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There’s an influencer coming for our teen boys, and the press he’s gotten lately is beginning to rival that of Trump himself: Clavicular, a 20-year-old creator who has crossed over into the mainstream along with the formerly obscure “looksmaxxing” subculture that bore him.
The young man, whose real name is Braden Peters, has been creating social media content since he was 15, mainly for online looksmaxxing forums that focus solely on making yourself the most aesthetically perfect man possible. Now he has over a million combined followers on Instagram and TikTok, where he’s bragged about smashing his face with a hammer so his bones grow back stronger, supplementing testosterone as a teen to man up faster, taking meth to suppress his appetite and sharpen his cheekbones, and wanting surgeries to both rearrange his jaw and elongate his legs. It’s all in the quest of “mogging” — the practice of upstaging other men by looking hotter.
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Clavicular doesn’t mince words when it comes to his skin-deep aspirations. “I would never go back to school,” he said on the Adam Friedland Show recently. “If you’re going to take out hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of loans, you might as well invest it into surgery rather than going to school.”
Plus, he added, “you can actually get college loans and use it for surgery … Misappropriating the funds is not gonna get you in that much trouble. And you’ll mog, so you’ll be able to sort of get out of it.”
Yes, parents, your teen is very possibly following this young man — especially after the flurry of recent media attention he’s received, prompted by such controversies as him hitting someone with his Tesla Cybertruck in a viral stunt and singing and dancing to Ye’s “Heil Hitler” with Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate, as well as hitting the runway last month for New York Fashion Week.
How Worried Should Parents Be?
“It’s a little bit hard to tell how much of this is hype, and how much of it is a little overblown,” says Christopher Pepper, San Francisco school-health educator and co-author of the best-selling Talk to Your Boys.
But while parents don’t “need to panic” about Clavicular or looksmaxxing, Pepper says there is an important lesson to be learned from this cultural moment.
“What parents need to be aware of is the pressure that young people feel to change their looks, to fit trends, and to feel handsome or beautiful,” he says. “A lot of times, people associate that pressure with girls. And girls definitely experience a lot of pressure around body image and concerns about whether they look the way they think society wants them to look. But increasingly, we’re seeing that with boys, too.”
And more and more young men, says Dr. Steven Pearlman, a New York facial plastic and reconstructive surgeon. He says has seen plenty of young adult men coming to see him for a looksmaxxing aesthetic. And while he’s not seen any teens — yet — he’s alarmed.
“The most concerning part of what we are seeing is that some of these techniques involve intentionally creating swelling or trauma to the face” to temporarily mimic sharper cheekbones or a more prominent jawline, either through excessive facial manipulation or pressure.
“When men come in after experimenting with these trends,” Pearlman adds, “many of them realize that what they were chasing online does not translate well in person.”
With these harmful practices, Clavicular is bringing new appearance-related concerns from the fringe into the mainstream. And that’s something for parents to be aware of, says Pepper.
“Like, you’re using a hammer to try and change your facial structure … increasing anxiety about things like the shape of your jawline and the shape of your chest and clavicle [hence the influencer’s name],” he says. “In the past people might have said like, ‘Oh, I wish I had more of a six-pack. I wish my biceps were bigger.’ But he’s introducing a whole new set of anxieties.”
It’s hard enough just to be a young person today, says Pepper, who also writes the Teen Health Today newsletter. “But going through your day being worried about how you’ll be perceived, about what you’re wearing, what your body looks like, about your height, about your muscles, about your facial structure makes your makes living more challenging.”
Know that Algorithms Promote ‘Masculinity Content’
Confident your son wouldn’t seek out looksmaxxing content? That doesn’t mean it won’t go looking for him.
“If they are on social media, the algorithm will promote masculinity content to them, whether they look for it or not,” says Pepper, who was involved in a Common Sense Media report on the topic last year. It found 73 percent of teen boys regularly encounter masculinity-related content online that was pushed into their feeds by recommendation algorithms. Messages that show up repeatedly are about “making money” (44 percent), “building muscle” (39 percent), and “fighting or weapons” (35 percent).
Other content pushed to boys deals with outdated gender roles around dating, and the age-old belief that showing emotions makes you weak. At the same time, the report showed, more than a quarter of teen boys are battling loneliness.
Content around body image can be particularly harmful for a young man just before or after puberty. “They can feel pretty insecure about their looks and don’t necessarily have a lot of body confidence,” says Pepper. “So these kinds of messages can really affect a young person if they hit at that time. “
What Parents Can Do In the Face of Looksmaxxing
First, help your kid look at the content in their feeds with some healthy skepticism. Bodybuilding and other image-based content is often paired with a marketing scheme — workout programs or protein powder, for example. Clavicular offers membership into his private online for $49 (something the director of Young Men Research Project tried for a Rolling Stone article, reporting back with, “What I saw should frighten us all.”)
You might want to just sit down with your teen and have them take you through the accounts that they follow, talking about why and what each content creator believe in. Have them ask questions: “Who is this messenger? Are they trying to sell me something? What is the message they’re trying to get across, and do I agree?”
Talking to them and keeping two-way conversations flowing is vital, Pepper says, and what inspired him to write his book. “Boys want advice. They want guidance. And when they’re not getting it from caring adults in their own lives, they are going online and looking for advice,” he adds. “Often, they have questions about how to look better or how to get bigger muscles. And as soon as you put those into a search bar or go on social media looking for answers like that, you start to get a curated feed. You get answers, but they’re often from people who don’t have your best interests in mind.”
Express Unconditional Love
Perhaps the most important thing to talk to your boys about, says Pepper, is how you love them free of judgment.
“You just want to make sure that the boys in your life know that you love them the way they are — that their body is fine the way it is,” he says.
“Reassure them that almost everyone has things about themselves that they wish they could change,” he adds, but that part of the process of becoming an adult is “learning to accept things about yourself that you can’t change and realizing that people will like you the way you are. And that one of the best things they can do is develop some confidence in the body that they’re in.”
