For a while, my TikTok “For You” page was riddled with the trend that everyone’s talking about: looksmaxxing. My feed was overcome with videos using the PSL scale to rank people, explaining bonesmashing, and promoting peptide injections. And of course, the man leading the army of young incels exploring this typically female-dominated field of relentless beautification, Clavicular, was everywhere. Clavicular, legally called Braden Peters, is a twenty-year-old streamer (named for his shoulder width that is apparently akin to that of a clavicle) who has devoted his life to looksmaxxing and spreading the looksmaxxing gospel.
Eventually, my TikTok feed evolved, and I began to see looksmaxxing content that was framed in a different light. What I began to see were emotionally-stirring edits of Clavicular.
“Edit” is now the seventh most popular search term that surfaces when you type “Clavicular” into the TikTok search bar. Put to Alex G songs and color-graded with care, these videos splice together some of Clavicular’s more vulnerable moments on camera, such as clips of him saying “I don’t think that anyone will really ever understand me” and sitting on a date with controversial Internet personality Woah Vicky. Comments on these edits read: “Clav might be the most complex character in nonfiction,” “i’m too much of an empath for this,” “why do we feel bad for him?”
It’s clear why we feel bad for him. It’s shocking and heartbreaking to witness someone with such glaring, debilitating insecurities inflict harm upon themselves for reasons we may not understand, but can relate to.
But, that’s not the question I’m interested in. I’m wondering this: Why don’t we feel bad for Liv Schmidt?
If you’re unfamiliar with Liv Schmidt, she’s a widely-hated diet-promoting influencer. She’s essentially the female version of Clavicular. She gained popularity by posting controversial content teaching girls how to become “skinni” using highly restrictive portion control strategies. A lot of her advice is typical diet culture messaging, but it certainly leans towards the extreme. And, the snarky, Regina George-style delivery of her counseling doesn’t help.
These days, Schmidt can’t be found on TikTok. After countless nutritionists and pseudo-nutritionists made commentary videos about her unhealthy habits, she was banned from TikTok for good. Her once inescapable presence is now untraceable. Though, she and her “Skinni Societe” are still permitted in the realms of Instagram and Youtube, where she is highly active. Her short-form and long-form videos tout commentary that invokes the same feeling of the 2000s, Kate Moss, heroin-chic era.
But while the undereating Schmidt was promoting on the app that banned her comes with serious health risks, it’s not like she was posting videos of herself smashing her cheekbones with a mallet.
So while an influencer like Schmidt gets ridiculed and cancelled for promoting eating disorders, Clavicular instead gets our compassion — why?
I think the answer is a gendered one that is completely to do with the way that women have been conditioned to silently endure the pain of beauty standards. Those who digitally express sympathy towards Clavicular and turn his content into dramatized edits are mostly women. Women who understand what it’s like to be a woman existing in the patriarchy. Women who understand what we don’t say but all have come to believe because of One Direction songs, the “cool girl” movie trope, and men who tell us they like “natural” makeup: no one is supposed to know that you put effort into being beautiful. You’re not supposed to say that that you’ve been eating less, or that you want to be skinnier (or “skinni,” à la Liv Schmidt?). We, women, know what it’s like to be a woman who wants to be smaller, so maybe we don’t feel the need to waste our sympathy on Liv. She is us.
In the Middle Ages, women viewed the male body as more divine than the female body, and thus they likened their female forms to the suffering body of Christ, rather than to that of female religious figures. A twelfth century prayer book made for Bonne of Luxembourg, the Duchess of Normandy, features an artistic rendition of the Wound of Christ, and it is unmistakably vaginal.
In Clavicular, twenty-first century Internet-duchesses seem to have found a new male body to represent their pain.
The female fascination with Clavicular is heightened by the element of surprise that comes with watching a man behave in the typically female-coded way that Clavicular does. It feels foreign to see a man care as much about outward appearance as we do, and furthermore to express that affliction so vulnerably. Frankly, women crave men who show the vulnerability that Clavicular so, even if it comes with a violent hit to the cheekbone. At least, they are intrigued enough by this vulnerability to turn it into artfully crafted content. They shame Schmidt while her skin grows closer to the bone, and they hold Clavicular through the screen as he grows in popularity.
Again, this begs the question, if Liv began bonesmashing, would people give her their sympathy? Would there be edits of her lonely frame set to songs by Hole rather than Alex G? Or — would she be seen as just another vapid woman obsessed with botox and Ozempic and IV drips and lip injections and vibration plates and microneedling and red light therapy and liposuction?
Maybe it is less black and white, though. Liv is cruel. She calls other women pigs with a smile plastered on her face. Clavicular’s content is quieter — the way he speaks about his insecurities influences people by showing rather than telling. Any empathetic person can pick up on his sadness and see that the content Clavicular creates is tragically harmful not only to himself, but to the entire community of young people who are so tethered to this frame of mind that they have devoted an online forum to it. With his openness about his self-consciousness, Clavicular may just be the face men want to see in the midst of the alleged “male loneliness epidemic.”
And within that “manosphere,” beautification is allowed to exist in a masculine way under the guise of “science,” as looksmaxxer men are aware of and fixate on every numerical angle and ratio that their face contains. It feels less like an art, as self-modification does for women, and more like a data-driven pursuit. So that men can feel less ashamed. For women, being openly looks-obsessed is seen as frivolous. Cleverly, men found a branding that avoids this.
In A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft advocates for women to be treated equally. While it is an incredibly rich text and one that was highly important to the women’s rights movement, Wollstonecraft is not at all sympathetic to women who are unaware that they are suffering under patriarchy. She shames them for spending their time appeasing men, being weak, and focusing on being beautiful. Wollstonecraft is angry that these women won’t make sacrifices, that they won’t conceal their girlish desires. Her vindication was written in 1781, so I can’t call up Mary. But if I could, I would ask her if it’s true that she didn’t have these girlish desires at all. Did she really remove herself so completely from the patriarchy that she didn’t care about being beautiful? Or, did she just push those desires out of sight?
Looksmaxxing as a whole feels like that now-deleted viral tweet that says “men do shrooms once and discover the same things 13 year old girls have discovered alone in their bedrooms.” Women are fed up with Liv Schmidt and her insecurities because they know them all too well. What’s interesting about pitying someone you see so much of yourself in, someone promoting the very thing most women spend their time trying to ignore? To truly and publicly sympathize with Liv Schmidt, we would have to give sympathy to the part of ourselves that wants to listen when Schmidt suggests to split a side salad with a friend and have green tea for “dessert.” Maybe we’re not ready to admit that, to direct our empathy towards ourselves through the mirror that Schmidt gives us.
Maybe, it’s just easier to thrust our burdens and our deepest insecurities upon a twenty-year-old boy than it is one of us.