Study outlines the five-stage pipeline Clavicular used to spread “diagnostic masculinity” and looksmaxxing

A recent study explores how an extreme male self-improvement trend known as looksmaxxing moved from obscure internet forums into mainstream public awareness. The research suggests that this spread relies not just on social media algorithms, but on a coordinated system of controversy, short-form video clips, and mainstream media coverage. The findings were published in Journal. Media.

Looksmaxxing revolves around the intense, systematic attempt to maximize a person’s physical attractiveness. Participants often scrutinize their own facial features, such as jawlines and eye angles, using harsh rating systems. The culture encourages men to alter their bodies to climb a perceived social hierarchy, sometimes endorsing dangerous practices.

For example, participants might engage in “bonesmashing,” a pseudoscientific practice involving hitting one’s face with a hammer to supposedly encourage stronger bone growth. Others promote using anabolic steroids or taking crystal meth as an appetite suppressant. These practices are part of what the community calls “hardmaxxing,” which involves intense and painful physical alterations.

Recent research has documented the harms of these online spaces. A 2025 study detailed how looksmaxxing communities subject men to severe critiques of their physical flaws under the guise of self-help. Participants are often made to feel like failures, driving them toward extreme cosmetic interventions.

This connects with another 2025 study indicating that these forums rely on aggressive peer feedback and pseudo-medical language to instruct men on how to correct their perceived shortcomings. These communities initially operated on the fringes of the internet, heavily tied to involuntary celibate, or incel, subcultures. However, a separate 2025 paper demonstrated how niche concepts like looksmaxxing have begun migrating onto mainstream platforms, cloaking their origins behind the language of self-improvement.

The rise of content creators promoting rigid masculine ideals has also drawn attention. In fact, a study covered by PsyPost in 2025 found that following online “manfluencers” tends to increase mistrust and misogynistic beliefs among young men. Building on this progression, the new research aimed to understand exactly how this subculture becomes widely recognizable to the general public.

To investigate how this operates in practice, researcher Dag Øivind Madsen of the University of South-Eastern Norway used a conceptual case study. He focused on Braden Eric Peters, a controversial livestreamer known online as Clavicular. Peters became a prominent face of looksmaxxing in early 2025, taking his alias from the community’s intense focus on clavicle width.

Peters began browsing looksmaxxing forums for up to 14 hours a day during the COVID-19 lockdowns. He openly documented his use of anabolic steroids since age 14, which he claims left him infertile, and was reportedly expelled from college for using performance-enhancing drugs. He gained a massive following by instructing fans on how to “ascend” the social hierarchy through intense physical alterations, even livestreaming himself injecting fat-dissolving peptides into other influencers.

The author analyzed public digital traces surrounding Peters from December 2025 to July 2026. These materials included mainstream media articles, platform profiles across networks like Kick and TikTok, public visibility indicators, and links to paid community sites. The goal was to map how his online persona circulated and gained widespread attention.

Madsen introduces the concept of diagnostic masculinity to explain this phenomenon. Unlike typical influencers who project a desirable lifestyle for audiences to aspire to, diagnostic influencers focus on identifying their viewers’ flaws. These content creators rank bodily deficits and promise that the viewer can purchase coaching to fix them.

Peters exemplified this by selling access to a self-improvement course called the “Clavicular System” for $50 a month. He provided guides on how to become more attractive and which peptides to inject. Through this system and his streaming revenue, he reportedly earned over $100,000 a month, turning male insecurity into a highly profitable enterprise.

The study identifies a five-stage model of containment failure. This term describes how a niche, coded subculture breaks out of its isolated bubble and becomes understandable to the broader public. The first stage, vernacular incubation, involves the community developing its own specific slang, such as “mogging” (being more attractive than someone else) or “foid” (a derogatory term for women).

In the second stage, infrastructural assembly, influencers build a network across multiple platforms. Peters used livestreaming sites to generate hours of raw video, while relying on a network of “clippers” to distribute easily digestible moments on short-form video apps. Many of these clippers were financially motivated, paid by platforms or creator programs to spread the content.

The third stage is controversy acceleration. The author notes that public scandals create dramatic, highly narratable moments that outsiders can easily understand. This brings the influencer to the attention of people who have never heard of looksmaxxing.

Peters generated numerous controversies during his rise to prominence. In December 2025, a livestream clip went viral showing him hitting a man with a Tesla Cybertruck in Miami. He was later filmed singing an antisemitic song in a nightclub alongside far-right figures, was arrested on drug possession and battery charges, and was investigated for shooting a dead alligator on a livestream. In April 2026, he was hospitalized following an on-stream overdose of a dangerous drug cocktail.

These controversies provide fresh material that users can cut into short clips, rapidly spreading the influencer’s face and vocabulary across the internet. This leads directly into the fourth stage, mainstream translation. At this point, traditional media outlets and high-profile commentators step in to decode the subculture for their audiences.

For example, Peters appeared in an interview with conservative commentator Michael Knowles, where he went viral for calling Vice President JD Vance “subhuman” due to his physical profile while praising California Governor Gavin Newsom as a “Chad.” He also appeared on mainstream television, abruptly walking out of a 60 Minutes Australia interview when asked if he was an incel. Even critical profiles in major newspapers helped translate his fringe concepts for everyday readers.

Finally, the fifth stage is parodic consolidation. At this point, the persona and vocabulary become so recognizable that mainstream culture adopts them as a shared public reference point. Terms like “mogging” and the suffix “-maxxing” seeped into everyday public consciousness.

This consolidation was evident when Saturday Night Live aired a sketch mocking the looksmaxxing trend, requiring no background explanation for the audience to understand the joke. Peters even walked the runway at a Paris Fashion Week event in June 2026. Though he faced mockery from locals during the trip, his presence at a high-profile fashion event highlighted how thoroughly the internet subculture had integrated into mainstream media.

There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. The study relies on a single case study of one specific influencer, meaning the exact trajectory might differ for other online figures or subcultures. Public platform metrics, like follower counts or search trends, are also highly volatile and provide only an approximate picture of actual audience size.

Additionally, the research focuses on how the media and platforms distribute these ideas, rather than measuring how deeply everyday viewers actually adopt the underlying looksmaxxing ideology. Future research could explore how ordinary users process and internalize these highly edited video clips.

The study, “Containment Failure, Diagnostic Masculinity, and the Diffusion of Looksmaxxing: The Case of Clavicular,” was authored by Dag Øivind Madsen.