The Shape of My Jaw > That Which Emerges from It
On Clavicular, Looksmaxxers, Incels, Donald Trump, Andrew Tate, and Pride
February 1999, Boise, Idaho. Before Donald Trump was elected president, before Andrew Tate served a prison sentence for human trafficking, before Clavicular took a hammer to his own face — there was Bodybuilding.com.
Though mostly dedicated to the exchange of bodybuilding information and encouragement, the website prominently featured one section dedicated to off-topic discussion. This “Misc.” subforum — by far the most popular on the platform — hosted threads with lighthearted topics varying between the proper method by which to calculate the number of days in a week (is it seven or eight?) and the feasibility of a human beating a gorilla in a fistfight. But many of these discussions would eventually take a much darker turn.
By the early 2000’s, forum threads emerged dedicated to, among other things, procuring anabolic steroids and locating the best leg-lengthening surgical clinics. In hindsight, and as disturbing as some of these topics would become, the manner in which Bodybuilding.com users — almost entirely young men — interacted with each other was much more concerning than the actual substance of their conversations. Although they didn’t then realize, visitors to the website were experiencing the early groundwork of what would eventually become incel culture.
“These feelings of depersonalization, derealization, and hopelessness often lead to outbursts of misogynistic rage — and in extreme cases, mass violence.”
Incels, or “involuntary celibates,” are a group of predominantly young, terminally-online men who express what can only be characterized as extreme frustration in connection with their inability to attract female attention. Essentially, incels are convinced that physical characteristics are the only relevant factor in determining attractiveness, and they are obsessed with trying to validate this belief. Take, for example, their propensity (in astonishing disregard of science and history) for borderline-phrenological charts which categorize celebrities into bands of attractiveness based on facial symmetry, jaw width, and bone structure.
For those who manage to improve their appearance (or in incel-speak, “ascend”) through exercise, diet, drugs, surgery, or otherwise, this wholly materialist view of romance regularly leads to a complete disregard for any manner of self-improvement outside of the physical. Those who cannot ascend often “take the black pill” (in quasi-reference to The Matrix film), becoming nihilistically resigned to their celibate fate, which they are certain can only be attributed to immutable biological characteristics. These feelings of depersonalization, derealization, and hopelessness often lead to outbursts of misogynistic rage — and in extreme cases, mass violence. Most famously, after uploading a video manifesto to YouTube detailing his desire to punish women, the Isla Vista shooter, self-identified incel Elliot Rodger, murdered six people (and injured fourteen others) on and near the University of California, Santa Barbara campus in mid-2014.
However, the incel ethos goes far beyond just phrenology, ascension, and violent ideation. Most young men become ensconced in the culture not out of a desire to commit violence, but to feel a sense of belonging as part of a larger community. Accordingly, the wide array of inside jokes and insider terms used by incels online would eventually grow beyond the confines of Bodybuilding.com to spawn a full-fledged subculture — one which would quickly become popular with the internet at large. The newfound immense virality of incel memes, amplified by forums and websites such as 4chan.com, were beginning to gain the attention of the wider internet-viewing populace.
While Bodybuilding.com may have been the primordial soup within which the component elements of inceldom were formed, 4chan was the evolutionary stage upon which it would flourish. Launched by Christopher Poole (aka “moot”) in October 2003, the website would go on to act as the incubator of all things incel for the next two decades. Genuinely detestable thoughts and ideas would arise in subforums like /pol/, rough around the edges, only to be clipped, laughed at, and passed around the rest of the internet via aggregation websites like Digg, Reddit, and YouTube. After enough time in the tumbler, they would re-enter the cultural zeitgeist in earnest, blunted by cynicism, polished, and consequently, much more tolerable to general audiences.
Enter Andrew Tate. A former professional kickboxer and the son of a chess international master, Tate rose to prominence in 2022 off the back of a virality campaign which leveraged subscribers of his scam web course (dubbed “Hustler’s University”) to artificially amplify his online visibility. His content, which endorsed a hyper-masculine, traditionalist view of romance and relationships, was essentially neatly-repackaged incel rhetoric mixed with a splash of heinous ideological regression. Frequently targeted directly toward adolescent boys, his viral videos encouraged viewers to claim their birthright — literal ownership over women — by becoming a “high-value male” (i.e., a high-earning, physically fit, and emotionally domineering man). Women, Tate claimed, should “shut the fuck up,” “get back in the kitchen,” and be willing to do anything to please their male partners.
