Looksmaxxing: When the Search for the “Perfect Male Look” Becomes Life-threatening

Do you know what looksmaxxing is? What are Adam, Chad, Amog, mog, who is Clavicular or who is Kareem Shami? If not, this is a text that could literally save the life of one of your loved ones. Or maybe you. Especially if you are the parent of a boy.

I believe that if you are a young Gen Z man, or even a girl, these terms mean something to you and evoke some emotion. For older people, for parents, Gen Z and Gen Alpha, these might just be some incomprehensible slang codes. But these codes endanger someone's life.

Looksmaxxing is a term that means “enhancing attractiveness”, and it applies mostly to men. We will not hear of a girl being looksmaxxed, although interventions – from hairstyles and makeup to facial surgeries in women – are also a form of looksmaxxing. And here, we are talking about enhancing external attractiveness. Not learning how to charm girls with intellect, good looks, flair, erudition… this is work on yourself, but not work on strengthening your intellectual and spiritual capital, social and emotional intelligence, but focusing exclusively on external appearance, on what men think attracts women.

These include a strong jaw, which is a very important criterion for looksmaxxers, strong eyebrows, muscle tone, reducing the body to pure muscle mass, fat tissue is undesirable, eyes should be narrow and with a cold look, never wide open and large, it is too feminine. Also, traits that are not valued in this looksmaxx community are romanticism, gender equality, giving flowers probably, patience and the desire to be heard and listened to. In short, these are the men we used to call slobs, assholes and *fuckers. Today, these are called alpha males and are part of the story of the manosphere, that rabbit hole of celebrating aggressive masculinity and celebrating the abuse of women, which often leads to the creation and sharing of pornography (real intimate shots or those made with undress apps and other AI tools like Grok) and to femicide.

Looksmaxxing: Why Parents Need to Understand This Viral Movement Before It's Too Late – Clavicular and Everything Else You Need to Know

After the manosphere of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson and a number of others, after YouTube videos about stoicism, discipline and focus that also contribute to creating a wrong view of gender relations (women are the ones who are unfocused, not stoic, cannot bear the burden of life, and men should bear everything stoically and focused, without showing emotions, without breaking down), we came to a person named Braden Peters, known as Clavicular.

He is an American livestreamer who became famous for promoting an extreme movement called looksmaxxing – the idea that men can achieve social and sexual status by radically improving their physical appearance. In its contents, it talks about practices such as taking steroids, extreme diets or even pseudoscientific methods such as “bone smashing”, i.e. hitting the bones of the face (with a hammer) in order to allegedly make them more pronounced. His pseudonym refers to the collarbone (clavicle), because in this internet subculture the width of the shoulders and the length of the collarbone is a symbol of a desirable male physique. Peters has become a viral and controversial figure on social networks, where his ideas attract a young audience, but also cause serious criticism for promoting dangerous and pseudoscientific practices. Well, yes – he is 20 years old. And he is friends with the American ultra-right activist, Nick Fuentes. There is also a video of Clavicular and the young men around him singing Heil Hitler.

Clavicular is not the only Looksmaxxer. Another famous one is Kareem Shami. All of them often document their process – from a boy, often chubby, to a looksmaxxer. And in fact, all men undergo this change during puberty and youth, even without intervention. The problem is that these influencers teach boys to hate their faces and to speed up the process of creating masculine facial features and a masculine body. There are forums discussing how to lookmaxxate. There are attractiveness and rating scales, PSL scales – are you Chad, normal or unattractive – subhuman. This puts a lot of pressure on young men, especially developing boys. Insecurities, fears and peer violence, crude jokes transform into an obsession with appearance, and ultimately misogyny.

So, via streams, mostly on Kick and TikTok, but a lot of it spills over to Facebook and Instagram, Clavicular also advocates hardmaxxing – extreme actions aimed at improving his appearance. According to his confessions, he had facial bones broken with a hammer so that, when they regenerate, they would become stronger and give him a more masculine appearance, then he had leg lengthening, a painful surgery with a slow recovery to make him taller, and because he started using anabolic steroids very early, he is allegedly infertile and his body can no longer produce testosterone naturally. He said this himself, we cannot know if it is true without clear evidence. He also told his followers how he took crystal meth to suppress his appetite and stay slim, maintaining maximum muscle mass with a very low percentage of body fat, which he considers a desirable appearance.

He's not alone. Plenty of young men are trying, at least in some milder form, to apply some elements of this pseudoscience and crazy doctrine. Essentially, we've got a movement that's doing to boys and men what women have been experiencing for generations – understanding their worth solely through their appearance, the pressure to look their best, to be slim enough, masculine/feminine enough, all according to the taste of the time – in order to be sexually desirable. Which is really bizarre and absurd if you don't have natural testosterone.

But this is served to boys in their teenage years, when they are discovering themselves and when their bodies are forming. It is not normal for a 14-year-old to take anabolic steroids and they should not, in fact, they should not. And for boys, young men in their teens, twenties, the face is not yet fully formed. The body of a teenager is just forming, the face is just getting that jaw, the facial bones. And he should not look like a Hollywood actor at 45. And for all those guys, including Henry Cavill – well, they need to find pictures of them when they were 13-25 and show them to all those boys who are trying to literally change their appearance by destroying themselves. We need to teach children what the normal maturation process is and how puberty changes facial features.

