The Most Beautiful Corpse on the Livestream
Clavicular and the nihilism of looksmaxxing.
Hello and welcome to Many Such Cases.
Despite the theoretical purpose of looksmaxxing, men like Clavicular are not in pursuit of sex. He does seem to be having it, or at least getting into bedrooms with women where an attempt can be made before he’s thwarted by his routine amphetamine usage and whatever cocktail of cortisol-reducing, testosterone-raising, fat-dissolving chemicals he’s ordered this week. And just to get to the point of sex being a distinct, immediate possibility would be enough. Less than that would be enough, Clavicular has said himself.
Clavicular is a young man of 20 years who has received a lot of attention this month. He spent his teen years on various forums devoted to improving his looks, amassing 14-hour screen times in a period of his development that should have been spent skipping basketball practice in order to flirt with girls in gas station parking lots. In these forums he was exposed to the usual cruelty and scrutiny of teen boys with the added terror of digital anonymity, and then later was given the idea and information how to order hormones, steroids and “fat dissolvers” offline and inject them himself. After years of this, it all appears to have worked. He’s handsome. Handsome enough that after posting on TikTok and starting a livestream, he’s managed to become famous by Internet standards.
He did all of this because beauty makes life easier. He did it because it gave him Sexual Market Value (SMV). But he did not do this for sex — that’s a crucial distinction. In fact, sex seems to be something he’d be willing to trade away if it meant he could continue to be beautiful.
“Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility,” Joe Berstein wrote in his profile of Clavicular for The New York Times over the weekend. “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.”
And so again none of this — the mogging, the jawlines, the livestreaming, the cloutbombing, the flamboyant nihilism — is in pursuit of sex. That matters because it would make far more sense that way. It would be more legible. It is, after all, what looksmaxxing is allegedly supposed to be about. Inceldom utilizes a taxonomy, where everyone can be ranked and ordered according to their ability to attract a member of the opposite sex. Looksmaxxing is the method of rising those ranks, of changing one’s appearance in order to reach a higher place in this taxonomy to theoretically be able to have sex with more attractive people. There are other valuable, tangible benefits of being hot, obviously, but this is the foundation. It is why these other benefits even exist, to begin with.
When Clavicular talks about sex, he does so as if it’s a chore. He readily admits that he takes as little time with it as possible — he has no interest in “impressing” a woman in bed, and he has other, more important things to do. Yet he does at least still claim to do it, even if begrudgingly. I’ll give him that. On his appearance on The Adam Friedland Show, he said sex usually takes him about a minute, and agreed when Friedland suggested he’d be better off just masturbating. All of this is again to say that none of this is about sex for Clavicular. None of this broader moment, really, is about Clavicular himself, either. The realities of Clavicular’s life are superfluous. He’s fucking with us. Even so, he has become the latest patron saint of the psychosexual cultural moment, one that continues to say that sex is boring, sex is secondary, sex is less important than embracing this empty cult of virality.
Here, though, there is still some sex to it all. Sexual market value is something that this universe of people cares about. What we are seeing with the looksmaxxers is both a new language and new structuring of intrasexual competition. The more you can mog someone (or outshine them, dominate them, etc), the better your place in the SMV. You can mog someone in looks, yes, but also in money, in clout, in height. It all continues to play out in the sexual marketplace, as Clavicular frequently reiterates. The purpose is not to actually have sex with women, but to signal to other men that sex with women is achievable.
Clavicular is right that there is value in the knowledge that he could have sex with a woman, and that sometimes the psychic satisfaction of that feels more rewarding than the act itself. It’s a dynamic that allows you to hold onto the pleasure of both desiring and being desired without either being ruptured. But it’s telling that he says that sex will gain him nothing. It suggests that he believes everything else he does, the stunts and the livestreams, serve to gain him something better. Money? Fame? A brief moment of embodying the zeitgeist? All of the above. Each, moreover, can be ranked and taxonomized in this same system of looks. Status is no longer an ineffable composite of relationships + charm + access, but a distinct number attached to how many views you get on your livestreams.
All of this, then, is a way for young men to structure their life and its aims according to something that at least feels concrete. To go to college, to try and earn an honest living, to find a wife and have a kids and leave some type of modest but respectable legacy — that no longer feels tangible enough. That doesn’t make enough sense. There is no coherent meaning to pull from the narratives of living that we have relied upon, and so men like Clavicular have returned to something far more basic and animalistic, yet through an entirely digitally-mediated filter. The only goal is to be the alpha in the room, so long as the room is constantly being recorded.
Looksmaxxing is the obvious medium of achieving status in this framework. We’re in an era of looking and being looked at. Images are cheap. You’ve got to be something special in order to keep anyone’s attention. And when the criteria for aesthetic specialness is dictated by the screen — not the big one, but the perpetual presence of several small ones — the looks themselves are going to warp. They might be beautiful still but something will feel off, uncanny. The signs of rot underneath will glimmer beneath the skin.
It is a type of beauty that feels frail and fleeting. It will come and pass not because it is too precious for this world but because there is no real meat on the bone. A lack of sexual viability has been a feature of contemporary beauty for years, but rarely has it been so obvious. What is the message that Clavicular and this set of looksmaxxers have to offer? Beauty can perhaps be something that is forced, yes, and with it can come attention. You can smoke meth to stay skinny and inject yourself with off-label hormones and maybe you’ll get famous enough to gamble for hours every day on your computer while a few dozen thousand people also watch on their computer. If you’re really lucky, you might get to walk in New York Fashion Week, get profiled in the New York Times and sit down on the most popular podcasts. That’s not nothing. But the message is also that all of that is secondary, maybe even meaningless, to the nebulous social hierarchy of the Internet that these young men have tried desperately to make concrete. There is no future. Mog or get mogged.
I wonder if part of the motivation (not just for Clavicular but this malaise in general) is driven by uncertainty. You said it yourself, “there is no future.”
If you can’t trust your political leadership to lead you (not based enough or not progressive enough), your parents to guide you (outdated perspectives, uncool, or just representative of a life you don’t feel applicable to you or achievable by you), society to care for you (oligarchy oppressing you, immigrants replacing you), your friends to be there for you (not based or redpilled, or at capacity and wondering if there’s someone else you can talk to), your employer to keep you fed and with health insurance - how can you feel secure in your place in the world and your resources and safety/livelihood?
Higher (felt) status buys some psychological felt sense of safety, certainty. And in an environment where the more abstract things like institutions, rules, social contracts, feel distant or uncertain, it seems rational (as in incentive, not as in reasonable) to revert to a more “basic, animalistic” behavior to pursue that status.
Reminds me of bodybuilding, where lifting weights goes beyond any of the traditional benefits and becomes a self-contained competitive endeavor. As bizarre as this looksmaxxing stuff is, at least these guys have some sort of project to work on—that's more than a lot of guys can say. Really just shows you how far we've fallen. Something is clearly wrong when a guy in his 20s has no interest in sex. There used to be a theory that sex was the entire underlying reason why men were ambitious to succeed in other areas.