Eugenia Cooney Vs. Clavicular:
thoughts after screening “Looksmaxxing”

The lexicon of looksmaxxing is something I, and probably any twenty-something in a major city, have become fluently ironic in. These memetic phrases operate as cultural shorthand: “you’re mogging” when a friend poses for a photo, “you’re beta” when someone hesitates to talk to a girl at the bar.

The riotousness is in the ridiculousness, the absolute bombastic nature of the language. When using these words, you're practically speaking around the words, rather than with them. They cease to act as nouns or to describe like adjectives. It is practically a new memetic language one must be initially versed in, have digested its seriously disturbing origins, and then superimposed its irony to be truly away from the word.

These neologisms didn’t emerge from nowhere. As absurd as they sound, they’re rooted in real practices and real beliefs. It’s easier to dismiss them as byproducts of fringe internet spaces: incel forums, ED Twitter, 4chan, but that dismissal no longer feels as secure. The language has outgrown its origins because the behaviors have. Looksmaxxing is unequivocally mainstream knowledge at this point.  What once felt like niche pathology now reflects something materially present: a culture increasingly organized around self-optimization. The analogy to capitalism is almost painfully obvious, but still necessary: there is a clear link between the rise of self-optimization “grindset” culture in recent years and its eventual embodiment in these practices, where optimization is no longer just rhetoric but something actively performed and internalized.

Eating disorder Twitter (notoriously female populated)  and looksmaxxing forums (notoriously male populated) operate as axiomatic mise-en-scènes, where objectivity is lauded, and subjectivity is largely excluded. The two spaces act as mirrors to each other, operating in similar, borderline identical ways at times, but receive completely different reactions from the public. 

The logic is simple and universal amongst both spaces: with enough research, enough discipline, and enough adherence to the system, you can arrive at a perfected version of yourself. Read as a symptom of neoliberalism, both spaces can be understood as attempts to regain control through self-optimization strategies that mirror broader late-capitalist logic, where it becomes easier to internalize blame and erase systemic complexity in favor of self-imposed solutions. In this framework, capitalism, like these disorder-driven logics, often favors a “simple is best” mentality, where clarity, ranking, and efficiency are valued over nuance, ambiguity, and contradiction.

There is not much nuance in the lobby of the Lumiere Cinema on Wilshire Boulevard, an arthouse theatre which is premiering Elan Alexander's short film “Looksmaxxing”.  It is littered with 20-something-year-old boys all dressed in baggy jeans and Palace hoodies. Most of these men seemingly received invites or loose invites from Sunny Suljic of mid-90s fame, the star of the short film. There was an immediate, performative machismo, one that both asserted itself and undercut itself through irony. 

My friend (another girl) and I sat in the plush chairs, shifting around, lightly uncomfortable, acutely aware of the boys (I say boys, opposed to men, despite them being around the same age as I am, purposefully), who sat behind us. They use these words as I described earlier, shrouded in irony:

“Are you ready to see Sunny looksmaxx bruh?” A faceless yet demanding voice afflicted by ‘fratcent’ beacons behind me, uncomfortably loud, and unluckily right into my ear.

“Wheres clav bruhhhhhhhhh?” His friend follows. 

It was clear, even before the film started, that much of the room was primed to treat it as comedy.

That expectation felt dissonant and slightly inappropriate. In the days leading up to the screening, I had been reading about the very real psychological consequences of looksmaxxing culture. I even listened to Adam Friedland’s interview with Clavicular, a central figure in the space. Much like Eugenia Cooney is to online- eating disorder spaces.: A face for the failing. 

“Don't you want to have sex?” Firedland, 38, asked Clavicular. 

Clavicular’s response was detached: sex itself didn’t matter as much as the proof that he could have it. The exchange was bleak.

The whole interview made me feel deeply sad. It also made me feel uncomfortable as I found myself in round a bout ways relating to Clavicular, which apparently isn't super uncommon according to the internet. He rattles off commonly held beliefs of a 15-year-old anorexic. Oftentimes, tweets where women will empathize with Clav, explaining they too know what it's like to reach for perfection, going to the utmost delusional lengths imaginable, will garner 20k likes, showing a real empathy and genuine understanding of the face of looksmaxxing. He has even been hailed as a sort of love interest, with fancams of him and WoahVicky edits to Iris by the GooGoo Dolls soundtracking what we are supposed to believe as a man falling in love with an unconventional and weird girl. A clip of him “sad-maxxing” to a popular Duster song will garner 20k likes as well, the comments showing real sadness for him. 

I think this is what made it uncomfortable to be sitting in that plush cinema chair, with bellows of laughter in anticipation of the short film, maybe the first of its kind, documenting men's first real encounter with this level of delusional imposed self-optimization to the point of sickness, both physically and mentally. Something about it felt grotesquely out of place. 

The film itself hits the expected beats. It opens with Suljic in a “goon cave,” surrounded by multiple screens of porn, then follows his progression from ridiculed “sigma” to chemically enhanced “ultra-chad.” By the end, he’s transformed into something grotesque; encased in prosthetic muscle, his skin peeling as a side effect of unregulated peptides and thereby horrifying his mother in the process.

Stylistically, the film leans into camp. The irony is deliberate and constant (which is unavoidable given the subject matter and its cultural reception) : a peptide website listing its price at $666.66, exaggerated prosthetics dominating the final act, stray meme references scattered throughout. It’s self-aware, fluent in the language it’s depicting. And the audience responded exactly as expected: laughter at nearly every turn.

