Where were you when Clavicular ran into a frat leader at Arizona State University and got brutally frame–mogged by him?
If your algorithm’s anything like mine, last month, your feeds became rapidly cluttered by this very question. Odds are that question was joined by reels about jelqing and whatever–maxxing, or edits of your favorite celebrities set to Brazilian phonk, lauded for their bone structure and positive canthal tilts. It probably seemed innocuous enough—it isn’t unusual to see whatever new slang or Kick streamer they cooked up in a lab clipped and ridiculed for the online masses. But as we point and laugh at cortisol–spiked Clav or the ridiculous slang surrounding him, there’s something to be said about us.
How did we get here? How did this bizarre language and its current poster boy come to take over not only our speech and feeds, but also the stage of New York Fashion Week?
While jestergooning might be a novel term, this isn’t your first exposure to this kind of language or rhetoric. You’ve probably seen, in lieu of the standard compliments and hype, comments on your friends' posts about how they are so alpha or sigma. You’ve likely tapped your razor–sharp jawline and mewed, or seen videos comparing botox–filled faces and steroid–powered bodies, determining which one mogs the other. We’re surrounded by content focused on optimizing our looks and putting down others who don’t fall in line. While we’re largely aware of this trend's most egregious examples, its more subtle influences have become embedded in even our most mundane or benevolent interactions.
Admittedly, it’s become a bit maddening watching another one of these trends or terms take flight every few months, with everyone seemingly oblivious to their sinister origins, beyond the obvious bodyshaming and bigotry. Much of this language is derived from that used and developed by “involuntary celibates,” or incels: the term was initially coined for lonely singles, but eventually became the moniker of violent men scorned by women “withholding” sex from them. Though often mocked online, incel ideology is no laughing matter, having been built upon misogyny and male supremacy—it's even turned fatal. While “–maxxing,” for instance, has been given a new life as a quirky suffix (with gym bros “gymmaxxing,” and perhaps you “LinkedInmaxxing” for a summer internship), its origins lie within a central tenet of the incel ideology called “looksmaxxing:” the idea that with enough dedication, one can become attractive enough to finally get the girl. Much of the aforementioned language stems from this belief—mogging is the product of successful looksmaxxing, mewing and bonesmashing as examples of soft and hardmaxxing, respectively, and so forth. This ideology thrives off the identification of the minutiae of anatomical “imperfections” in believers and the women who’ve purportedly wronged them, the perpetuation of bodily insecurity, and the promotion of dangerous body maximizing techniques.
For a while, one could claim ignorance, or say that the terms in the zeitgeist have no clear connection to their unfortunate origins—in this view, their incel roots are nothing more than a dark fun fact. But when you have Clavicular sharing videos of himself hammering his own face (“bonesmashing”), proselytizing the use of meth, and offering services to “ascend” his nearly one million TikTok followers’ appearances, it becomes clear that the link remains hidden in plain sight.
But despite this knowledge, the most pushback you’ll see online comes in the form of mocking comments or satirical reels, wielding irony in the face of inceldom. Some of them regurgitate incel logic back at its wielders—from pushing these terms to their logical extremes and innovating upon them to illustrate their idiocy, to slapping a corny filter onto Clavicular, calling him gay and effeminate, and picking apart his looks just as he does to others.
This is bad. Bad for more reasons than the language’s insidious inception or hypocrisy. While we might be clued in to what’s absurd, capable of laughing at it and turning it on its head, many people aren’t—from the young Gen Alphas, for whom this content is made to the older, less tech–savvy adults among us. This rhetoric has killed people, and there’s no reason to believe it’ll stop doing so—whether it takes the lives of denigrated women or the young men breaking their bones and abusing hard drugs to level up on the Perceived Sexual Market Value scale. The most vulnerable among us are being fed some of the worst, most violent rhetoric developed by a community that thrives off of keeping its members lonely and desperate. Those of us privy to that information simply act as vectors of spreading it further—and we just laugh it off as funny and quirky.
We’re subject to this language's negative effects, as well. When it comes to what the widespread use of incel–rooted language says about our culture, it’s fairly obvious. We pick up new slang, especially as young adults, to fit in and establish conformity. Therefore, the new normal for many pockets of youth internet culture has become laced with incel talking points and beliefs—under a few gradients of irony, if any.
