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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Everyone's favorite looksmaxxer Clavicular was in the news last week due to his appearance in a Miami courtroom for some minor crime or other. What made this event go viral was the general agreement that he was brutally mogged by the surprisingly physically attractive judge.

Now, the odds that Clav just happened to get the best looking judge in the United States on his case are vanishingly small, which means that judge was specifically assigned to him. This follows a pattern I haven't seen anyone really discuss: All the institutions Clavicular has interacted with have sent their most physically attractive representative to deal with him. But doesn't that just validate his worldview? It's like the arguments against his position don't have enough merit to stand on their own. They have to be delivered by an absolute gigachad.

Think of the ABC interview. Like, no shit that guy says he's happy with how he looks. Does he think ABC would have let him anywhere near their precious cameras if he didn't look the way he does? Is it some coincidence that he and his fellow TV presenters tend to be seriously good-looking? Do ugly people just have poor interviewing skills?

What I want to see is the message of character uber alles delivered to Clav by a guy whose appearance makes women want to cross the street. I think he's hit upon something fundamental, but he's putting people off because he's going about it in the most autistic way possible.

I have no clue why everyone continues to dog on that kid? he just seems like an autistic, scared 19-year-old. Care to explain why everyone and their grandmas hate that man in particular to the insane degree that I see online?

he just seems like an autistic, scared 19-year-old

Care to explain why everyone and their grandmas hate that man in particular

Your question answers itself, does it not?

Think of the ABC interview. Like, no shit that guy says he's happy with how he looks. Does he think ABC would have let him anywhere near their precious cameras if he didn't look the way he does? Is it some coincidence that he and his fellow TV presenters tend to be seriously good-looking? Do ugly people just have poor interviewing skills?

This interview is just painful to watch because Clavicular is so devoid of rizz. His whole body language is screaming, "I do not belong here, I'm an imposter!"

Why does every presidential (or royal or constitutional or revolutionary) guard lining the red carpet from foreign leaders’ planes even in average height or short countries like China happen to be some 6’3 beast? Because they assign their 99th percentile height soldiers to that duty. Even North Korea manages to find some tall soldiers for the most iconic parts of the DMZ border.

Everyone knows looks matter. Criticizing Clavicular on those grounds would be delusional. The only way you can get to a ‘freak of the week’ type character like that is a kind of mocking, condescending, relaxed dominance. It’s being hot and having never had to think about it, because you’ve always been hot. Oh yeah little guy, so you hit your face thousands of times? And that’s to get girls to speak to you, pal? Sounds rough.

Oh, you had to try?. Some ugly person saying he’s happy with his looks is often perceived as either insincere or delusional (this is far from always true, but it is what it is).

Indeed. Look at them heightmogging this shortcel. Or whatever gen alpha slang Clavicular's fans would say to describe this.

But yes it looks silly when your soldier or guard looks like a child next to theirs. There was an incident during the Obama administration in which a woman Secret Service agent was shoved out of a doorway by a man breaking into the Whitehouse. She's small, he isn't, he just pushed her out of his way.

What's revolutionary about this? Yes, being attractive has many perks. No, you should not hit your jaw with a hammer to develop a chad jawline.

No, you should not hit your jaw with a hammer to develop a chad jawline.

People keep saying this but nobody ever says why. Even you just said that it has many perks. Why not do it?

It is bad for society to encourage a red queen's race of self torture. Same reason why we should not encourage tiger parents to go overboard with private tutoring and such for their children.

Seems to me that a better parallel is the stuff women do (e.g. wear painful shoes, pluck at their eyebrows) for beauty, and in both cases I'm inclined to leave it up to the individual.

It's very painful, and it's not likely to actually work; more likely it'll just make you look like you got the shit beat out of you. If you want to reshape your jawline to be more chaddish, find an actual plastic surgeon.

he isn't aggressively beating his own jaw lmfao, it's more akin to gua-sha-ing your way through bone smashing, like he sure as hell isn't causing himself serious injury

It’s interesting how this youngblood gets constantly pearl-clutched over.

