Insecurity is a fact of life for most of us. It’s why so many philosophical and religious traditions focus on dealing with this in a “letting go” kind of way. From the Buddha, to Cato the Younger, to modern day acceptance movements, we have always known that the judgements of others upon ourself is truly of no concern to us. Our external appearance is only a part of our selves and our insecurities about it are just a means to be manipulated by those without our best intrests in mind.

That said there’s really nothing wrong with wanting to dress or look a certain way. There’s plenty to be gained physically from participating in the rituals of personal aesthetics. Wanting to look fit often makes us care about our bodies more. We pay attention to our health and what we eat. Caring about skin care means we often clean our faces regularly which helps prevent scarring and infection from out of control achne. We wear sun screen and prevent cancer.

There’s even mental reasons to practice in beauty routines. I shit, shower, shave and brush my teeth every morning. These help me mentally prepare for the day ahead. They’re rituals that signal to me it’s time to wake up (in addition to waking me up). I fast so that I stay mindful of the foods that I eat to make sure I’m not trying to eat through my anxieties. I do face masks with my fiance because I like bonding with them.

There are reasons to practice self care is what I’m saying. Physical and mental healing and human bonding being the most valuable to me.

But, I suppose there is another reason….

Clavicular

Recently I watched a video interview with Braden Peters AKA Clavicular. A man participating in one of the most extreme forms of Gender affirming care I’ve seen from a cis person. His routine includes everything from “bone smashing” to “meth maxxing” and is then shocked when people want to talk about meth maxxing more than which Ozempic-like GPL-1 inhibitor to take to help with maintaining a calorie deficit.

It’s hard to talk about his philosophy because it is quite offensive to my world view and I acknowldge this, but I think it’s important to psychoanalyze a bit just to practice empathy.

He’s young, only twenty years old. A child in my eyes normally. He went through highschool during COVID and he’s been obsessing about the internet the whole time. He knows about all the different “looks maxxing” forums in the PSL trifecta: puahate (pick up artist hate), sluthate, and lookism. So he’s no doubtedly been consuming mass quanitities of sub culture world views as his only form of human interaction for presumably years. And he’s proably autistic by his own admission.

An autistic, isolated child who has diagnosed his outsiderness as being caused by his weird looks. So he goes to places obsessed with trying to gameify beauty rituals for the rewards of money, women, and, most importantly, appealing to the male gaze.

The Goal

Clav is not a very interesting philosopher in my eyes. He’s focused on an idea of infinite self improvement for vainity’s sake. He says that men should focus soley on becoming a “10/10” in looks before persuing the joys of life and then says that no one has achieved this status. That’s it’s even impossible. He sees no inherent worth in making friends or relationships for the sake of human connection, only looking at people for what they can give him.

But there are rewards to looksmaxxing. You will recieve more money, you will recieve more sexual gratification (so long as you’re a man of ocurse), you will recieve status. All you have to do is smash a hammer into your face, infect acid into your fat, and take just a little bit of meth (since it’s the same as adderall after all) (Note: Absolutely do not take meth instead of adderal for weightloss.)

Now to give credit to an idea, I am a fan of constant self improvement. I think the challenge of being your best self is a challenge that never ends. The world and our lives will always change and our morals and desires will always change with time. But this is good in a Joseph Campbell “Pathways to Bliss” way in that happiness is acheived by straining constantly for an unatainable level of compassionate virtue. Your traditional ideas of charity, empathy, sacrifice, general kindness towards others. Where as Calv bleives in more of a Sam Altman “Moore’s Law for Everything” type of infinite growth. Where the thing to grow is money and power over others.

Worse still, he offers no explanation as to why this is the ideal. He only states a fairly damning claim that this is simply how the world is.

The World View

Worldview’s are one of my favorite things to think about. You and I can both have had different enough upbringings that we worry about completely different things in any given situation. When I go to the movies I want to sit in the back because I hate when there’s people behind me kicking the seat. When you go you prefer being as close to the golden zone in the center as possible because you like cinema.

These worldviews of our’s are heavily influenced by the people around you because we all love being in a community. So I developed my taste of movie seating because I went to the movies with church groups and schools all my life, there being so many people there and them being annoying children meant they’d kick chairs. You were part of a cinema club in high school and wanted to “experience” movies how they were meant to be experienced.

Clav’s world view is dominated by his upbringing in catholic school, his autism influence social anxiety, and his hyper fixation on incel rhetoric. This means he’s inclined to appeal to a incel internet forum perception of beauty because it’s where he’s most comfortable. He also has to reconsile Cathlic concervatism in his ideas.

