or faked, the video reveals the breathtaking callousness of Peters and the many fans who rushed to his defense. Indeed, the incident seems only to have grown Peters’s following. James Fishback, a far-right candidate for governor of Florida, posted on X that Peters “did nothing wrong.” (Peters did not respond to a request for an interview.)
My introduction to Peters came late last year, when Instagram’s algorithm served me a video of him wearing a baseball cap, primping and pouting for the camera. He remains silent, letting the large word on his hat do the talking: NIGGA. The post earned him tens of thousands of likes along with the admiration of white nationalists such as Nick Fuentes, who declared to his online following of so-called Groypers that Peters is the modern-day Nietzschean “overman” he had hoped for. “Sculptor and clay!” rhapsodized Fuentes, referring to himself and Peters. “I prefigured the white-ass nigga!”
The looksmaxxing movement—ideologically incoherent but rife with juvenile racism—echoes the ongoing Groyperization of the American right. This is particularly evident in the growing antagonism that certain factions express toward Vance. Fuentes, for example, sounded like a looksmaxxer himself when he criticized the vice president last year. “He’s visibly obese and very ugly. He’s got a fat face, no jawline, no chin,” Fuentes said, before shifting to a more familiar topic for him: “His wife and kids are not white!”
Looksmaxxing grew out of the online culture of “incels,” or involuntary celibates, a term that emerged in the 2010s. United by their resentment of women, incels tend to see attractiveness as a straightforward function of genetics—millimeters, symmetry, skin color—and therefore out of their control. Looksmaxxers hold a similarly superficial view of beauty as a kind of rigid mathematics with a single, knowable solution. But they believe that this makes it malleable: One can “ascend” to a higher plane of attractiveness with enough money, effort, and perhaps the willingness to dabble with crystal meth.
For many members of the group, though, looking good is not a path to social or romantic goals; it is an end in its own right, a kind of self-glorification. Rather than a womanizing Don Juan, their ideal is someone closer to Achilles, the Homeric war hero whose excellence is determined by his success over other men. The primary goal of the looksmaxxer is not sexual pleasure or mating prowess—Peters speaks freely about his infertility, supposedly caused by excessive testosterone supplements—but to mog and achieve status within the pecking order of their same-sex digital community.
This kind of thinking has spread among young men on the right at the same time that many of them are adopting polar-opposite beliefs. Another part of the cohort is embracing Christianity, whose pro-social commitments—monogamy, marriage, childbearing—flatly contradict the looksmaxxing ethos.
[Timothy Keller: American Christianity is due for a revival]
But the rise of looksmaxxing and the return to social conservatism are both reactions to the same set of conditions. Today’s young men came of age on the social internet, during the upheavals of COVID-19, and under the political dominance of the most narcissistic and superficial president in American history. And their generation has experienced so many of the worst effects of decades of social fragmentation, economic anxiety, and zero-sum competition for what can feel like ever more limited opportunities for meaning, fulfillment, and recognition. Amid this tumult, the fact that Clavicular and his ilk have managed to intrigue so many young men with their brand of nihilism shouldn’t be a surprise. That so many others have sought refuge in traditional sources of order and structure shouldn’t be one either. Instability breeds divergence.
For many of the men who reject conventional norms, appearance has become the stablecoin of the realm. And of course this is true for many women too. Some estimates suggest that more than 3 million women have opened creator accounts on the amateur-pornography website OnlyFans. Many of them are hoping to be the next Sophie Rain, a 23-year-old former waitress from Florida who has already made $82 million on the platform. For younger generations lacking purpose or faith in the future, nothing remains to them but their own bodies, to paraphrase the Hungarian critic László Földényi.
The paradox is that they would manipulate and exploit themselves even as they live in a time of relative peace and plenty. But physical security can coincide with existential precarity. In discussions about looksmaxxing on social media, some critics have highlighted that irony by citing an experiment by the ethologist John B. Calhoun. In 1968, Calhoun built large, enclosed mouse colonies with abundant food and water, no predators, and lots of space for nesting. At first, the population flourished. Later in the experiment, a group of male mice emerged that Calhoun dubbed “the beautiful ones.” These mice spent most of their time grooming, sleeping, and eating—maintaining clean, unscarred bodies and showing no signs of stress. Concerned only with themselves, they disengaged from the other mice and stopped reproducing. Eventually the entire population collapsed.
Oscar Wilde made the strongest case that worshipping beauty for its own sake can end only in death and destruction. Dorian Gray, the Victorian era’s proto-Clavicular, literally exchanges his soul for eternal youth and beauty—a move that the looksmaxxing community would seem to endorse wholeheartedly. The bargain makes him a monster, but Gray’s downfall is not the result of mere egoism. It comes from something even more dangerous: the belief that beauty exempts you from responsibility.