clavicular: a picaresque internet personality

things right now 59—week of 2.9.26

Source: @williambanks_

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fast takeoff

There were two stories of breakout stardom in the final months of 2025: Connor Storrie and Hudson Williams of Heated Rivalry fame—the "gay hockey show"—and the Kick streamer Clavicular, the tip of the spear for the mainstream relevance of the looksmaxxing movement. What unifies all three is that they are attractive, physically fit young men; their fandoms skew young and are powered by niche internet subcultures (looksmaxxing for Clav and fujoshi—young women who consume fictional content about gay men—for the Heated Rivalry boys); and the rise to fame of all three has been powered by episodic social media moments.

The fast-takeoff celebrity has been missing from the cultural landscape for some time. Possibly because Hollywood's extreme risk aversion has rewarded slowburn trajectories. You had to achieve some status as a niche internet micro-celebrity before you could get a major project greenlit. Thus, new "young" celebrities for youth audiences have been conspicuously old. Charli XCX has been around since MySpace. Her first solo hit was the single "Boom Clap," featured on the soundtrack of the 2014 film The Fault in Our Stars. When Brat debuted in 2024, Charli was 31 and had been a niche internet micro-celebrity for over a decade. Rachel Sennott was a Twitter personality in 2018. By the time her show I Love LA premiered in 2025, she was already 30. (A main complaint about the show was that Girls-for-Gen-Z mainly featured millennials.)

In contrast, Connor Storrie is 25, Hudson Williams is 24, and Clavicular is 20.

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• Zero-to-NYT or Joe Bernstein profiles Clavicular for The New York Times

• Breakout Stardom or Hudson Williams' and Connor Storrie's follower count

• Fujoshi or straight consumption of gay content

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anointed vs. ascended

Clavicular is the most interesting of all these figures if only because his "ascension," as he would put it, is happening despite mainstream condemnation. By comparison, Storrie and Williams were both immediately anointed by Hollywood: signed by CAA, invited to every major awards-season show, courted by brands like Armani and Saint Laurent, and featured as Olympic torchbearers.

Despite their Skinemax debut, the Heated Rivalry boys have taken a decidedly middlebrow path to fame, appearing in publications like GQ, Men's Health, and Interview; Clavicular has embraced a lowbrow trajectory, which isn’t really surprising. Is there anything young (straight) men like in America that isn’t taboo?

Ironically, though, the lowbrow lane oftentimes leads to highbrow coverage. The New York Times, The Guardian, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic have all written takedowns, with Thomas Chatterton Williams' opening volley in his piece in The Atlantic perhaps the most sweeping in its denunciation of Clavicular and the movement he has come to symbolize:

The so-called looksmaxxing movement is narcissistic, cruel, racist, shot through with social Darwinism, and proudly anti-compassion. As the name suggests, looksmaxxers share a monomaniacal commitment to improving their physical appearance. They trade stories of breaking their legs in order to gain extra inches, 'bonesmashing' their faces with hammers to heighten their cheekbones, injecting steroids and testosterone to inflate their muscles, and even smoking crystal meth to suppress their appetite. If you had to pick a single corner of the internet that best captures the vices of the Trump era, you couldn't beat the looksmaxxers. Perhaps more than any other group, they reveal the depth of the moral crisis that confronts young men today.

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• Vice Signaling or conservative-coded culture

• Grifting or Clavicular's Looksmaxxing Academy

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looksmaxxing

Looksmaxxing isn’t so new. Neither is the term mogging that’s risen to prominence with it. Both are downstream of the Pick-Up Artist (PUA) subculture that has been receiving media coverage since the Rolling Stone contributing editor Neil Strauss wrote a New York Times bestseller on the subject in 2005: The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists.

Looksmaxxing and mogging (or being the Alpha Male Of the Group) were both born in the cauldron of PUA forums roughly a decade ago. I first came in contact with the terms via Doomscroll’s Josh Citarella. (He also introduced me to the concept of mewing—a tongue posture technique used to align the face and reshape the jawline.)

But a decade ago, moral panic was directed at the rise of fillers, Botox, and other injectables among young women, inspired by influencer culture, especially the Kardashian-Jenner clan. I distinctly remember being at a party where a twentysomething Angeleno was bragging to anyone who would listen that Kim Kardashian had been copying her face.

Today, this has become so common as to be passé. We chortle at Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s “MAGA face.” Plastic surgeons on TikTok play guess-the-age-of-this-face, as 20-year-old girls now have the faces of 35-year-olds.

Looksmaxxing, like Instagram face before it, is powered by the popularity of a new class of drugs: peptides. Introduced to the American public under the banner of GLP-1s—weight-loss drugs like Ozempic (semaglutide) and Mounjaro (tirzepatide)—a whole class of unregulated grey-market “Chinese peptides” address all manner of ailments and hedonistic desires. There are peptides for energy and peptides for hair loss. There are peptides for collagen production and peptides for muscle growth.

At cocktail bars, people in Los Angeles casually recommend their peptide dealers, if only as an opportunity to brag about the celebrities their dealer services.

There may be risks. Clavicular may report being infertile at 20. But the body has replaced the garment as the fixation of fashion. Or as Rick Owens put it:

“Working out is modern couture. No outfit is going to make you look or feel as good as having a fit body. Buy less clothing and go to the gym instead.”

Looksmaxxing is the avant-garde of style inasmuch as style is the art of self-presentation and appearance.

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• PUA Origins or Neil Strauss' The Game

• Infertilitymaxxing or steroid use

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the picaresque internet personality