Nomaxxing

Beauty can’t be measured. The sublime can’t be dominated.

The media furore around Clavicular (dear lord, why do I have to write such a phrase?) is bound to die down sometime. He will always be with us though. He’s embedded enough into our pliable cultural firmament that someone, somewhere, will always be saying “hey, remember Clavicular?” Sarah Sherman will clown him on SNL. Some video will surface of him being slapped outside a club. He’ll orchestrate another online fight, or just shoot another alligator. He will never not be mogging, never not reminding us that he owns at least a small piece of our collective consciousness.

The sicker we are of him, the more disgusted we are by the very phenomenon of looksmaxxing, the more relevant he is. The algorithm did its job boosting Clavicular, and he did his job showing the “manosphere” to be so influential that even its followers have followers. Yes, this young man who would deliberately break his own face for a sharp jawline and can’t name the Prime Minister of Britain is a vain moron. Yes, he parrots far-right talking points that come from the likes of Nick Fuentes and the Tate brothers.

Yes, he has his own acolytes and admirers: lonely, angry boys willing to fork over not-insignificant amounts of cash for him to tell them how to look exactly like him. No, he isn’t going anywhere. All the Guardian-readers’ tongue-clucking won’t change that. He, and those he has inspired, have too much momentum. In this world, the most powerful beauty is the most interchangeable, the most disposable. It’s how you build an army. An army that will keep you in fast cars and large houses for a long, long time.

Maybe modernity was always headed here. Clavicular himself would have no clue what modernity was, but Fuentes would certainly have us think so. That Fuentes simultaneously praises Clavicular, could never hope to look like him, and will definitely never go to the lengths to achieve his look, is besides the point. Men with boiled meat faces like Heinrich Himmler still lauded an ideal of blond hair, blue eyes, and Greek statue physiques. It’s one of the reasons why I’ve argued, perhaps controversially, that there is no such thing as fascist beauty.

Let me explain what I mean here. Or rather, let me first explain what I don’t mean when I say fascist beauty is impossible. I don’t mean that fascists are incapable of creating beauty. Much as we may hate to admit it, some of the most remarkable poetry and literature of the 20th century was created by self-identified fascists. Cultural critique would be a lot easier if that weren’t true, but here we are. Celebration of repressive violence that is designed to hold everyone in chains doesn’t necessarily mean you’re incapable of writing graceful prose, or rendering a stroke of paint effectively.

I also don’t mean – and this may be controversial – that violence tout court is necessarily ugly. There are countless masterpieces depicting war and death that prove otherwise. Look at Saturn Devouring His Son. It is a terrifying, awesome image. We are watching a god tear his son limb from limb with his own hands, gnashing his flesh between his teeth. It is a scene of gruesome terror. And yet, looking through this window into the gods’ torment, we are fixated. Not just by the horror, but by the macabre way it renders the horror. The brushstrokes are impressionistic, crude and rushed, appropriately for a scene of madness. We are gazing at the universe coming apart, and are awed by how the grand cosmic also look so human through the most awful that the human form can accomplish.

All these potentials and possibilities – the imperceptible atomic units of consciousness, nodes at once autonomous and intertwined – collide and converge in our imaginations in ways that shock and surprise, sometimes weirdly comfort us. In a world of such wide possibilities and disparities, our psyches grasp for something more, but they do so using the signifiers of wreckage.

What we are talking about, then, is the sublime, in the Kantian sense, and beauty is adjacent. Something beautiful always contains at least a glimmer of the sublime. This is aesthetics enjoyed on their own terms, but also provoking a tinge of fear for what our reasonable selves can’t fully grasp. Our eyes are unable to fully take in the winding, complex enormity of a mountain range, and we are awed, reminded simultaneously of everything we love and everything we cannot touch. At its freest, the sublime reminds us not just of our mortality, but our ability to reach, to move, to strive in unique directions toward something like liberation. Yes, we are frightened, but discovering what we are capable of in relation to infinity is necessarily frightening.

Again, art created by fascists may achieve this, but it is sheerly coincidental, epiphenomenal to the domineering impulses that animate fascism. Its drive isn’t to help the individual touch the ineffable, but to coerce the individual to march in a perfect line, to conform to the society’s precise shape, to achieve the physique that everyone else is trying to achieve. Perhaps someone will reach the ineffable, but it will likely be the man at the front of the crowd, exhorting us to gloriously annihilate ourselves. Move as directed. Then die when we need you to. When Walter Benjamin talks about the aestheticization of politics that fascism requires, this is what he means, and it produces an impoverished politics and an impoverished art.

When self-annihilation becomes convincing, when it mimics beauty closely enough, the annihilation of history can’t be far behind. Molly Crabapple recently spoke on how the transcendent mathematics of the sublime stand up (or rather don’t) to the weaponized math of death being wielded in Iran right now. Tehran’s Golestan Palace – a building whose architectural intricacy makes it about as close to the sublime as you can imagine – is obliterated by bombs. A chatbot congratulates the bomber.

