#enthralling.

[star--grrrl]

Me watching @strange-aeons onision’s book reviews

[bright-eyed]

The century of the maxxer

Incredible things are happening in America

This is what it means to be a maxxer. We are a long way away from the optimisation of the self; to maxx is an intense form of asceticism. The maxxer is the person who willingly sacrifices every aspect of their lives except one, the maxximand, which is extended to infinity until it begins to develop the distance and vastness of a god.

Probably the world’s most prominent maxxer is a man called Braden Peters, who calls himself Clavicular. Clavicular is a looksmaxxer; his austerity is to make himself as beautiful as possible. If you’re good looking enough, you can ascend, break out of your genetic destiny and into a new order of being, where the subhumans will crawl after you with lolling tongues. Clavicular started looksmaxxing at the age of fourteen, injecting himself with testosterone. He also shoots anabolic steroids, human growth hormone, peptides, botox, and crystal meth. He’s had multiple plastic surgeries. His other secret is bonesmashing, which is exactly what it sounds like: he smashes his own cheekbones with a hammer so they grow back bigger. It’s impossible to know what he would have looked like if he hadn’t done all this, since his ‘before’ pictures all show a prepubescent child, but it’s hard not to conclude that he’s utterly ruined his body. He didn’t go through a normal puberty; his glands are completely incapable of producing testosterone by themselves, and if he ever stops taking the hormones he’ll rapidly decompose into a genderless lump. The various injections have also left him totally sterile; his balls are almost certainly fucked up in ways we can barely imagine. He is a meth addict. And while he really does have legions of lesser beings crawling after him with lolling tongues, they do all seem to be men.

Clavicular lives in a sort of nightmare clown world, where he is constantly being approached in ordinary shopping centres by small, strange, awkward men who say things like ‘I’m known in Orlando as the Asian Mogger. I would have the honour if you could verify me as the Orlando Asian Mogger.’ There are various misshapen freaks of nature, men with shoulders wider than they’re tall, sinister stalking giants on artificially lengthened legs, who travel across the country to stand next to him and compare physiques. Like a mythical gunslinger, the great mogger needs to constantly watch the horizon for whoever’s coming to mog him. Other men adore him in more nakedly eroticised ways. In one video, he’s live-streaming a fun casual hangout with Andrew Tate, Tristan Tate, Nick Fuentes, a bunch of other people sitting in silence looking at their phones, and menial staff vacuuming in the background. One of the men is berating a woman sat in Clavicular’s lap. ‘You are not an 8. You’re not an 8. You’re a thirsty 7, you’re asking for validation, and you’re sitting in a 10’s lap.’ ‘That’s kinda rude,’ she says. ‘That’s kinda rude,’ agrees Tristan Tate. ‘Clavicular’s at least an 11.’ Clavicular doesn’t say anything. What gives the scene its particularly haunting resonance is that throughout this exchange, he seems to be eating soup.

In all his interactions with women that aren’t directly supervised by a Tate brother, Clavicular is painfully passive and awkward. The women who like him are all of a type: hot but autistic beyond belief, brainrotted, barfing up a constant stream of overenthusiastic tryhard 4chan nazi jargon that he seems to find deeply embarrassing. Normal women treat him with undisguised contempt. He is constantly having his cortisol spiked by foids. It turns out that being maximally beautiful is not actually the same as maximising your chances of getting laid. Clavicular will never be a female sex symbol; that role goes to men like Slavoj Žižek and Danny DeVito. But maxxing is not optimisation. The maxxer is not trying to have an enjoyable life. He’s trying to reduce himself to a single principle.

[...]

There’s a reason Clavicular has become the media’s go-to symbol for maxxing, even though The Crooked Man is a much better exemplar. He keeps things on a very comfortable terrain. Maxxing, the line goes, is an outgrowth of incel culture. It’s about men, the problem with men, the crisis of masculinity; it’s about how men are now facing the kind of toxic body politics that women have had to deal with forever, and how they’re developing their own hysterias in response; it’s about online extremism, it’s about the harmful narratives that seduce young men into various forms of misogyny; before long it’s about how we all need to put the kettle on and have a proper talk about our men’s mental health. They’re not entirely wrong; there really is a crisis of masculinity, it really is expressing itself through the mainstreaming of misogyny and the proliferation of a diseased relation to the self. It’s just that maxxing comes from something else entirely.

[...]

The difference between a maxxer and an ordinary striver or optimiser is infinity. Ordinary people have broken themselves apart into a bundle of miserable attributes, but all of them are contingent. At any point, the rationalised factory worker can be moved to a different station and subordinated to a different set of motions. But the maxxer only has one thing. Everything is on the line and nothing is in reserve. No cracks in the maxxer’s surface. They are whole and complete in a way the fractured masses are not; they’ve burned off everything about themselves other than their obsession. All that’s left is the need to be the most, to touch the furthest point of excess. When someone is under the spell of infinity, there’s an electricity about them. We might love them or despise them, but we’re obsessed with maxxers. Few people agree with Clavicular, but he’s got more people furiously thinking about the meaning of beauty than anyone since Kant. We write essays about maxxers; we blunderingly ape their behaviours; we spike their cortisol while they’re jestergooning at the club. This has nothing to do with what they merely are. If someone just happens to be extremely tall, that’s briefly interesting, but only for a moment. Every village has its gangly man. But if someone keeps undergoing surgeries to make themselves taller, if they’re constantly breaking and resetting their femurs, if they’re injecting black-market somatropin directly into their spinal column, suddenly we’re transfixed. The appearance of something superlunary in the world.

The twenty-first century is going to be a century of the maxxer. It won’t take many maxxers to make a century; when you drag yourself to the absolute furthest point in a distribution tail you leave a lot of turbulence in your wake. The twentieth century was a century of the masses, class and ethnic conflicts, nationalism and the great contests of history. The realist novel, the personal essay, the strip-mining of ordinary life for patterns and insights. Our century will not make nearly as much sense. All of us will be held hostage to the obsessions of a small group of mentally deranged and self-destructive freaks. Someone will emerge out of nowhere and start tonguemaxxing, and suddenly entire political orders will rise and fall on the density of the President’s circumvallate papillae. The kind of Marxist-historicist critique I’ve half-mockingly resurrected here is already becoming impossible. Already it’s crowded out by screeching eroticised resentment. Brief storms of interpretative fury. The future will not understand itself. There’s only one way to escape the magnetic chaos that’s coming, and live in a world that still holds together. You need to start maxxing yourself. You need to find a principle, any principle, and destroy yourself for it. How many apricots do you think you can fit in your mouth?