Clavicular is a Kick streamer whose bizarre behavior has been going viral recently. He’s especially known for looksmaxxing, a systematic attempt to maximize attractiveness. Even the New York Times wrote a piece about him. But why do we care? Whether in favor or against, why are people reacting to looksmaxxing?
What is looksmaxxing?
Clavicular goes to extreme lengths to improve his appearance. He hits his cheekbones with a hammer to make them more defined; he takes methamphetamines to stay lean and steroids to get stronger; he even got limb-lengthening surgery to be taller.
He does all these things in the name of “ascension.” The idea is to improve his appearance and ascend into higher confidence, social ease, and sexual prowess. Most of his streams include something to that effect. On average, over 15,000 viewers watch women flirt with Clav outside nightclubs, or watch him “mog” other people by being more dominant and more attractive.
Other times, he talks about looksmaxxing. He offers opinions, rates people’s looks on a scale of 1-10, and provides advice for ascension. He also offers a fairly expensive looksmaxxing academy called Clavicular’s Clan, which includes over a hundred courses on ascension and weekly consultation calls with the man himself.
But Clav’s obvious narcissism and insecurity are not the reason he’s gone so viral. There is something serious happening in his ideas.
Clav’s philosophical system
The real appeal of Clavicular and his content is its fundamental idea: that attractiveness makes life better and easier. To an extent, that’s true. The better-looking you are, the easier your life is—or, as Clav would say, the higher your “sexual market value” (SVM). So it makes some sense to maximize your looks.
But buying into looksmaxxing, at least how Clav does it, means buying into his understanding of existence as a whole, which is a much heavier price. Clavicular treats human life like a big game of Monopoly. As far as he’s concerned (in a twisted kind of utilitarian way) nothing is worth doing unless the return on investment, or ROI, is good.
For example, in a recent interview with the YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, Clav said this about the value of connecting off-stream with a woman simply for the sake of connecting: “But where’s the ROI on that?”
That’s the world Clav’s looksmaxxing requires. In it, all things are measured by how they can increase your success. Since connecting with most people doesn’t make one successful (unless you’re streaming it to thousands of people), it isn’t a good investment
That way of thinking also explains his fixation on looks. In a world where all that matters is making yourself better for your own success, maximizing your looks is almost a secret hack. It’s a way to become more successful in all realms.
Of course, it can and will make you more successful with women, but ultimately, Clav says: “I don’t like when people put too much focus on, like, getting girls as the reason that they looksmaxx because chasing tail is really not gonna get you anywhere […] it’s a mega waste of time.” It’s about success in all realms, not just in sex.
What Clav gets wrong
It may seem obvious that Clav’s philosophy is limited and misguided. But it’s hard to say why.
That’s because his idea that the time or effort you put into something should be less valuable than what you get out of it actually sits on well-trod philosophical territory. In a similar vein, many thinkers have argued that people are inherently selfish and that it’s only natural that we do things to help ourselves. (Most notably, Hobbes, who extended that idea into social contracts).
But Clav takes it a step further: his looksmaxxing implies that it’s not only natural to help yourself exclusively, but it’s also necessary and good. One shouldn’t do anything that has a bad ROI. That means don’t help an old lady across the street, don’t volunteer at a charity or nonprofit, and don’t waste time making other people happy. Those all have bad ROIs.
Instead, you should do the opposite: maximize your looks, your sexual market value, because it has the best ROI. That way, in any situation, your inputs can create more powerful outputs—better jobs, more sex, and an easier life.
He’s right, in a way. Existence consists of producing inputs and receiving outputs. You put effort and time into an interview and get an output: either a job offer or a rejection. And he’s also right that being attractive can boost the value of your outputs.
But that’s where his thinking fails. He doesn’t seem to understand how inputs become outputs, how the effort you put into a date turns into a second date, or not. He doesn’t understand that inputs become outputs by passing through relationships.
It’s our relationships with people, institutions, and everything else that turn our inputs into outputs, our actions into results. So the real best way to maximize your ROI is to improve your relationships. Relationshipmaxxing, not looksmaxxing, will give you the best success. That’s why ugly people succeed all the time—not in spite of their ugliness, but because they have good relationships.
That fact destroys Clav’s whole ROI-driven worldview. Because it’s not about just yourself. It’s about your relationships with other people. Those relationships thrive most when you truly care about the other person. So actually, the best way to maximize your own success is to care about other people and have good relationships with them.
But that’s impossible. You can’t believe that your own success is the only thing that matters while simultaneously caring about other people and your relationships with them. In that way, Clav’s ROI-focused philosophy contradicts itself.
How to understand Clav’s philosophy
Clavicular’s ideas are vain, sexist, and fundamentally flawed. His philosophy invalidates itself because he doesn’t account for the fact that relationships determine success or failure more than anything else, and that physical appearance is just one aspect of relationships.
Of course, there are other issues with Clav. His use of scientific laws and studies to back up his looksmaxxing methods is shaky at best. His use of finance rhetoric like “market value” and “ROI” to describe people is reductive and insulting.
But the most concerning thing about Clav’s flawed philosophy is who gets involved with it. Looksmaxxing grew out of online incel communities. These much-talked-about “involuntary celibates” are typically young, angry men with “extremely poor mental health,” as a recent study found. These are the sort of vulnerable, potentially unstable people who listen to Clavicular and could end up looksmaxxing to such an extreme that they hurt themselves or others.
We don’t have to look far for an example. This past week, Clavicular was in the news for apparently overdosing on stream. He was rushed to the hospital. Since then, he’s tweeted that his experience was “brutal,” which I can only imagine is an understatement. It hasn’t been confirmed what he overdosed on.
But if it can happen to him, it can certainly happen to his followers, many of whom follow his advice about which drugs to take at which dosages.
Clavicular’s philosophy isn’t just self-destructing. Its practitioners could very easily be endangering themselves.
