Clavicular and looksmaxxing reach their sad, inevitable conclusion

Internet swamp fever dream Clavicular has been charged with rape. Braden Peters, the 20-year-old influencer known online as Clavicular, faces charges of rape, drugging someone for sexual intercourse, and providing alcohol to a person under 21 in Massachusetts, stemming from an alleged May 2025 incident involving a 17-year-old girl. A related civil lawsuit accuses him of injecting the same teenage influencer’s face with a fat-dissolving substance during a livestream without her consent and alleges that he later provided her alcohol and sexually assaulted her. Peters has denied the allegations. His arraignment is scheduled for October 14.

His response to being charged has been about as nuanced and empathy-inducing as Elon Musk operating a chainsaw onstage at a Ku Klux Klan rally while high on coke and ketamine. Peters posted screenshots and videos to social media, accused his accuser of greed, and wrote, “Happens to all successful young men, people try to come for your money.” With that logic, I guess all young women can expect to be drugged and raped by supplement-mainlining influencer man babies who beat their faces with hammers. And we wonder why women are turned off from dating? In another post, he suggested there are better ways to make money than suing someone who doesn't want you. Classy.

The unbearably grim reality of Clavicular’s fame is finally delivering on its promise. Who knew that when a culture makes fake masculinity the ultimate prize, puts young men on steroids and testosterone, encourages them to hit themselves in the face with hammers to improve their jawlines, and turns men like the Tate brothers, who face charges of rape and human trafficking, into masculine role models, it would eventually produce young men facing rape charges of their own?

Clavicular became famous as one of the most recognizable faces of “looksmaxxing,” the online subculture devoted to treating the human body like a defective consumer product in need of constant upgrading, where sharper jaws, bigger muscles, different eyes and improved canthal tilt — whatever that is — become the difference between being desired and discarded, while men stare into cameras with the intensity of Dr. Hannibal Lecter saying, “I ate his liver with some fava beans and a nice Chianti.”

Underneath the jaw measuring is an ideology so empty, so unfunny, so contemptuous of consent and so toxic it feels like something Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump dreamed up under a table at Mar-a-Lago while trying to look up a woman’s skirt: women are blow-up dolls, men are statues, beauty is rage, sex is essentially masturbation with another person’s body, vulnerability doesn’t exist, and your value can be calculated by measuring the distance between your eyes. The objective is not merely to become attractive but to alpha, mog, and dominate, becoming the guy other men fear and women are not even granted the agency to refuse.

Outside of the rape charges, Clavicular and fellow looksmaxxer Hexumlite, whose name makes him sound like a villainous twink written out of Transformers, wandered onto a gay beach in Miami and attempted to explain their sexual cosmology to a bunch of shirtless gay men who absolutely did not ask. Hexumlite announced that he was a “bull,” complained that women had become too picky, explained that he was trying to “beat hypergamy,” and became preoccupied with whether the men thought he looked like a top or a bottom, flexing his bicep while asking whether he looked too small to top. The men largely dismissed them until Hexumlite again asked whether he looked like a bottom; then they finally answered: yes.

The beauty of watching years of manosphere pseudoscience crash into gay men trying to enjoy the beach is unmatched, because suddenly none of the currency works: the muscles establish no dominance, nobody gives a shit about hypergamy, and the hierarchy becomes gibberish. Better still, these heterosexual apostles of optimizing yourself for women become desperately interested in what gay men think of their bodies, muscles, sexual roles and masculinity, until a movement supposedly built around escaping female rejection arrives at two straight men flexing for gay strangers and asking whether they look like bottoms. Congratulations, boys, you maxxed so hard you invented Fire Island.

Human beings have always worried about whether they were attractive enough, strong enough, rich enough, or masculine enough, because congratulations, welcome to being alive, but somewhere along the way we decided straight men deserved an industrial complex devoted to treating adolescent insecurities as profound cultural grievances. Women have spent generations being told to starve, inject, and slice themselves into acceptability, while queer people know exactly how dangerous failing somebody else’s masculinity test can become, but give a straight teenage boy a weak chin and suddenly civilization itself has failed him. Every insecurity gets a storefront, every rejection becomes evidence of a rigged sexual marketplace, and every woman who doesn’t want you becomes proof the world has denied you something you were apparently owed. Nobody makes money telling these boys that puberty is humiliating, rejection hurts, most people eventually find somebody who wants to love them, and none of this requires an ideology; there is considerably more money in telling them their loneliness is evidence of a conspiracy, their face is a medical emergency, and women are the enemy.

Kids, and frankly everyone else in the world, deserve better than having this shit constantly shoved into our faces as an instruction manual for becoming men or for how the rest of us are supposed to receive them. Instead, we have the normal terror of being 15 turned into a sales funnel for testosterone, steroids, misogyny, and body dysmorphia, while grown men get algorithms teaching them that every humiliation they have ever suffered is evidence that they are physically defective and every disappointment is somebody else’s fault.

I feel sorry for the women expected to become dead-eyed dolls, therapists for grown men, punching bags and supporting characters in somebody else’s masculinity crisis, and for queer people who spent our lives being told we were doing gender incorrectly only to discover that the men supposedly doing it correctly are hitting themselves with hammers and asking strangers at gay beaches whether they look like bottoms. Mostly, I’m just tired of knowing who these idiots are.

I’m tired of living in a culture where, after all of this, Clavicular was awarded the opening walk at the 424 show at Paris Fashion Week. Build a following around looksmaxxing, become notorious for misogyny, homophobia, and racial provocation, spew neo-Nazi garbage with Nick Fuentes, and somebody will eventually decide what you really need is a runway in Paris.

At this point, I can only hope the ones convicted of these crimes eventually find themselves somewhere without access to cell phones, the internet, or hammers. Actually, maybe keep using the hammers on yourselves. Just please stop filming it.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness.

Opinion is dedicated to featuring a wide range of inspiring personal stories and impactful opinions from the LGBTQ+ community and its allies. Visit Advocate.com/submit to learn more about submission guidelines. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on any of our stories. Email us at voices@equalpride.com. Views expressed in Voices stories are those of the guest writers, columnists, and editors, and do not directly represent the views of The Advocate or our parent company, equalpride.