He basically got Streisand-effected to fame from advising other young men to indulge in a fraction of the vanity, self-absorption, and self-prioritization that women regularly exhibit.

You dare use women’s own spells against them, Peters?

If young men partake in looksmaxxing, it’s because they’re misogynistic incels who falsely believe propaganda espousing that women are shallow. If young women’s primary hobbies revolve around makeup and clothing, it’s because they’re victims of a misogynistic society that Socializes them into thinking they’re only valued for their appearance.

But most people who criticize Clav don't criticize him for trying to become better looking, they criticize him for encouraging men to do dangerous things like using a cocktail of powerful drugs to improve their looks and lower their social anxiety and to hit themselves in the face with a hammer (which is not actually particularly dangerous I think, since the hammer in question is more like a rubber mallet, but the critics don't know that because they don't bother to actually read a lot about looksmaxxing).

The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do. Even most cosmetic surgery, when done by actual doctors, might be less dangerous than Clav's drug habits, although of course all surgery carries some risk of severe injury.

The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do.

Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.

Anorexia Nervosa is often brought up as a result of body dysphoria and mostly impacts women.

A lady in my local area got arrested and made international headlines for Injecting fix-a-flat into womens' buttocks 15 years ago.

The popular "Brazillian Butt Lift" procedure can lead to literal fat necrosis and associated smell. In fact, in searching up that article I just learned that they're allegedly one of the most dangerous procedures around, death rates around 1 in 4000 or worse????

Probably an honorable mention about tanning beds and skin cancer.

There was in fact a recent, award winning horror film about the implications of womens' constant drive for maintaining beauty. The titular substance is a dangerous drug.

But if you want max irony, the 'Body Positivity/fat acceptance' trend, which results from the insistence that you can be beautiful at any size (but only if you're a woman) has seen quite a number of its top advocates die while arguing against the need to pursue standard beauty practices. So in a way, failure to push women to pursue beauty is also getting them killed.

Steroid and other drug use has been offing bodybuilders for decades now (RIP Zyzz), so its a bit hard for me to see Clavicular's regimen as anything but a tiny iteration off pre-existing practices, and ironically probably more practical for the average guy.

You're not describing practices that anyone is condoning.

I'm not sure what you're saying.

Society doesn't condone them? It surely doesn't condone Clavicular either at this juncture.

There's certainly subcultures that push each of the practices.

To be fair to @faceh, a lot of people are at least tolerating them. You can have BBL done at respectable plastic surgery clinics.

But most people who criticize Clav don't criticize him for trying to become better looking

They are, even if they try to find excuses otherwise, as his objective for becoming better looking was explicitly for the goal of attaining women’s attraction, thus implying women’s preferences might be less than perfectly Wonderful. “Looksmaxxing,” the (supposed) movement being seethed about, literally begins with “looks.”

they criticize him for encouraging men to do dangerous things like using a cocktail of powerful drugs to improve their looks

The notion that steroids help you be simultaneously thin and muscular and that stimulants help you be thin was not some magical discovery Ser Braden stumbled upon in the mid-202Xs. Few, if anyone, however, have become so well-known for packaging the two together so explicitly for garnering female attraction.

Many predecessors have discussed steroids and/or stimulants for more nebulous goals such as bodybuilding and sports performance enhancement, but less explicitly in packaging the two together for attracting women. Which goes back to the looks-for-women part. Braden was not supposed to say the quiet part out loud.

lower their social anxiety

Considering how many more women than men are on drugs related to mental disorders, this should be a nothingburger to the extent men look for solutions to mitigate social anxiety. Come to think of it, considering how many girls and women are on hormonal birth control (only for helping with acne and cramps, of course), men leveraging hormone-altering supplementation shouldn’t be a big deal either.

The majority of women's looksmaxxing attempts do not extend to the kind of dangerous practices that Clav encourages men to do.

The encouraged “danger[]” is far overblown. Steroid-use, as practiced by normal gym bros (as opposed to hardcore bodybuilders wanting to be stage-ready) is not that big of a deal at all. At least according to his Wikipedia page, Peters readily admits to a possible linkage between adolescent-steroid usage and infertility, of which his audience is likely aware. I imagine he has expressed similar caveats to his viewers with regard to stimulant use. And like you said, the bone-smashing (more like tapping) probably isn’t doing much of anything good or bad.