This definition of our moment is something that the new Louis Theroux documentary on the manosphere doesn’t seem to grasp. I’ve always been underwhelmed by Theroux’s work. It always made me think that he was trying to produce a more anodyne and digestible version of what Adam Curtis does (or used to do before he started falling back on formula). A bit of deadpan humor, a few blank stares, and letting your subject hang themselves with their own words can be entertaining for the viewer. But I find myself wondering what purpose it serves past making the viewer feel better for not being Theroux’s subject.

Do these documentaries actually help pull anyone back from the brink of dangerous belief? Into the Manosphere includes conversations with a handful of the most successful influencers from this world. All of them trade in the kind of blatant misogyny and homophobia we’ve come to expect from them. Each have sometimes millions of followers. They promise to transform you into the most successful (and yes, beautiful, though they likely wouldn’t use that word) version of yourself. All of them, to a man, came from broken families, most often with a father who wasn’t around.

All offer – for a price, of course – what they claim are surefire investment tips and financial plans to make them as wealthy as they are. “I just made $25,000 in ten minutes while talking to you.” Most are bogus of course; they make their fortunes not through investing, but through you. Which, when pushed, they will say is only how it’s supposed to be. The winners dominate the losers, because someone needs to do the dominating and someone needs to be dominated. According to them, civilization can only be defended from its feminized decline by these kinds of practices.

None of this, however, is particularly surprising. We know by now that the high concentration of aggressive and insecure men is an outgrowth, in part, of the loneliness epidemic. The enclosure of common spaces that allow us to be in connection with others – without the mediation of commodity – has left most of us with no place to turn.

We also know that the lonely human being (of any gender) is easily pulled into the gestalt community online. And we’ve all digested enough about the nature of social media to know that it’s so easily monetizable. Where we might search for the ineffable security of human contact, we now look for the imperceptible molecules of data that say you have more. It’s a paltry substitute, but it’s in far greater supply than the sublime.

The most infuriating moment in Into the Manosphere is at its climax. Theroux tries to get Harrison Sullivan – an influencer with the eyeroll-worthy handle of “HS TikkyTokky” – to hoist himself on his own petard. Again, it’s his tried-and-true tactic. Let the evil beneath the surface come out. In this case, it’s the disturbing antisemitism that seems to be a common feature virtually all of the manosphere.

Sullivan, who in the doc’s opening scenes had been quite friendly with Theroux, this time greets him with a stone face of suspicion. His followers have let him know about Theroux, you see, the liberal soyboy. He’s got his mother there too, who we’re told doesn’t approve of the sexism, the racism, the homophobia. Still, she’s there to support her boy.

They lay into Theroux and brush away most of his questions. Sullivan’s broadcast of him and his mates assaulting men they call predators? Justified. His management of OnlyFans performers he outright calls trash? What of it? It’s rather easy. Who is Theroux, they ask, to question Sullivan’s naked pursuits of profit, who is he to call Sullivan a hypocrite, when Theroux is also making money profiling such awful people for his documentaries? They have a point, particularly given the very good chance that Sullivan is making more than Theroux. All the while, the influencer’s followers watch on the livestream, egging him on, prompting him to absolutely dominate Theroux.

Throughout the conversation, Theroux gently prods and steers the subject through all the things the manosphere takes for granted: the hierarchies of men and women, the will to exploit as the geist of western civilization, and of course, the threat to that civilization (i.e. the Jews). Then Sullivan, prompted by his followers watching the livestream, drops an anvil on Theroux. “Is Israel committing genocide?” he asks. Theroux freezes. He has no reason to freeze. Theroux has made no fewer than two documentary films on the kinds of settler-zealots that view Palestinians as dogs and are willing to commit massacres to gain their land.

Theroux, in other words, knows what this genocide looks like, better than most white Brits. He’s spoken to this genocide, face-to-face. And yet he froze. In the abstract, it should be easy to retort. Yes, Israel is committing a genocide, but Israel can’t be equated with all Jews, and the fact that you are doing so is dangerously antisemitic and plays into Israel’s hands.

Or, more in keeping with Theroux’s modus operandi, he could have just asked, rightly, What does that have to do with Jews? Let Sullivan hang himself. But even this basic, easily grasped form of nuance is easily flooded by the sheer volume of online comments. Sure, HS won’t be invited onto Graham Norton anytime soon. But with this many people willing to hand over their hard-earned cash, willing to push their thoughts and actions through the sieve of the internet, breaking themselves down into so many nanograms of gleeful mogging, what does it matter?

The simple fact is that no petard can reach far enough for him to hoist himself on it. It’s not beautiful, but it achieves an odd kind of symmetry. And there’s no denying it’s more compelling than the respectability and lukewarm decency Theroux is peddling. Mostly because the outrage, the takedowns, the insufferable “controversy,” have so much more weight packed onto them, so much more data that can be converted to capital. Sullivan’s followers called the exchange a moment when he “owned” Theroux. It’s not just a turn of phrase.

