How Clavicular made a spectacle of himself

By Scottie Andrew, CNN

(CNN) — Last week, the “looksmaxxing” livestreamer Clavicular collapsed as thousands watched.

The 20-year-old self-styled master of looking good was live on camera in a Miami mall when he slumped and started to slur his words. Taking shelter from fans he’d been taking selfies with, he stumbled into a booth at an empty restaurant, closed his eyes and let his head flop onto the shoulder of the streamer seated next to him. He stopped responding after that. His camera crew cut the stream when they realized he was ill, but bystanders caught his team carrying his limp body out of the mall.

Miami Fire officials later said they’d responded to a suspected overdose. Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, hasn’t specified what substance he took before his collapse, though he hinted in a recent stream on Kick, his preferred platform, that the substance’s abbreviation is three letters.

A couple of days prior to the suspected overdose, “60 Minutes Australia” released an interview that the influencer had walked out of after a few half-hearted attempts to insult his interviewer. Earlier this month, he appeared to start convulsing after encouraging another streamer, who calls himself “the Cuban Tarzan,” to choke him. And less than 24 hours after his suspected overdose, at the opening of a club that’s open three nights a week for five hours a night, he spent most of the time standing by himself on an elevated surface, scrolling on his phone while young women danced a few feet away.

Is this what self-improvement looks like? Clavicular has presented himself as a short-term case study in the benefits of “looksmaxxing,” the art of modifying one’s physical appearance to attract women, wealth and fame. Starting at age 14, by his account, through exercise, sometimes by a hammer to the face, and with the help of a regimen of off-label or illicit drugs, he says he’s made himself into something new: a 6-foot-2 Chad with a 31-inch waist and pointy clavicles that span 19.5 inches (his own measurements, provided to the New York Times).

The result is an uncannily childlike face stuck onto a slim frame with swollen arms and a sharply tapering torso. (He rarely shows his legs.) His skin is always pallid, his expression pursed, his eyes vacant. He’s almost always wearing, or removing, shirts that are too tight, so he can flaunt the broadness of his shoulders. He’s been profiled in GQ and walked in New York Fashion Week; after spending a day with him, the Times declared, borrowing from looksmaxxing argot, that he’d “ascended” — in looksmaxxing vernacular — successfully became more attractive and widely known.

But collapsing in public and appearing to lose control of his own body doesn’t match the image of a giga-Chad. Clavicular’s project isn’t playing out like an inspiring story of human potential or a replicable health fad, even as he says “looksmaxxing is just another form of self-improvement that’s a little bit more holistic” than working out.

“I’d say I’ve pretty much tried it all,” he told “60 Minutes Australia” of his own looksmaxxing methods. “I haven’t had plastic surgery, but just about everything else in terms of biohacking. So you can really do a lot for your looks with simple pharmaceutical intervention.”

Onscreen, his is a performance predicated on extremity and shock, played out on his own body. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching.

Clavicular is less idealized young man than living experiment, appearing to risk his health for a fling with fame –– much like freak show performers who turned themselves into spectacles. Sword swallowers, fire eaters and pain-proof specialists willingly subjected themselves to things that could hurt or kill them, as long as someone was watching.

“No one performs a freak show for their own benefit,” said Matt DiCintio, a freak show scholar. “Are people looksmaxxing so they can look better for themselves? Would people looksmaxx and not document it? It’s sort of similar to performing in popular entertainment –– you don’t do it for yourself.”

CNN gave a written request for comment to a source close to Clavicular, who agreed to relay it to Clavicular’s lawyer. At the time of publication, Clavicular or his lawyer had not provided comment.

If Clavicular’s apparent unraveling has turned off any aspiring Adonises who once idolized him, it’s riveting thousands more: His follower count on Kick has nearly doubled from what it was in early February, just before local police accused him of entering an Arizona bar underage with a fake ID. Authorities declined to charge him in that case, but he was arrested again in Florida in March, on a misdemeanor battery charge, shortly after an unrelated incident wherein he shot at an alligator in a swamp. The law enforcement agencies involved in his misdemeanor arrest and the alligator shooting didn’t immediately respond to CNN’s requests for comment. The Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission said in March it was investigating the incident; it’s illegal to kill or attempt to kill an alligator in the state. TMZ reported that the alligator was already dead at the time of the shooting.