How his world view manifests is pretty plain to see in his prefered lifestyle of going to clubs, monetizing his whole life, and appealing to the male gaze.

Male Gaze

I’ve mentioned it a few times now, but he is trying to appeal to the male gaze. He want’s to be appealing to men. He wants to be an ideal for them to strive for. He doesn’t look that way for women. He looks that way because he is convinced by his male friends that this is what a man looks like.

“But women are hanging all over him!!!1!”

True, but he’s pretty open that it’s not for the women. And it’s not for him either. He want’s to aprticipate in the incel culture of these looksmaxxing and slut shaming forums. To do that he has adopted their beauty standards and helps develope their beauty routines (or protocols if you’re too much of a man to use a woman word like routine).

The feminists in their full nuance recognized this forever ago in comic books. Women complained that women in comics were often just naked with a painted costume and men would retort that the men were super buff, don’t they like it? The anwer, it turns out, is no. Generally women like softer features over a mini Hulk (or Regular Hulk I guess). It is men who fetishize muscles.

What is wrong?

A lot of things are wrong with Clavicular. He’s clearly traumatized by the life he was dealt and I think we need to reflect on the damage that socialmedia has done to the self image of young people. Especially the world views of young people who were denied the important social practice years of normal High School. I’m not really a child psychologist or socialigist or anything, but I would not be shocked to learn COVID and Incel Forums in addition to his rampant insecurities caused him to be such a drain on society.

I do mean that too, he’s not saying anything interesting or commenting on anything we should change. He simply believes the world is exploitable if you’re hot and believes that you can become hot enough to exploit it. He’s selling a pathway to playing the game of attention and capitalism sold by the modern world.

And I do mean selling it. He, like most manosphere lifestyle influencers, sells courses on how to be him. Why you would take life advice from a twenty year old who, again, live streamed while on methamphetamine for weightloss is beyond me, but clearly someone is buying and clearly it’s someone who’s been convinced that there’s no other way out of what ever nihilistic funk they’ve found themselves in.

It’s the same doomerism we’ve seen from the Tate brothers and every other cigar smoking shirtless guy on Tiktok.

“It’s women’s fault you’re lonely” > “It’s your fault you’re poor” > “I’m harsh because I care about people” > “For $50 a month you can join my discord and learn how to be a man!”

It’s just emotion manipulation. He’s attacking people’s insecurities about status symbols in life and offering a quick fix. But that’s the thing, it’s not a quick fix! He’s, at best, selling confidence and worst snake oil. For every one man he molds into another soulless looksmaxxer there’s a dozen incels who are never convinced of their own self worth. Who are stuck in the dreggs of the manosphere. Never getting the status symbols they desire because they can’t fathom that money doesn’t come from being hot, but by convincing a bunch of young men and children that a $50 a month discord is how you get a chissled jawline and a mansion.

What am I taking away?

The world is filled with content. That content is not made to give us answers and make us feel good. It’s meant to make us upset, uncomfortable, and desperate for products that will solve these issues we’ve just learned we had. Clavicular is peak consumer capitalism. He is a constant ad for ozempic that seemingly never stops streaming Including while running over a pedestrian. He’s riddled with buzzwords and speaks mostly on “big word authority” (I know bigger words than you and more pharmaceuticals there for I’m smarter!).

Clavicular claims to be apolitical despite his association with antisemites that Get him banned from Miami Clubs. But he is political in that he’s contributing to this miasma of uncomfort, discontent, rage that has allowed the western world to become so fascistic. He’s just channeling that rage into beuaty classes and investment advice.

I think the most exciting thing was said at the end of the Channel 5 interview, Andrew Callaghan was criticized by Braden Peters for not asking him anything about looks maxxing. Something Andrew refutes in a bit of a back and forth.

Then, Braden asks Andrew a really good question.

Braden: “When you wake up in the morning and you look in the mirror, you’re 100% satisfied with every single thing? IS that what you’re telling me?”

Andrew: “Yeah more or less.”

Braden: After a moment of shock “Alright well… If you want to be complete disengenous, that’s fine with me.”

Braden can’t imagine a world were someone has conquered their insecurities. He thinks he will be stuck with this mental block forever. And that’s sad. He won’t let himself be happy for no reason.

Braden I think is a good failure case for self reflection. He’s a nihlist who’s trying to cope with the world by claiming to do something profound when he’s only making our suffering worse.