Tate had unknowingly birthed an online space that would soon come to be referred to as the “manosphere,” which would shortly grow to become a sprawling network of charismatic figures with similarly hyper-masculine views. Audiences, numbed to Tate’s terrible ideas due in large part to his extreme oversaturation, became vulnerable to more sanitized versions of these opinions, viewing them as increasingly moderate. With the online political spectrum successfully shifted, manosphere topics were then amplified to wider audiences by socially-acceptable both-siders like Joe Rogan (and further legitimized in the process).
In 2024, the manosphere — embraced, of course, with open arms by the Trump campaign — became actualized, playing a significant and vital role in Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential re-election. Although Tate would find himself serving a prison sentence in Romania for human trafficking, rape, and associated organized crime charges during the election cycle, other right-leaning social media figures with newfound cool-kid status, such as Rogan, Theo Von, Adin Ross, and NELK, all did their part in sane-washing the obviously far-right (and clearly cognitively declining) Trump — just as they had with Tate.
“For millennia, young men have grappled with the difficult question of how best to attract the attention of women — and for millennia, they have found new and more interesting ways to fail in doing so.”
And that is how the ideas and opinions of a community of involuntarily celibate, body-building man-children on the internet led directly to the second term of a 34-time felon who is more than likely the third- or fourth-worst President the U.S. has ever seen.
But the story doesn’t end there.
In late 2025, a new player emerged onto the manosphere scene, more nimble and much more popular than any of his predecessors. Clavicular, most prominently a TikToker and Kick streamer, calls himself a “looksmaxxer” — in other words, an incel who is willing to go to extreme lengths to ascend. Braden Peters, or “Clav,” as he is affectionately referred to by his online community, has spoken openly about his “softmaxxing” (workouts, diet, grooming, height-boosting insoles) as well the more polarizing “hardmaxxing” techniques he employs to achieve what he believes to be a more perfect physical appearance — things like methamphetamine use to stay skinny, anabolic steroid injections to grow muscle, and “bone smashing,” or repetitively hitting himself in the jawbone with a hammer in an attempt to re-form it into a more aesthetically-pleasing shape.
Looksmaxxers like Clavicular see themselves as “stat-dumping,” in reference to a video game technique wherein the player forgoes investment in all but one aspect of their player-character in order to optimize that such chosen aspect. These young men believe that maximizing their physical beauty (and thus, forgoing any other means of personal growth) can eliminate what might be the largest individual source of their anxiety — the need to engage women verbally, intellectually, or emotionally. It’s a synthesis of early incel ideals and manosphere beliefs: if I ascend, then I can unlock my innate birthright — the attention of women.
This time, though, it’s much more lame. Clavicular, who just recently turned twenty years of age, is addicted to meth, physically impotent via chemical self-castration, and, on April 14 of this year, he appeared to overdose while live streaming in front of the Moxie’s in Brickell in Miami. Yet somehow, his viewership continues to expand rapidly. Clearly, his message is resonating with young men and boys in the same way incel rhetoric always has: by appealing to, and preying on, their most base insecurities.
For millennia, young men have grappled with the difficult question of how best to attract the attention of women — and for millennia, they have found new and more interesting ways to fail in doing so. They just can’t help it — their pride gets in the way and, like the lemmings in White Wilderness, they run off the cliff en mass, falling into the rocky waters below. And, as Count Dooku warned the man who would one day become Darth Vader, “twice the pride, double the fall.”
But at least Darth Vader never did meth.
Don’t Be a Sucker is a blog about internet culture and its interactions with politics, sports, tech, law, and society at large. You can visit the Archive to read past entries. Subscribe below to make sure you don’t miss anything — and consider sharing this post if you enjoyed it.
Interesting!
Blake, I had no idea this rabbit hole went so deep or so far back. The through-line from Bodybuilding.com to the 2024 election is very chilling and Clavicular... I don't even have words. A really important piece. Thank you for writing it! ♥