(Sidenote: Watching a man best-known as HSTikkyTokky and his declared progressive mother verbally pummel this respected liberal documentarian was the most appropriate activity for this day. It was the day Robert Mueller died. When the news hit, I’d forgotten Mueller even existed. Donald Trump, his most high-profile target and adversary, whose political career should have been ended by Mueller’s report, is gleefully bombing Iran. With Big Beautiful Bombs. Relevance through sheer force, rationalized through vituperative rejection of reason. Then he selects a manosphere influencer as an envoy to Australia…)

The question, as always, is what is to be done. How can the looksmaxxing manosphere be defeated? Even asking this feels silly. Partly because, as we must continually acknowledge, capitalist realism forecloses the imagination of alternatives. As I’ve tried to illustrate throughout this piece, repeating it in different ways, this enclosure of our imagination is now happening on a molecular level. Our habits and thoughts, our ideology and actions, are recognized and shaped with such granularity that we can only see it with the kind of particular attention that comes with letting our minds quiet, allowing the dust and detritus of the attention economy to finally settle.

It is of course way easier said than done. Particularly because that same economy, that same mode of exchange dominating our patterns of thought and emotion and perception, is so well designed to prevent the kind of contemplation that might let us question our judgments, ask where they came from, interrogate the nature of the values and conventions we cling to so fiercely. While I don’t think cutting through all the noise of manufactured desire, commodified life, and patriarchy on steroids will be truly possible without a new and radically different society, I also don’t think that a new and radically different society will be truly possible without cutting through all the noise of manufactured desire, commodified life, and patriarchy on steroids. (It’s almost as if dialectics are relevant… something something, negation of the negation, something something something…)

In other words, while it’s easy enough to picture a utopia of abundance, there’s also a need to think through a utopia of less. Everyone should be housed and fed, but there are already enough housing units to shelter us (they’re just unused or sitting vacant), and there’s already enough food grown (millions of tons of crops are burned every year because they can’t be profitably sold).

The same goes for culture. The sublime is almost never a question of more. The awe of staring into the cosmos is never simply a question of their size; infinity is both vast and empty, unquantifiable. Our grasp of them isn’t required. I am swayed by what Julia Alekseyeva writes about the fight against modern fascism requiring “surrendering all your comforts at the door.” By that same token I find myself asking what new comforts we might discover. Comfort and beauty don’t necessarily occupy the same ontological space, but they do converge when we start to discuss the concept of luxury. Especially when we discuss it in the same context as Kristin Ross in her aptly titled Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.

What one finds in Ross’ book isn’t merely a society trying to figure out how everyone in Paris can have more, but how in redistribution, in erasing the idea of ownership, people can discover new meanings for themselves, new conceptions of human possibility. Beauty isn’t something owned or possessed or even achieved. Beauty is something lived, and best lived collectively.

“Ending class-based luxury,” she writes, “opens up an entirely new vista of social wealth.” If more has never equaled beautiful, then eliminating the false equation from people’s consciousness may just allow us to access the sublime in a way we’ve never known before.

As for all the looksmaxxers, our would-be fascists trying to achieve their impossible fascist beauty, they’ll have to adjust. They’ll have to find a new way to maxx, a new obsession to mog. If change is now so difficult on a microscopic level, maybe all that’s left is to scramble its most essential building blocks, its very DNA. If the only way to be best is to have less, then we should at least expect consistency. They too will have to search for the most fundamental, molecular way to achieve, to transform.

Many of them will simply ask the AI what to do next. (They’ll be among the few who still ask ChatGPT for life advice.) It’s already gotten enough practice telling isolated young men to kill themselves, you think it won’t be any help in achieving the ultimate self-obliteration in the service of maxxing?

Tear off your skin. Claw your flesh off. Muscles? Tendons? Sinews? Nothing but encumbrances, obstacles in the way of your total success. Slamming your face into a twenty pound weight is for amateurs. Not good enough. Your bones? Rub them in acid. Whittle them down to their most spindly and precarious. Better yet just put your whole body in a particle accelerator. Let the atoms finally strip you down to your oozing frame. Push through the pain. Push through fear. What are you, gay? If you can’t accomplish this much then you’re nothing. Then again, nothing is the point. Prove to the world you can be most nothing. At the end, you’ll be more beautiful than you could ever imagine.

Both images are from David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986).

Worms of the Senses

(what I’m seeing, hearing, and reading…)

Seeing

• There Will Come Soft Rains, written and directed by Nazim Tulyahodzhayev, (1984)

• Street of Crocodiles, written and directed by Stephen and Timothy Quay, (1986)

Hearing

• Hiroshi Yoshimura, GREEN (1986)

• Xiu Xiu, Plays the Music of Twin Peaks (2016)

• Slowdive, Souvlaki (1993)

• Televangel, Anthropocene Blues (2018)

Reading

• Paris in Turmoil: A City Between Past and Future, by Eric Hazan, (2022)

• “Corduroy Psychedelia: On Boards of Canada, Hauntology, and the PBS Unconscious,” by Sereptie (2026)

• “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love,” by Raymond Carver (1981)