Editor’s Note: This article includes discussion of suicide and sexual violence. If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide, there are resources to help. The U.S. suicide and crisis lifeline is available by calling or texting 988, or online at 988lifeline.org.
It took eight years of bone-smashing and methamphetamines to get here. It’s 7:30 p.m. in a Miami dive, and 20-year-old Braden Peters is quipping back and forth with a college student. He compliments her dress. She laughs. Maybe they forget that 70,000 people are watching live on Kick. Peters pauses and gestures towards someone offscreen: “This is the Master.”
Peters, better known by his online handle “Clavicular,” is the chiseled face of “looksmaxxing” — a body modification subculture in which men go to extreme lengths to “max” their physical appearance. Like most 4chan-borne cliques, looksmaxxing is tied up in incel ideology, namely hypergamy: the notion that most women choose their sexual partners from a handful of “high-value” men. The rest are relegated to inceldom — involuntary celibacy. The looksmaxxer’s goal is to “ascend,” escaping sexless purgatory, by any means necessary. By his 14th birthday, Peters was smoking crystal meth.
“It kills the appetite,” he explained on an August livestream.
Perhaps you’ve heard this story, or another chapter of Clavicular’s lore. How he smashed his cheekbones with a hammer in the hopes they’d heal higher; more regal. How he wears lifts and plants height-boosters around his home so “slays” — incel shorthand for sexual partners — would believe the lie that he’s 6’2”. That across Twitch, Kick and YouTube, he has declared himself “the greatest ascension in looksmaxxing history.”
Or maybe you discovered Clavicular this week when he was criminally charged with raping a 17-year-old girl. The charges against Peters, filed on Sept. 8, include one count each of rape, drugging someone for sexual intercourse and procuring liquor for a minor. The case appears to match a separate civil lawsuit by Aleksandra Vasilevna Mendoza, aka Alorah, a streamer Peters allegedly assaulted in his Cape Cod home in 2025. Per Mendoza, Peters claimed he would make her the “female face of looksmaxxing,” before injecting her with a “non-FDA approved substance.”
If all this sounds odious, it’s not even the beginning. To many, looksmaxxing has appeared to be another directionless youth movement: a self-improvement trend akin to the creatine and raw milk crazes of years past. Others are discovering that Clavicular — with his two-inch insoles and Invisalign smile — has connections to a for-profit death machine, designed to catch a generation of teenage boys at their most vulnerable.
Clavicular, perhaps unwittingly, has become a recruiter for supported suicide — the deadly internet subculture moderated by Looksmax.org’s psychopathic founder.
There would be no ascension. Clavicular would pay the Master in flesh.
Lamarcus Small spent 2026 basking in Clavicular’s success. Small, an overweight 30-something known virtually as “Master,” left his job in 2019 to manage web forums full-time. Looksmax.org was his brainchild: a series of body-modification message boards plastered with “rate me” requests and medication routines.
Between 2016 and 2020, Small and co-conspirator Diego Joaquín Galante (internet alias: Serge), founded half a dozen men’s lifestyle forums like it. Small built in wreckage. When Reddit banned its incel forum, he launched Incels.co and Incels Wiki. When Lookism.net — the internet’s original looksmaxxing forum — collapsed, Small founded Looksmax.me and Looksmax.org. Each was tangled in inceldom, misogyny and male loneliness. Women were forbidden from participating.
In 2025, Small’s sites found an avatar in Clavicular, a teenager who was becoming one of Looksmax.org’s top posters. Clavicular wrote threads on body modification, egged on his peers and racked up “reputation” — the forum’s social currency. He was the young and impressionable face to lead the young and impressionable faceless: an aspiring influencer made famous by echoing Looksmax.org’s daily talking points. On some livestreams, Clavicular would plug Looksmax.org by name. On others, he mentioned “the Master” — then a shadowy figure who moderated but seldom participated.
With Clavicular’s help, Small was stitching together the incelosphere, an anti-feminist, masculinity-first menagerie of the internet’s most deplorable. Looksmax.org was just another tendril.
In 2019, Small told BuzzfeedNews he managed his forums “like a business” — operating servers, handling finances and bringing in enough revenue to moderate full-time. He gave himself the alias “Master.”
