Last week, the “looksmaxxing” livestreamer Clavicular collapsed as thousands watched.
The 20-year-old self-styled master of looking good was live on camera in a Miami mall when he slumped and started to slur his words. Taking shelter from fans he’d been taking selfies with, he stumbled into a booth at an empty restaurant, closed his eyes and let his head flop onto the shoulder of the streamer seated next to him. He stopped responding after that. His camera crew cut the stream when they realized he was ill, but bystanders caught his team carrying his limp body out of the mall.
Miami Fire officials latersaidthey’d responded to a suspected overdose. Clavicular, whose real name is Braden Peters, hasn’t specified what substance he took before his collapse, though he hinted in a recent stream on Kick, his preferred platform, that the substance’s abbreviation is three letters.
A couple of days prior to the suspected overdose, “60 Minutes Australia” released an interview that the influencer had walked out of after a few half-hearted attempts to insult his interviewer. Earlier this month, he appeared to start convulsing after encouraging another streamer, who calls himself “the Cuban Tarzan,” to choke him. And less than 24 hours after his suspected overdose, at the opening of a club that’s open three nights a week for five hours a night, he spent most of the time standing by himself on an elevated surface, scrolling on his phone while young women danced a few feet away.
Is this what self-improvement looks like? Clavicular has presented himself as a short-term case study in the benefits of “looksmaxxing,” the art of modifying one’s physical appearance to attract women, wealth and fame. Starting at age 14, by his account, through exercise, sometimes by a hammer to the face, and with the help of aregimenof off-label or illicit drugs, he says he’s made himself into something new: a6-foot-2Chad with a 31-inch waist and pointy clavicles that span 19.5 inches (his own measurements,providedto the New York Times).
The result is an uncannily childlike face stuck onto a slim frame with swollen arms and a sharply tapering torso. (He rarely shows his legs.) His skin is always pallid, his expression pursed, his eyes vacant. He’s almost always wearing, or removing, shirts that are too tight, so he can flaunt the broadness of his shoulders. He’s been profiled in GQ and walked in New York Fashion Week; after spending a day with him, the Times declared, borrowing from looksmaxxing argot, that he’d “ascended” — in looksmaxxing vernacular — successfully became more attractive and widely known.
But collapsing in public and appearing to lose control of his own body doesn’t match the image of a giga-Chad. Clavicular’s project isn’t playing out like an inspiring story of human potential or a replicable health fad, even as hesays“looksmaxxing is just another form of self-improvement that’s a little bit more holistic” than working out.
“I’d say I’ve pretty much tried it all,” he told “60 Minutes Australia” of his own looksmaxxing methods. “I haven’t had plastic surgery, but just about everything else in terms of biohacking. So you can really do a lot for your looks with simple pharmaceutical intervention.”
Onscreen, his is a performance predicated on extremity and shock, played out on his own body. Hundreds of thousands of people are watching.
Clavicular is less idealized young man than living experiment, appearing to risk his health for a fling with fame –– much like freak show performers who turned themselves into spectacles. Sword swallowers, fire eaters and pain-proof specialists willingly subjected themselves to things that could hurt or kill them, as long as someone was watching.
Source: Drudge Report
