Let's Be Adults

I just read the GQ profile of Clavicular on his trip to New York to walk for Fashion Week. This came out two days after Adam Friedland's interview with Clavicular dropped on YouTube, which the profile makes mention of. A week earlier Adam Friedland was on sports and culture reporter Pablo Torre's podcast where the two discussed the former's upcoming interview with Clavicular for the first half of the episode. The day after that episode dropped the New York Times published its own profile of Clavicular while he was streaming from Arizona State University. Guys, what the fuck are we doing?

For those who the name Clavicular does not ring a bell, which, honestly God bless, he's a 20 year-old Kick (red pill Twitch) streamer who's gone viral for his insane looksmaxxing routine which includes punching himself in the face to create a more chiseled bone structure and injecting a slurry of chemicals to counteract things like anxiety, hair loss, and an inability to produce testosterone due to early-age steroid use. Looksmaxxing is an internet subcommunity with ties to incel culture that is comprised mostly of young white men who are obsessed with becoming hotter ("ascending" in their parlance) because they believe how you look is the number one determinant of your quality of life. It's extreme, it's sad, it's a little head scratching to me why we're so willingly captivated by it all. Based on the recent spate of press, we can't get enough of this Clavicular guy, or the coterie of nihilistic Gen Z moggers who trail in his wake.

To be clear, I don't have a problem with any singular piece of coverage on Clavicular, or the broader looksmaxxing movement in general, part of a culture journalist's job is holding a mirror to the more unseemly facets of the human condition and mining their roots for understanding. What bothers me is the fact that over the past two months there have been upwards of 10 such profiles covering this stuff in prestige rags of record ranging from the aforementioned GQ and New York Times to Rolling Stone, The Atlantic, and New York Magazine. For context, as of today Clavicular has 188k followers on Kick. One could look at that number and say, wow, that's a lot of people, which has some truth to it. But another way to look it at is in terms of the 16.5 million white males between the ages of 15 and 24 that live in the US, meaning that the audience on Clavicular's primary channel accounts for barely 1% of his presumed target demo, and that's assuming every one of his subs is in fact in said target demo, which is probably extremely generous. Back in November Clavicular's Kick audience was only 60k, so he's grown over 300% over 4 months, a scary trend, only, how much of a trend would this be if we weren't writing endless handwringing think pieces about his grotesquerie and obsessively ripping clip farm edits of him on TikTok and IG Reels? Basically what I'm asking is, is Clavicular's popularity the byproduct of a concerning swell in youth body dysmorphia or the agape gawking of adults? For sure a bit of both, but, as with most moral panics concerning children, I put the onus of the blame on the latter.

I'm just sick of hearing about this stuff honestly. I don't think we're diagnosing the problem any better, I don't think we're helping things by talking about it so much. Instead I think we're signaling to the very teenagers we're talking about that we don't know what the fuck's going on either and have no plausible alternatives to offer in place of these sham idols. My personal view is that most kids are probably fine and have never even heard of Clavicular, or think he's a creep. This is roughly what my teenage twin cousins had to say when I asked them about the PSL scale at Christmas this year, "Oh yeah, I've seen that on TikTok, it's weird." Period, end of story. And even among his followers, how many of them will eventually grow out of this infatuation? How much dumb shit did you believe/read into at 19 that you don't think about at all now? It's us, the adults in the room, that can't look away. Which is why the most shameful people in the GQ article are actually his publicist Mitchell Jackson and CFWA's 2022 American Emerging Designer of the Year Elena Velez, who Clavicular walked for. What do you mean your clients include Candace Owens and Adam22? Why do you have George Santos and Anna Delvey sitting front row at your fashion show? Guess what guys, you're not Kanye West!

I feel similarly about this recent obsession with Clavicular and looksmaxxing as I did about the spate of gooning articles that cropped up on the internet last year. You're telling me teenage boys are masturbating a lot? Shocking. Or what about Cluely? The viral AI start-up that was enabling its users to "cheat on everything" and supposedly upending how tech companies found customers. Does anyone use it now? Does anyone even care? Two things can be true at once, these can both be troubling signs of a breakdown in our social fabric, and sideshows that should be acknowledged and then ignored in favor of material action and change. My point is that, if we're going to live in an attention economy, then we have to vote with our time. We have to be willing to pull ourselves away from the minutiae of our feeds that keep us inundated with information and constantly cycling through short-term discourse trends. Let's be in it for the long haul. Let's be adults.