That reaction felt misaligned, not necessarily because the film failed, but because it succeeded too cleanly. It captured the aesthetics, the language, the escalation, but in doing so, it also became legible as parody, easy to consume and dismiss just as it is with any tiktok you get of Clavicular. Leaving the theater, the tone didn’t shift; conversations outside were still punctuated by jokes, by the same ironic detachment.

I can't fault the director or the actor at hand. They did great. Suljic's performance often grounded itself despite the apparent irony, an impressive feat for somebody his age dealing with such a bloated subject matter. The director attempted to find some sort of earnestness amongst such an un-earnest audience, both literally the audience in the theater, and on a broader cultural scale. 

The film ends up saying both everything and nothing. It’s accurate, even incisive at times, but it doesn’t quite break through the layer of irony that protects its subject. And that’s the larger issue: looksmaxxing, as a culture, hasn’t really been forced to answer for itself. 

Spaces like Eating disorder Twitter or Tumblr are often forced to “answer” for the illness, as if it were both the individual's choice and a moral failure. You see this clearly in reactions to, say, a TikTok of a visibly anorexic girl body-checking: comments either demand she delete the video for fear of influencing younger girls, or display a new cruel reaction of calling her a “fatty,” as if she’s fully aware and deliberately performing her condition for attention, as if she possesses self-awareness that trumps her illness. She is made to feel stupid if she does not possess this. In both cases, her mental illness is flattened into something willful and something she is ultimately responsible for, not algorithms, not chemical disruptions in the brain; this is a moral choice she made, one she feels is right and one that is within her control. She is called to answer for her illness, which is seen as a moral failing, but also to answer for the hypothetical moral failing that she might impose.

Post-pandemic, a paradox has emerged around self-optimization: to not self-optimize is a crime, to not become your best self is a betrayal of self. It shows a sort of lack of motivation or commitment to yourself. It is ultimately seen as a failing. At the same time, self-optimization is only socially validated when it remains within culturally sanctioned boundaries and is oftentimes deemed more socially permissible if attempted by a man. 

This creates a split in moral perception. Certain forms of bodily control and self-modification are normalized, or even lightly praised, when framed through the language of discipline, aesthetics, or “improvement,” while others are pathologized or outright condemned. Over the past year, this divide has become increasingly visible in online responses: looksmaxxing content is often treated as distasteful but intelligible, even humorous or culturally readable, whereas an explicit eating disorder, particularly when embodied by women, is framed as unequivocally harmful and morally unacceptable.

This is not to say either “side” is right or wrong. It is just an observation about the internet's reciprocity of illness and its perpetrators. Fundamentally, both of these online spaces operate on the account of sick people, who are mentally anguished; the idea that there can be a “right” or “wrong” operates under the hope that these people perpetuating the cultures at hand can be trusted to have morale. Which is unrealistic. 

Looksmaxxing hasn't been called to answer for itself. It’s buffered by humor, by memes, by a collective unwillingness to take it at face value. That irony diffuses responsibility; both for the people perpetuating it and for the broader culture that allows it to spread. In practice, this irony operates like a protective frame. It allows the discourse to remain legible as a joke, even when it overlaps with genuinely rigid or harmful ideas about bodies, worth, and optimization, even bordering at times into pro-aryan rhetoric. Because it is mediated through irony, it becomes harder to assign moral accountability for “spreading rhetoric”.

Women's suffering isn't granted the same interpretive distance. Especially in relation to illness, this produces a stark double standard. Women are more readily framed as either genuinely sick, in need of correction, or morally compromised, whereas men are more often permitted to occupy an ambiguous space where irony can obscure intent and diffuse accountability. This difference matters because it shapes what is socially legible. For men, irony can function as a buffer that allows participation in extreme or reductive body discourse without being fully held to its implications. For women, similar expressions are stripped of that buffer and treated as transparent evidence of moral failing. 

With looksmaxxing gaining popularity, both in observation and participation, it is becoming evident that men are more prone to eating disorders or disordered behavior. Which is not something anybody should relish in seeing. But, the only positive implication here might be that the internet can change how it reacts towards its sick users. With the internet now being indispensable, it would be ridiculous to operate under the assumption that all its users are of sound mind. Just as we treat the real world. 

Ultimately, the rise of looksmaxxing represents a democratization of dysmorphia, repackaged as a "grindset" for a generation that has been told self-optimization is the only remaining form of agency. By filtering this desperation through layers of meme-culture and " irony, men have carved out a socially permissible space to be unwell, shielded by the plausible deniability of a joke. Meanwhile, women in similar digital trenches are denied this luxury, their struggles read not as satire but as literal moral contagions.

But as the laughter in the Lumiere Cinema suggests, irony can only mask the peeling skin and the "goon cave" isolation for so long. When the prosthetics come off, and the memes go stale, we are left with a landscape of deeply isolated individuals, regardless of gender, trying to solve systemic anxieties through biological warfare against themselves. If we are to move past the "irony buffer," we must stop treating these behaviors as punchlines or moral failings and start seeing them for what they truly are: the inevitable, agonizing result of a culture that values the perfected object over the living subject. Whether it’s "sad-maxxing" to Duster or body-checking on TikTok, the cry for help sounds the same, even when one side is laughing over the noise.