The Manosphere Hits the Mainstream
From red pill blogs to Clavicular's New York Times and GQ profiles, the manosphere has finally broken containment
The original “manosphere,” a collection of blogs loosely organized around what they called “the red pill” (a term adapted from the film The Matrix) started to get very popular in the 2013-2015 timeframe.
Even back then, it started to cross over into mainstream interaction. One of the early big-name pickup artists, RooshV, launched an online “lad magazine” called Return of Kings that I saw get links from sites like Instapundit, for example. (Roosh later converted to Christianity, unpublished most of his work, and seems to have largely disappeared).
The manosphere was one of the online streams that merged to become the broader Trumpian right in 2015-2016. As part of this, a variety of standard-issue media hit jobs were run against various figures and parts of this movement. That toxified it such that any non-hostile mainstream interactions died out. (At some point, Instapundit appears to have gone back and scrubbed its links to Return of Kings, for example).
But the manosphere continued to grow as an underground movement. It pivoted heavily to Youtube and Reddit, saw the growth of new subcultures within it, etc. For years, it remained largely absent as a cultural force in the mainstream world, however. As before, if anyone did get mainstream attention, it was mostly negative. Andrew Tate is a good example here. The figures who did get some positive recognition in mainstream culture, like Jordan Peterson or Joe Rogan, were people who did not really come from manosphere origins, but just became labeled as such.
But a decade or more later, the manosphere and its principles have broken containment and seeped into mainstream popular culture. A good example of that is the “looksmaxxing” icon Clavicular that I previously wrote about.
The New York Times recently did a big profile of Clavicular. Notably, it ran as the cover story in the Sunday Styles section and was not a typical hit job of the type you might have once found in the news or opinion pages.
The Times writes (gift link):
Clavicular’s extreme methods, bizarre argot and nihilistic worldview, in which the universe is a Darwinian nightclub full of aggressive men jockeying for status, have in recent months made him a social media sensation. Uncanny clips of him “mogging” other men — that is, standing next to them and making them look common by comparison — and mercilessly appraising women’s looks have gone viral on TikTok and Instagram. Videos of Clavicular have become so ubiquitous on X that its head of product recently threatened, jokingly, that he would shut down the site if he saw one more. By any definition of internet celebrity in 2026, he has ascended.
…
Inside, under the eye of a docent, Clavicular petted a sturgeon. He recoiled. (“It’s like when you drop your phone in the toilet,” he said, later excusing himself to “hand-sanitizer-maxx.”) He and Ms. Kirk wandered into a section called “Bizarre and Beautiful.” They pressed their noses up against a tank of luminescent jellyfish.
But they didn’t touch. Though Clavicular’s aesthetic ideal is hypermasculine, he believes he is currently infertile because of testosterone replacement therapy, which can affect fertility. Earlier that day, Clavicular confessed that knowing he could have sex with a woman was in some ways better than the deed itself, which “is going to gain me nothing.”
“It’s a big time saver,” he said.
The piece notes Clavicular’s various controversies, such as going to a Miami nightclub with Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, and others, singing Kanye West’s “NHH” on the way, or streaming himself screaming the n-word. But it’s mostly in the form of a profile of an emerging celebrity. Clavicular is being treated like a garden-variety social media influencer star rather than an avatar of “toxic masculinity” or some such.
And GQ magazine also did a profile of Clavicular (note: contains vulgarity):
Over the last few months, he’s been called everything from the “greatest performance artist alive” to a “mentally ill meth addict” and compared to a picaresque-novel protagonist who “bounces from one thing to another without suffering any real consequences or learning anything from the experience.” He’s gone from New Jersey nobody to Miami frat boy to, suddenly, the toast of the reactionary downtown scene. Last week was his peak—his Manhattan debut, which included a surprisingly credulous New York Times profile, a glamorous runway walk, and multiple fashion afterparties. We were backstage as all the chaos unfolded.
…
Clavicular streams the entire pre-show process for his fans, from fitting to hair and makeup to dress rehearsal. The show is vaguely themed around artificial intelligence, transhumanism, and surgical brutality. Models walk with bandages wrapped around their faces; one woman wears a corset with a metal frame that looks half-melted by radioactive bile. Clavicular is a good muse for a show concerned with “people’s almost suicidal desire or impulse to be beautiful.” But it feels like he’s mostly been brought in as a gag, an opportunity for both Velez and Clavicular to produce what he describes as “infinite clip glitch” and a 100-acre “clip farm.”
…
Lately he seems to have broken containment, evolving rapidly from purely online looksmaxxing guy into something like a mainstream personality. The uninitiated seem to find him both amusing and terrifying. His first spotlight moment came in December, when he told the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles that even though his personal politics hewed closer to JD Vance’s, he would vote for Gavin Newsom in 2028, because Newsom is hotter and Vance is “obese.” He’s since been covered by outlets like The New York Times and The Atlantic as a New Type of Guy to whom concerned attention must be paid—a harbinger of a future generation of post-canceled nihilists who would vote for a liberal if he looks like Superman.
…
Normies have also become obsessed with the lingo of looksmaxxing, which has simmered in deep crevices of the web for years, incrementally adding freaky new terms and in-jokes. There is “mogging,” or outshining someone; “foid,” code for a woman; you can be christened a Becky (mid), a Stacy (hotter), a Chad (GOAT male status), or simply a jester (idiot).
This piece is much friendlier than even the New York Times.
As GQ notes, it’s not just the personalities of the manosphere that are going mainstream, but the terminology as well.
One of those terms is “SMV” or “sexual market value.” This is basically how attractive you are seen by the opposite sex in today’s relationship markets. The New York Times also recently wrote an article (gift link) about this:
