Do you know where you were when Clavicular was framemogged by the ASU frat leader? Hopefully, you have no idea what that means. But many young people today do.
Clavicular is an influencer famous for “looksmaxxing,” dedicating his entire life to his physical appearance. One sad but fateful day, the ASU frat leader, a far buffer specimen, stood next to him in a video—a most emasculating experience for Clavicular, who built his whole persona around being the hottest guy in the room.
Two-thirds of young men regularly engage with online content promoting “masculinity.” This ranges from harmless fitness videos to Clavicular’s looksmaxxing. On the darker end of this amorphous network known as the “manosphere,” you’ll find influencers promoting violent misogyny and preying on young men’s insecurities.
The crisis of the youth
To be young in a decaying system is torture. The future seems uncertain, bleak, and insecure.
55% of young people say it will be “much harder” to buy a house than it was for their parents. 44% say it’s harder to get a job. The Covid lockdowns meant isolation and higher social media use—exacerbating mental health problems, and resulting in a loss of social skills for children and teens. Youth suicides have spiked by 60% over 20 years.
Young men with college degrees face higher levels of unemployment than other demographics. They’re more likely to report feeling lonely, worried, and stressed than any other group in the US.
Bonesmashing and Sex Traffickers
Manosphere influencers exploit young men’s social, economic, and personal anxieties. Men and women, they say, are pitted in a zero-sum game—and men are losing. A young man’s only recourse is to become a “high-value alpha male” by getting obscenely rich, escaping the grind of a 9–5 job, and oppressing women.
Various corners of the manosphere rely upon different gimmicks. Looksmaxxers preach that those who don’t have a chiseled jawline, perfect hair, and a built physique will be relegated to the bottom of the social totem pole. To be successful and attractive to women, all your efforts should go to “improving” your appearance, regardless of the cost to your general health and well-being. For example, “bonesmashing” is the practice of hitting your jaw with a hammer to “sculpt” facial features through brute bone trauma.
Grifters sell bogus “wealth building” financial advice and networking groups. “Pick-up artists” teach how to manipulate women. Incels spew arguments for repealing women’s democratic rights. Web-cam pimps exploit young women for profit.
Andrew Tate, a convicted sex trafficker and standard bearer of the manosphere, argues that society has become “feminized,” and crushes young men’s “masculine imperative for power.” Tate also thinks women should “be stripped of the vote, barred from the workplace, and forced to procreate.” According to him, women are biologically wired to be attracted to men who are misogynistic, domineering, and abusive.
These ideas take their most vile expressions in so-called “incel” forums. In 2026, a CNN investigation discovered a world-spanning online network which encouraged men to drug and rape their wives and girlfriends.
Friends in high places
Tate has made a fortune from spewing reactionary poison. Before his arrest for sex trafficking in 2022, he sold an $8,000-a-year course which promised to “free the modern man from socially induced incarceration.” Students of his “Ph.D: Pimping Hoes Degree” learned “how to recruit women into sexual slavery.”
Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is rumored to have jump-started Clavicular’s career. Thiel and JD Vance were major investors in Rumble, a right-wing streaming service which allegedly paid Tate $6 million a year. When Tate was arrested in Romania, Elon Musk, Tucker Carlson, and Charlie Kirk all came to his defense. After Trump’s election victory, the US government pressured Romania to lift Tate’s travel ban.
Tate and other manosphere influencers get paid millions by shadowy backers. They stream their gym routines from opulent beachside mansions. They go to exclusive clubs, splash expensive champagne over bare-chested women, and move in the same circles as other wealthy parasites. According to them, this is the pinnacle of manhood.
It’s no wonder that Tate had an admiration for another “high-value alpha male”: Jeffrey Epstein. In a deleted tweet, Tate wrote: “EVERYONE wants to be friends with the pimp. Doubt me? EPSTEIN HAD ACCESS TO PUSSY. Look at his fucking friends list.”
Epstein had the impunity to do as he wished to the women and girls he abused. To him, they were mere objects for his enjoyment—and the enjoyment of his billionaire friends. Ghislaine Maxwell would scout working-class neighborhoods for vulnerable young girls to groom. The ruling class sees us as things to control, manipulate, abuse, and discard.
Who is to blame for misogyny?
Proponents of identity politics insist that men in general, regardless of their class, benefit from women’s oppression. They argue that women of all classes have more in common with each other than they do with men of their own class. In other words, a working-class woman shares more common ground with Ghislane Maxwell or Kamala Harris than with a working-class man.
To a young man today, the idea that he has “male privilege” over rich women like Hilary Clinton or Kamala Harris must seem like a sick joke. In the absence of a working-class party that can correctly identify the enemies of working-class men and women—the Maxwells, Vances, and Clintons alike—right-wing grifters will continue to prey upon disaffected young men.
The most obscene misogyny originates at the very top. This poison trickles down and infects the whole of society. In the US alone, one in five women has experienced sexual violence. This didn’t start with Andrew Tate and the manosphere—they are only the latest expression of a system that is terminally diseased.
But the oppression of women is not an eternal feature of human nature. After the working class takes power, we will cast off the millennia of accumulated social rot and forge new human relations free of misogyny, oppression, and exploitation.