The language we use not only reflects our culture but also shapes our perception of it. This is true at the most basic level of simple categories like color, as studied extensively by linguists and neuroscientists—the words we employ, day to day, are anchorpoints for how we process and internalize the world around us. Not only does our use of this language point to how body–informed bigotry and violent misogyny have become culturally normal, it also makes us more receptive to such ideologies, giving us with a familiarity and pseudo–reverence for the language that legitimizes looksmaxxing.
Social media has become a catalyst for this kind of linguistic phenomenon, funneling new language to more and more impressionable people and presenting opportunities to cash in on their sociolinguistic capital. Designed to keep us scrolling and sharing, there is a direct profit incentive for platforms to show you content so enraging that it’ll get you hate–scrolling through its comments section, or so absurd that you’ll share it with your friends to laugh at. And what better than raw, unbridled misogyny, self–mutilation, bullying, and objectification of others to do just that? Couple that with social media's intrinsic ability to shape the way we talk to each other—I mean, look at what LinkedIn has done to us—and you have the cultural landscape of today. Regular, well–adjusted people like ourselves are talking like the self–described “ultimate gigachad,” spewing misogynistic and racist language, and promoting bodily insecurity and harm.
This isn’t the first time social media has proliferated the use of a particular kind of language. In fact, this entire situation feels like a pendulum has swung back from the days when African American Vernacular English terms and structures (e.g., “period,” “slay,” and the habitual “be”) were the main linguistic export of Twitter and Instagram. Until fairly recently, it would be correct to say that nearly all “Gen Z slang” was lifted from AAVE via funny social media posts—now, through clips shared to enrage or mock, incel terminology has also become ingrained in our speech. And, perhaps even more on the nose, we’ve begun seeing the marriage of this language and straight–up racism and antisemitism, with posts warning against “goyslop,” as well as racialized looksmaxxing pointers charged with medical terminology (i.e., an annoying woman might “spike your cortisol”).
Clav himself isn’t just the newest face of incel jargon, but also the most prominent product of language shaping perception. Before his Kick fame, he frequented Looksmax.org, an online forum riddled with incels, where he documented his looksmaxxing journey. At just 20 years old, he’s been injecting himself with testosterone supplements illicitly for a third of his life. Not even one month after matriculating at college, he’d been expelled for his covert testosterone use.
This kind of thing doesn’t just happen to young men by chance. It is through the jokes, the mockery, and the resharing of incel content on social channels that a child destroyed his body and dedicated his life to perpetuating the same harmful practice. And the cycle continues—through our addiction to ironic humor, we pick up the slang, apply it within our day–to–day lives and interactions, and further normalize it. These practices allow a greater audience to stumble upon the same dogma that trapped Clavicular to begin with. Just as manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate garnered their audiences through engagement–baiting and paying people to clip their misogynistic streams, Clav and a new generation of influencers capitalizing on male loneliness are exploiting powerful algorithms to draw in more customers. But this time, it’s different—no longer are they attempting to veil misogyny with dogwhistles like “females.” They’ve gone full mask–off by calling women “foids” (female humanoid), “Stacys” (women who deny incels sex), and “subhumans.”
Now, thanks to our natural encoding as social creatures, our addiction to irony, and the power of the word on our own judgments and perceptions, inceldom is no longer limited to forums—it’s now mainstream, in your face, on Instagram reels and your TikTok feed. And since you’ve become so accustomed to being bagelpilled and matchamaxxed, laughing at memes about chuds and “an foid,” you’ve been disarmed. This language has become familiar, rendering its danger invisible. You might know it’s ridiculous, but it’s lost its edge—it doesn’t seem as reprehensible as it truly is.
The cycle continues to progress, platforming its previous victims to normalize the language of looksmaxxing and the incel ideology. Clavicular, likely radicalized by an immersion in incel slang and looksmaxxing procedures through irony–laden posts, is now the latest agent of this psycholinguistic project. He's radicalizing a new generation of youths, making objectifying women, shouting the n–word randomly, and breaking your own bones synonymous with the pursuit of beauty and status.
All of this begs another question: What exactly can we do about this? Honestly, I’m unsure if there’s a concrete answer. The only thing that can really be said at this point is a plea to be vigilant—recognize social media for what it is, and do your diligence to investigate new trends and formats for what they truly are. We must be cognizant of how these trends shape our language, and, through that, our mindsets. No matter how funny the comment you have flaming Clav might be, it’s just not worth feeding the algorithm. As long as they keep achieving virality, these trends and memes will continue to infiltrate our language and our culture. They'll keep redefining what is normal and acceptable, radicalizing impressionable children into peddlers of bigotry, and turning yesterday’s lolcow into the latest New York Times profile.