Among looksmaxxers, Clavicular is the most infamous for his extreme approach to beauty, positioning what looks like self-harm, like trying to physically reshape his bones, as “self-care.” Looksmaxxing grew out of forums for so-called incels — involuntary celibates united in blaming women for their misery — among members seeking an alternative to a sexless life. If they weren’t attracting women in their existing, unoptimized forms, then they’d demand their attention by improving their physical attractiveness. It was a series of questions about incel culture and his connection to the self-proclaimed misogynist influencer Andrew Tate that led to his walking out on the “60 Minutes” segment.

Looksmaxxers who got internet-famous before Clavicular, like Kareem Shami, encouraged followers to “mew,” tucking their tongues in their mouths to better define their jawlines, or consider plastic surgery (“hardmaxxing”) to correct physical deficiencies. Clavicular, meanwhile, shared lurid, dangerous-sounding anecdotes of injecting himself with testosterone while he was still going through puberty and using methamphetamine to stay skinny. On early livestreams, he hit the bones in his face with a hammer, hoping they’d grow sharper.

But dangerous acts can and do go wrong in front of an audience hungry for blood. The founding member of the Flying Wallendas, a family of stunt performers who performed often without safety nets, fell to his death at age 73 during a highwire walk that was broadcast on nationwide TV. Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy was mauled by a tiger during what became the duo’s final show. DiCintio recalled, too, a husband-and-wife duo famous for appearing to catch bullets in their teeth, “until one day they didn’t” due to a misfired gun.

Like carnies, looksmaxxers mostly associate with their own kind. They speak their own odd language that distinguishes members of the in-group and doesn’t make a ton of sense to outsiders, attaching “-maxx” to the ends of words that function on their own. (“Showermaxxing” is just showering.) Looksmaxxers compete to “outmog” each other (to look hotter in side-by-side appearances). They attempt to avoid “cortisol spikes,” stressful or embarrassing moments on livestreams. Women who aren’t attractive (or attracted) to them are “foids,” a blend of “female” and “humanoid” meant to offend. “Jester” is a verb, noun and adjective; all are undesirable manifestations of a lack of serious commitment to the pursuit of maxxing. And like sideshow performers, looksmaxxers travel together and settle in the same places –– for looksmaxxers, it’s Miami.

But a few decades ago, California’s Venice Beach was the destination for a type of proto-looksmaxxer. Outdoor fitness enthusiasts evolved into bodybuilders, who, like looksmaxxers, fixated on their bodies and adhered to a rigid, extreme interpretation of masculinity often achieved by using steroids and substances.

Massive musclemen were considered freakish for their extreme body modification, too, but their true, subconscious goal was to gain each other’s approval, said bodybuilding historian John D. Fair. In gyms they found a place to gather in person. Based solely on his livestreams, Clavicular’s circle appears to mostly hang out in his cavernous Miami apartment while he plays “crypto casino games” on camera. They also make brief visits to clubs where the star is too young to drink.

“Although one of the reasons I started lifting was to impress women, I found that women constantly complained they were not impressed by big muscles, but men were,” said Fair, a former bodybuilder.

Whatever connection looksmaxxers share is skin-deep. In looksmaxxing forums, young, unfamous people take turns asking each other what’s wrong with them physically and how they recommend “fixing” those perceived flaws. Improving their physical appearances in theory should help improve their romantic prospects and even professional opportunities, said Kyle Ganson, assistant professor at the University of Toronto who’s studying looksmaxxing. But looksmaxxers mostly define themselves by what other looksmaxxers think of them, which mainly happens online.

“There’s something about the need for looksmaxxers to be conspicuous to one another as opposed to something like a performer, who’s doing it because it’s their vocation,” DiCintio said.

By his own metrics, Clavicular is a looksmaxxing success. He’s surrounded by young, beautiful women and beefy men who seem more interested in his camera crew than Clavicular’s dick jokes or speeches about testosterone cycles and facial harmony. He’s told the New York Times that he suspects he’s sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone and alluded to not necessarily enjoying the act of sex. (And yet on a livestream this week, Clavicular joked about hosting a contest whose winner would become pregnant with his child; he said he doesn’t plan to be an involved parent.) On the “Adam Friedland Show,” he said he lasts about one minute during intercourse. On a recent stream with a group of octogenarians, he confessed his lack of “game” with women –– “when it comes to talking to girls, it’s pretty brutal” –– and that he leverages his fame to get them into bed.

At last week’s club opening, Clavicular, who said he was less than 24 hours sober, was still glued to his phone while the clubgoers danced. He was reading livestream comments and waiting for a text from his dad, whom he’d invited to the opening. His father didn’t show before the livestream ended.

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