Master didn’t looksmax. He wasn’t interested in supplements. His ideology was the “blackpill” — the fatalistic belief that a man’s social life is genetically predetermined. The terms propagated on Small’s forums were incel hallmarks — tongue-and-cheek, sure, but plucked from 4chan to create a sense of hopelessness. Women were “femoids” or “foids,” a sexually motivated mark to be made into a slay. Unattractive men who hadn’t taken the blackpill were normies. The term incel itself was an admission of helplessness. Looksmaxxing was a grasp at agency.
In 2023, Small appeared in a 66-second BBC News clip. Angus Crawford, a correspondent, staked out Small’s Huntsville, Alabama, home in a surveillance vehicle. It took Small three days to emerge, and then, only for long enough to retrieve a DoorDash order. Before Small slammed the door in his face, Crawford rattled off a question. It wasn’t about looksmaxxing.
“I want to talk to you about the suicide forum you set up. Hundreds of people have died,” said Crawford. “Do you have anything to say to the relatives of the dead?”
Small looked jarred. He had not disclosed that he was the administrator of another forum, a “pro-choice” suicide message board called Sanctioned Suicide he had launched with Galante in 2019. On Sanctioned, Master went by “Marquis” — a guide looking to help the hopeless end their lives. He called it “catching the bus” (CTB).
Sanctioned lay at the bottom of an elaborate funnel the Center for Combatting Digital Hate termed the “incelosphere.” It would turn up in Google searches for “body image,” “unemployment” and “looksmaxxing.” It was referenced in the forums Small operated as Master. To the plugged-in, the blackpill was twisted enlightenment. To Small, looksmaxxing was incomplete escape.
“It’s the cycle of inceldom,” Galante wrote on Looksmax.org 2018. “First you go to incels.is, then you either try your luck at looksmaxxing or give up and go to [Sanctioned Suicide].”
Like Incels.co, Sanctioned was founded in the wake of its Reddit ban. Small and Galante launched with a handful of message boards and approved members manually. This time, women were allowed to participate. Users abetted each other with methods, tactics and reassurance that CTB was the only way out.
“If you want to be safe [during a welfare check], don’t put [poison] in plain sight,” wrote one admin. “Don’t hand it over to the police, even if they ask for it.”
Sanctioned provided the means. Under Marquis’s stewardship, users were funneled to retail sites where they could purchase lethal sodium-nitrite kits. The orders shipped in under 24 hours and cost just $20. Once they were equipped, Sanctioned users would give real-time instructions on dosing, and well-wishes as they prepared to “catch the bus.” Auxiliary threads offered video tutorials and step-by-step instructions on how to hide search history from parents and authorities. Parents were a concern — of Sanctioned’s 40,000 current users and 6,000,000 monthly page views, at least half are estimated to be under 25 years old.
Those demographics hold for Looksmax.org. The site’s “Best of the Best” forum, a collection of threads picked by moderators and read live by Clavicular, features titles like “The Ultimate pubertymaxxing guide,” “roidmaxxing 101,” “A guide to using drugs to climb the social ladder” and the “The Final Dickpill.” They parlay teenage longing for adulthood into body dysmorphia and suicidal ideation. In the comments, users peddle anabolic steroids, psychedelic drugs and stimulants like Modafinil. Those who express interest are routed to Sanctioned.
In 2023, Canadian authorities arrested 57-year-old Kenneth Law, one of a number of poison dealers native to Sanctioned. Law was connected to 1,200 sales of lethal chemicals and hundreds of deaths across 40 countries. He ultimately pled guilty to 14 counts of assisting suicide and is awaiting sentencing.
Like other sellers, Law stalked the incelosphere and peddled to users at the highest risk of ending their lives. On his Sanctioned account (alias: Greenberg), he claimed to be “a retired medical examiner from New York.”
Sanctioned’s preference for sodium nitrite — an uncommon and poorly researched method — makes the funnel easy to map. A forum search for “SN” or “nitrite” on Looksmax.org yields thousands of results, including hundreds of links to Sanctioned. Aliases like Law’s were active on both forums, promoting the same third-party poison dealers. Nembutal and exit bags, other means hawked on Sanctioned, are pushed frequently on the looksmax site.
