Does Looksmaxxing Give Women the Ick?

The male beauty arms race is getting weird

The clavicle bones.

“What would you rank Timothée Chalamet?”

Braden Eric Peters, aka “Clavicular”, a man who has spent years sculpting and surgically altering his face and body, recently considered that question on the podcast Impaulsive.

“I would say … around 6.25 … 6.5,” he replied.

“And his SMV?” the podcast co-host asked Peters, referring to Chalamet’s “sexual market value”.

“Pretty high,” Peters, 20, said in his flat monotone. “He’s only gonna get girls on birth control though,” he added, before going on to explain that this is a bad thing because “women with higher oestrogen … are attracted to, like, more masculine faces.”

Welcome to the weird and twisted philosophy of looksmaxxing, the online subculture devoted to optimizing male appearance through gym routines, skin care, jawline exercises and surgery. Clavicular himself is an advocate of “bonesmashing”, or hitting one’s face repeatedly with a hammer to change the face shape. He told the New York Times that he suspects he is sterile after years of injecting himself with testosterone.

This is one reason no one should be seeking his advice. Another is that he is dead wrong about what makes men attractive to women.

The looksmaxxing movement has grown out of the manosphere — a toxic movement of aggrieved male voices. The manosphere has been around for more than a decade, but it has grown louder, angrier and more organized in recent years. What began as scattered online spaces for men lamenting the modern dating landscape has developed into a network of podcasts, influencers and self-styled gurus who now reach tens of millions of young men. Prominent voices include Andrew Tate, who has built an online empire telling young men that women are property, and Clavicular associate Nick Fuentes, the white nationalist who greeted the overturning of Roe v Wade by tweeting “Your body, my choice”.

Some of what draws young men to this world reflects real problems. Boys now trail girls at almost every level of education. They are more likely to be unemployed, more likely to die by suicide and more likely to live with their parents in to their thirties. To many young males, the phrase “the future is female” sounded like a celebration of their own growing irrelevance.

More constructive voices, including Jordan Peterson, Scott Galloway and Chris Williamson, have urged young men to take responsibility and make something of themselves. Clavicular and his imitators would say they are also doing precisely that — taking matters into their own hands by reshaping their faces and physiques to win female attention.

But, ironically, the very purpose of looksmaxxing, which is designed to attract women to “masculine men”, will not achieve its purpose. Because the harder a young man tries to appeal to women, the more likely he is to appeal to other men instead.

That is the lesson from a recent experiment by the PhD student William Costello. Costello posted two photos side by side on X. One was of Clavicular. The other showed Felix Yongbok Lee, a popular K-pop singer with extremely feminine features. Costello asked his 20,000 followers to pick the more attractive of the two.

Men picked Clavicular. Women, in contrast, preferred Yongbok Lee. This is consistent with studies indicating that men overestimate women’s preferences for highly masculine features.

Some male commenters claimed that the female commenters were lying. This is a comforting belief, allowing men to ignore feedback that contradicts their assumptions.

A much simpler explanation is that women mean what they say.

Looksmaxxers like Clavicular may not be aware of it, but they are optimizing themselves not for attraction from women, but for respect from men. That, in fact, is the hidden logic of “looksmaxxing”. Men respect signs of dominance and toughness. A heavy jaw, sharp cheekbones, a hard stare. These features impress other men because they signal strength. So when a young man imagines an attractive male face, he tends to imagine an exaggerated version of those traits. He then sets out to build it.

Women, generally speaking, want something different. They tend to prefer a face that is softer than men assume. When masculine features get too extreme, they stop registering as attractive and begin to appear bizarre or even frightening. The looksmaxxer who has carved himself into a comic book caricature has pushed past the point where most women find him appealing. (Relatedly, some women make a parallel mistake, assuming men prefer extreme thinness when many men actually prefer healthier, curvier female bodies.)

A man who spends hours every day fine-tuning his face and body exudes qualities women tend to dislike. He can come across as vain, high-maintenance and self-absorbed — less like a secure partner than someone perpetually scanning for the next option.

Clavicular attracts female attention largely because he is famous, and fame draws attention no matter the face attached to it. A non-famous man who puts in the same hours would turn most women off, no matter how the final product looked.

Notice what Clavicular is actually doing. He openly boasts about his looksmaxxing routine, and the public boasting is what made him famous. The fame, more than the face, is what now draws women to him. His followers can’t replicate that, but they can adopt the looksmaxxing routine. They must conceal, though, the extreme looksmaxxing protocol Clavicular tells them to adopt, because in an ordinary man it reads as vanity and artifice, which many women consider to be red flags.

In short, Clavicular is selling a map to a destination (female attention) he reached by a different road. It’s unclear if even he understands this.

None of this means looksmaxxing is entirely irrational. It is actually a reasonable response to the world young men now live in. Dating apps and social media platforms reward looks before anything else. Before a woman knows whether a man is kind, competent, funny, or interesting, she sees his pictures. She might share them in a group chat where her friends weigh in. A man who fails to clear the bar on physical appearance never gets the chance to be judged on anything else.

For an ordinary young man on a dating app, “just be yourself” is not a strategy when the first filter is a photograph. He can see, correctly, that looks matter a lot in his actual life, even as the people around him insist otherwise.

The basic version of looksmaxxing is good for almost everyone: exercise, a decent haircut, clothes that fit, better posture, a reasonable diet. But the looksmaxxing protocol that Clavicular tells them to adopt gives women the ick.

The figures young men are listening to have almost nothing to say about becoming the kind of man a decent woman would want to be with. That work does not involve a hammer or a syringe. It involves character, which cannot be bought, or injected, or chiseled. It is the slow, unglamorous work of growing up.

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A version of this article was originally published in The Times of London under the title “Clavicular says he knows how to attract women. But really, he attracts men.”