J.J. McCullough put out a video a few weeks ago where he talks about a "Freak of the Year" phenomenon he's observed this decade. Since at least 2022, there has been someone who becomes famous out of nowhere for reasons that range from irrelevant to reprehensible, before dropping off the face of the earth. During their brief period of celebrity, the public will gawk at them while various smart people try to argue that they're representative of some larger trend. If you're on the left, Clavicular is representative of toxic masculinity. If you're on the right, he's representative of the insane lengths men feel the need to go to to be attractive to women in our emasculated age. Since nobody actually likes the freaks, you can feel free to use them as punching bags because nobody will come to their defense when push comes to shove, except maybe their online followers, whom the smart people all believe are morons. Clavicular is Freak of the Year 2026; previous freaks have included Nick Fuentes, Hawk Tua Girl, and Andrew Tate. If I were king of this forum, my policy would be to ignore the freaks, because anything that can be said about them is ultimately irrelevant and only feeds into the dumb media narratives that sustain the freaks' existence. Ignore them.

I kind of agree in the sense that the freak himself and what he's proposing should usually not be seriously considered, but the choice of which freak is presented, and how the media talks about him, does reveal a lot about the media (also: Was Trump the "intended" freak of 2016, and represents how this approach can go horribly wrong if you misjudge your own popularity and that of the freak?).

Real OGs remember that Trump was Freak of the Year in 2011

the dumb media narratives that sustain the freaks' existence

The existence of lolcows is not sustained by media narratives. Rather, they exist in their niches of the Internet regardless of media attention.

I think this kind of lolcow can snowball to way more monetary rewards in today's era of streaming, memecoins and online casino deals though. Previous versions of this would come and go without ever really capitalizing on it

Perhaps, but most of them aren't interviewed by respectable journalists or profiled on NPR. That's a media phenomenon.

Fundamentally, men are not allowed to actively and consciously attempt to improve themselves for sexual gain. It’s like women getting plastic surgery, except it’s even worse and more frowned upon. This explains the intensity of the negative reactions to not only Clavicular but to the “manosphere” and “TRP” communities in general.

There was an old 4chan post about how if you need to consciously devise and work towards a strategy to “get women”, you’re already fucked. Normal men don’t have to do that. They just go about their lives and socialize with people naturally and meet women who are attracted to them. I think that’s basically true. If you’re looksmaxxing or doing pickup artistry or anything of the sort, it’s because you’re markedly below average (in terms of sexual value) in some fundamental way. Women understand this (at least subconsciously) and thus are repulsed by looksmaxxing/PUA/etc. There’s a chance that the techniques might actually work and trick them into sleeping with a man who has inferior genes, which would be bad. Women don’t want to sleep with a man who had to work for it; they want the natural winner who just did everything correctly from the start. Women will scream and howl that this isn’t true, but, it is true.

People don’t hate Clavicular because he’s “superficial” or any dumb rationalization like that. They hate him because he’s trying to start an organized movement to upend the natural sexual order. Culturally speaking, we’ve long since been inculcated with the idea that economic upstarts are to be lauded; sexual upstarts, not so much.

There was an old 4chan post about how if you need to consciously devise and work towards a strategy to “get women”, you’re already fucked. Normal men don’t have to do that. They just go about their lives and socialize with people naturally and meet women who are attracted to them. I think that’s basically true.

You're supposed to let women believe this, even if it's not true, and even if it is obviously not true. And it's usually not true.

Fundamentally, men are not allowed to actively and consciously attempt to improve themselves for sexual gain.

Maybe i just exist in a right-wing media bubble but this seems just immediately and obviously false to me. Telling guys to lose whieght, work out, learn a new skill, or pick up a hobby is overwhelmingly the norm, not the exception. If you think self-improvement is toxic/forbidden you might be succumbing to the woke mind-virus

The Pick Up Artists won, I see.

