Bones, Drugs 'N' Disharmony: The Sad World of Looksmaxxing
The life, times, and fable of Clavicular and his ilk.
If you are a man of a certain age - let’s saaaay 44 as of last month - your relationship with your body is relatively uncomplicated. You look in the mirror, notice your hairline is retreating faster than the French at the first sign of conflict, so you sigh, pat your slight beer gut, and go about your day. You’re a potato with a mortgage. It’s not perfect, but it is a system that has sustained human civilization for centuries. Your body is no longer a temple, unless you include those decrepit, crumbling ones from Indiana Jones.
But leave it to the internet, with its hyper-insecure teenage boys, silicon-valley algorithms, and penchant for existential dread usually reserved for German philosophers or emo bands. Their dads waited until forty-five to have a midlife crisis, wile these lads have chosen despair 20 seconds into puberty.
For millions of young men, looksmaxxing is a religion. It is an online subculture dedicated to maximizing one’s physical attractiveness through a series of increasingly unhinged pseudo-scientific rituals. We are not talking about getting a nice haircut, putting on some deodorant, and learning how to ask a girl about her day. No, no. That requires leaving your room. Possibly even developing a personality. Unthinkable.
According to looksmaxxing theology, your entire worth as a human male is dictated by your biacromial diameter - the scientific term for the distance between your shoulder joints. If you have wide collarbones, you are a god. You have the "V-taper." “Get a deep V and you’ll be deep in V.”
In the dark, damp corners of these forums, having narrow clavicles is treated like a terminal diagnosis. It means you are doomed to look narrow, sloping, and inherently beta. You don’t have a torso; you have a wire coat hanger that has been stepped on by a heavy boot.
“I’m sorry, Julian from Croydon. I’ve looked at your photos. You’ve got a lovely personality, a master’s degree in chemistry, and you’re a very nice lad... but your clavicles are off-centre by 0.8mm. It’s over for you, mate. Back to the basement. Don’t forget to shackle yourself.”
Into this void of absolute, unadulterated insecurity stepped a young man who didn’t just participate in the subculture. He branded himself after it. A content creator known to his millions of followers simply as… Clavicular.
Clavicular is an absolute titan in the looksmaxxing community. He’s to the looksmaxxers what Elvis is to rock ‘n’ roll or what Zack Polanski is to erotic hypnotism. A figure too big for his movement. He wasn’t just posting standard gym progress; he was a self-styled "aesthetic consultant." Or what people over 30 call a closet homosexual. On his streams, which pull millions of views, he would look at photos of his desperate, teenage viewers, draw red geometric lines across their shoulders like he was evaluating a piece of prime real estate on a building site, and tell them exactly how "sub-optimal" their skeletons were. It was Grand Designs, except Kevin McCloud tells you that your ribcage has brought shame upon your bloodline. And then, of course, he would sell them the solution.
For the low, low price of a monthly subscription or a PDF download, Clavicular would teach these boys his secret methods for "widening" their frames. He’s like a Tate brother with a bleached asshole.
But here’s the problem with building a career, an empire, and an entire business model on being a flawless, genetically superior specimen: you actually have to be one. You can lie on a CV. You can't lie on a skeleton. Well, you can if you sleep with Kate Moss, but that’s a story for another day.
Anyone can pose for a photo under perfect lights and edit it to within an inch of fiction. Anyone can read a script drafted by a team of writers, specifically oriented to make them appear as charming as Byron. When nobody’s looking, a myth can be maintained with ease. On the internet, the truth has a horrible, stubborn habit of leaking out. Usually because a teenager with three monitors and zero girlfriends has decided to make it his life’s work.
It turned out that the high priest of wide shoulders, the man who was charging young lads fifty quid a pop to diagnose their skeletal failures, was utilizing some very old-school, very embarrassing digital magic: lens distortion, extreme camera angles, and aggressive video editing software. The classic starter set to catfishing. The same toolkit used by every 45-year-old divorcée on Hinge claiming to be 28 and “living their best life.”
The forums started posting side-by-side analyses. And funny enough, whenever Clavicular walked past a doorframe, the wood seemed to warp. Oh no, even his doorframes are looksmaxxing! The bricks on the wall behind him appeared to curve inward, as if his sheer masculine energy was bending the very fabric of spacetime. Every time he flexed, his bedroom became a Salvador Dalí painting.
Unless Clavicular was secretly a mutant with gravitational powers, the conclusion was inescapable: He was photoshopping his torso in real-time video.