Let's be clear – in looksmaxxing there is also softmaxxing – which includes what we call face and body care and going to the gym. Use of properly selected cosmetics, serums. What millennials called metrosexuals. And that's great. You should definitely support men who take care of their appearance, choose clothes carefully, have at least one fine suit, use face cream and serum, do pedicures and manicures, and have well-polished nails. But here we are now talking about extreme activities with the aim of getting as many sex partners as possible, being desired, without investing in intellect, reading books, knowing culture and art, and at the same time advocating extreme activities – from the use of drugs and anabolics, reshaping facial features to, of course, unprotected sex. Advocating superficiality without brains or charm.

All this is reminiscent of a film brought to a distorted, grotesque reality. A satire of yuppie and neoliberal Randian and cannibalistic capitalism in the movie American Psycho, with the great Christian Bale in the role of investment banker Patrick Bateman, a serial killer. Let's just remember the scene of his morning routine, which crosses the line of perfectionism into the world of psychopathological perfectionism. But this film was not created to be the scenario of the world for us. He was a metaphor, a warning and a satire.

Looksmaxxers are not gentlemen. A real man protects the weaker, does not make fun of, knows how to deal with his flaws, both physical and character, works on himself intellectually and spiritually. He reads books. This is a form of body dysphoria that, through social media channels, imposes impossible and distorted standards of attractiveness on millions of boys. All with the promise that they will be *fuckers* and that this is something to strive for. Just as women have been taught for generations that they are only valuable if they are worthy of attention, to be a sexual object, sexually desirable. This is also a consequence of the spread of the sorority-fraternity American subculture through social media, something that has never been represented or a trend in our country.

A small dictionary of manosphere and lookmaxxing

Let's go back to the beginning of the story and a few terms you need to know and mention them here. Most of them originate from meme and incel culture and the lookmaxxing community. Incels, although I believe most of you are familiar with the term, are those men who are condemned to involuntary celibacy, referring to men who believe they cannot achieve romantic or sexual relationships, even though they want to. Online communities that use the term often develop an ideology that claims that physical appearance and “genetics” are crucial for success with women, which is why some members express strong pessimism, resentment or hostility towards society and women. Such forums often use their own jargon (e.g. Chad, Stacy) and develop hierarchies based on appearance and social status.

• Adam – in this slang, means the idealized “first man”, an archetype of perfect male appearance and genetics, an almost mythical reference to physical perfection. Adam is the Chad of Chads.

• Chad – a term for a man who is extremely physically attractive, tall, confident and easily attracts women, so it is used in the incel community as the opposite of an “average” or unattractive man. Let's say Chad is Channing Tatum. One example.

• Mog – a verb meaning to surpass someone in physical appearance or presence, so that the other person looks inferior in comparison. It stands for AMOG.

• AMOG (Alpha Male of the Group) – a term for the dominant male in society who has the highest status and attractiveness in the group, often the one who “beats” other males in social or sexual competition.

• Stacy – a stereotypical name for a very attractive woman who supposedly chooses only the most physically attractive men (“Chads”).

• Normie – a person who does not belong to the incel or looksmaxxing subculture and lives a “normal” social life without an obsession with appearance hierarchies.

• Blackpill – an extremely fatalistic ideology within the incel community that claims that genetic appearance and physical characteristics are almost entirely crucial to romantic and social success.

Lookmaxxing doesn't make a gentleman.

Even the Vatican addressed the subject of this corporal dream of body transformation, in a much broader context of transhumanism, posthumanism, the relationship to technology and humanity.

The irony of the looksmaxxing community is that many appeal to “rationality,” biology, and evolutionary advantage, as if attractiveness is something that can be mathematically optimized through discipline. They call this process of improving appearance “ascension” – a term that directly alludes to Christ’s bodily ascension after his resurrection, thus transforming their aesthetic ideal into an almost religious, surreal idea of ​​perfection.

The problem with looksmaxxing isn't that young people want to look good. People have always wanted to be attractive, it's part of human nature. The problem is that boys today are being sold the idea that their worth is contained solely in their facial bones, shoulder width, and body fat percentage — and that anything is permissible to achieve that image, even breaking their own bodies. In that world, there is no room for character, humor, empathy, knowledge, or culture; there is only a body market in which people are ranked as products.

If all this seems grotesque, almost caricature — remember that exactly such ideas were once satirized in films like American Psycho. What was once a metaphor for the psychopathology of hyper-competitive capitalism is now algorithmically sold to teenagers as a manual for life. The Internet has turned irony into an ideology.

That's why it's perhaps most important that parents, teachers, and adults in general understand the language this subculture uses. Because behind words like Chad, mog, or AMOG is not just internet meme humor, but an entire worldview that teaches boys that they are only valuable if they dominate — with their bodies, status, and women.