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Between 2018 and 2021, Small and Galante changed aliases and switched servers multiple times in an effort to evade identification. The New York Times finally traced Small in 2021, to the Huntsville townhouse he shared with his mother and brother. He went on the record for them that year.
In the interview, Small decried the media’s “pro-life bullshit” and defended Sanctioned as a “pro-choice forum.” He highlighted the site’s recovery hub, but conceded that users registering solely to use it “would be denied most likely.” The reporter asked whether Small, a self-proclaimed incel, would allow his hatred of women to affect his moderation of the site — female users were disproportionately encouraged to end their lives and faced sexual violence on forum–facilitated meetups. Small said that he expected his “biases” to be curbed by other moderators.
According to the BBC’s ongoing investigation, Sanctioned was connected to at least 130 deaths in the United Kingdom alone. As governments — Australia, then Germany and the U.K. — cracked down on Sanctioned, Marquis prepared for war.
“We are confident even if they coordinated all those takedowns at the same time (which is very unlikely), we could be back online within 24 hours,” he wrote.
Small and Galante got better at covering their tracks. The most viewed posts on Sanctioned were “goodbye threads.” By deleting the accounts which posted them, Small could inhibit investigations by parents and law enforcement. After the first wave of heat, he required members to tick a box confirming they were 18.
In the summer of 2026, Master was still a shadowy figure, known well to the natives of Looksmax.org but surprisingly disengaged since the BBC probe in 2023. And then there he was — on livestream with Clavicular, giggling over the size of his insoles.
The stream clicks on two hours before the dive bar. Peters and Small are in a Miami studio. They sit side-by-side in gaming recliners, eyes trained on Clavicular’s monitor. You can see the Kick chat in Master’s glasses: thousands of messages from teenage looksmaxxers who know his name, if not his face.
“I love you Master.” “You own me Master.” “Master, what are your testosterone levels?”
Clavicular’s headshot is plastered on the back wall, only his nose and jaw in frame. When Master speaks, his tone is humiliated. He follows Clavicular’s lead.
“We’re doing a quick stream with Master,” says Clavicular. “If you guys use Looksmax.org, this is the guy. I don’t know how many of my chat are normies versus Looksmax.org users. Chat, write below if you’re registered on Looksmax.org.”
Ten-thousand viewers are now watching live. Clavicular opens Looksmax.org and flips through threads. “New foid slay.” “Rate me. I’m 14.” “I achieved my goal but I’m still incomplete.” It’s a glorified ad for the website: These are the best forums. This is the best medical advice. Here is a woman you could slay.
They scroll through racial slurs, deformed faces — bone-smashers, botched plastic surgeries, bullying threads — and photos of young girls. Clavicular stops on a side-by-side of two kids, no older than 14. Caption: “Girl I’m talking to. Is this hypergamy or a looksmatch?”
Master laughs. They flip through “rate me” posts and he laughs harder. Since 2019, Master has lived on programmatic ad revenue and Bitcoin donations. Managing Looksmax.org is a full-time job.
“Do you read any of the looksmax stuff?” asks Clavicular.
“Nah.”
When he does advise, Small is brief and temperate. He cautions teenagers against cosmetic procedures. As Clavicular recaps his road to ascension — an endless register of supplements and self-harm — Master’s eyes gloss over. He doesn’t give a shit about any of this.
“I would say you’re the greatest example of ascension,” says Master.
When the sun sets, they hit Ocean Drive. Clavicular brings an entourage of 19- and 20-year-old women he has not met. They are friends of friends, discovered college students. Maybe guests from his former Miami Beach nightclub, Barca. Master stands awkwardly in the wings. As the girls file in, Clavicular makes his introductions.
“Not to get personal or anything, but the Master’s looking to settle down,” Clavicular tells one woman. “I don’t know if you have friends that are older because he’s like 32…. Or maybe the Master’s like, fuck it, I want to go 18. DiCaprio-maxxing.”
In the chat, hundreds of preteens are meeting Master for the first time. He’s not the psychopathic Marquis here. On stream, he’s the Godfather of Ascension, the Dr. Frankenstein behind the AMOG (Alpha Male of the Group) Monster. Every time Clavicular says “Looksmax.org,” another person registers for the site and falls down the funnel.
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