No, I'm not being supercilious. You're just not looking on a broad enough time horizon. Self improvement with the goal of getting the girl is very much a comparitively recent thing borne of PUA/red pill types that, ironically enough, grew out of online dating becoming more and more popular.

Before then, it was very much a case of the idea 'a woman should love me for myself' and vice versa, that love should occur without effort, and other romantic fantasies that don't really bear up to reality.

Saying all of that is 'overwhelmingly the norm' is basically walking through conquered territory and saying there was never a fight.

It's not about self improvement. You're thinking about the man only.

The woman's concept of pair bonding is choice. Choice is hers. Anything that interferes with her agency over her choice in men is to be avoided. So a man visibly making himself into something she would choose, despite this being pretty much normal for most guys who believe they can make themselves more attractive to women is ick and cringe. He should just be something she chooses, not something made into what she chooses, because that implies that he had control and agency over her choice.

Compare and contrast "falling" in love; the key is falling. They want to fall, not grow into love.

I don't think there's any conflict with choice and self improvement here? Men self improving makes them a more appealing choice. The woman is still choosing, but individual men can make themselves more or less better options.

There's also the broader point that people aren't stable. They're almost always growing or degrading one way or another. Being the kind of guy that works hard and goes to the gym will make you wealthy and hot.

Correct, there's no conflict here, but apply the same thing to a man "self improving" by practicing PUA game and suddenly people throw a fit.

...which makes sense, because the PUA/Game materials are overwhelmingly not about self-improvement, betterment, wellbeing or personal growth as much as grimoires teaching manipulation, deceit, and an approach of smoke and mirrors to get up the skirts (or down the pants, for Americans) of women.

I remember Neil Strauss's book back in the day had its share of how to be "your best self" segments (it was very readable) but his original strain of PUA seems to have been subsumed by the more opportunistic, commodified variety schooling young men to use, for lack of a better word, trickery. Guys who buy into that schtick (literally spending money) deserve a certain amount of sympathy, but then feeling pity for them is the aphrodisiacal equivalent of tarring them with feces.

I don't see too much difference. Improving one's ability to manipulate others is a life skill I consider near critical for existence in the modern era. There are entire fields of industry built off the ability to deceive their customers and smoke and mirrors. How these abilities are applied, on the other hand, I'm with you.

Well, there's the Dale Carnegie how to win friends and influence people, and then there's the Machiavellian exploitation of others for one's own benefit, or to get one's rocks off. I see a difference.

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You are absolutely right, and it's not even just in the right-wing media bubble. Telling men to get in shape, dress better, get a haircut, and develop better social skills is some of the most common mainstream dating advice for men. Leftists will generally give men the same advice. Another common bit of mainstream dating advice is to just treat women like human beings, which some people might think is "woke"... except if you interpret it correctly, it's actually not. Human beings have sexual desires, and treating women like human beings who have sexual desires is good advice. So is the advice to look better and develop better social skills.

I think you’re way overthinking this, people just find it funny that an internet weirdo who is obsessed with physical appearance and “mogging”, is himself “mogged” by people who don’t share his obsession. Sort of like watching the class know it all proven wrong.

Yeah, people find it funny because they don't actually know much about Clavicular, so they don't realize that he doesn't claim to be the most attractive man in the world.

I think I just about died watching the Piers Morgan interview at the part where Piers asks with a completely straight face what “jestermaxing” is, and it takes a few back and forths to reveal that Clav thinks that jestermaxing is bad.

It's just inherently funny to see someone trying to maxx a trait get mogged by someone who isn't trying. Has nothing to do with whether or not he claims to be the most attractive man on the planet or not.

The judge is not mogging him based on looks but based on authority (and camera angles in this instance I think). If he were not a judge this guy wouldn't be mogging anyone.

Obligatory TracingWoodgrains post.

The normative standard that Clavicular violates is that exterior physical beauty is, and more importantly ought to be, reflective of inner beauty. An ugly person could not deliver this message, because he would also violate this normative standard. The catharsis of seeing Clavicular get "mogged" comes from Clavicular's unnatural, unearned, and unreflective beauty being shown to be vain in contrast to the natural "earned" beauty which is reflective of the true inner virtue of the gigachad interlocutor.