The Rise of Clavicular: Why Are We Obsessed with Terrible People?

Image Author: Fort Lauderdale Sheriff's Office or Broward County Sheriff's Office via Wikimedia Commons

For rising star Clavicular, the pre-game is simple: smash your cheekbones with a hammer. "I’ll just lay down on my bed and brace my head so there's no CTE, and then smash my zygomas so that they grow,” he explains, projecting from my screen with the clinical authority of a man recommending his skincare routine. He recommends this regimen, which he calls “bone-smashing”, to his 4.2 million followers. I am, embarrassingly, very tuned in.

A few scrolls later, I discover that bone smashing is just the warm-up. On livestream, Clavicular also microdoses crystal meth to stay lean – “really not as bad as people think,” he assures his audience. This ritual is especially prescribed for followers he classifies as “subhuman” on his scale of human attractiveness, a label he uses literally. After all, how else will his audience “slay foids” (have sex with women) and assert dominance over their male peers?

It shouldn’t take mere minutes for Clavicular’s hammers or highs to end up on my feed. Yet, his meteoric rise makes perfect sense. Social platforms are engagement machines, and a man casually beating his own face with a hammer is, surprisingly, quite engaging. On TikTok alone, videos with the phrase “bone smashing tutorial” have already amassed nearly 270 million views. Score for private healthcare providers. Less of a score for the rest of us. Who exactly do we blame? A quarter of a billion eyes don’t appear from nowhere – those eyes were trained to look long before Clavicular arrived.

“It’s bang out the machete, boom! In her face, and grip her by the neck. Shut up, b***h.” Enter Andrew Tate. In 2022, the algorithm rendered him inescapable, arming teenage boys with his casual (and catchy) misogyny. Where Clavicular wields his hammer, Tate had a whiteboard, cigar, and a gospel for lost men. His sermon? Permission slips for male rage, rebranded as self-improvement. “You cannot be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey… or a woman that doesn’t obey you.” Neither the algorithm nor the viewers could get enough. That is, until the bans came… albeit too late. Tate’s cult audience was not lost: it was inherited by Clavicular, whose viewers enjoy watching him approach women on live streams. In 2025, the Tate brothers were charged with rape and human trafficking. Clavicular, meanwhile, is still streaming.

At some point, I should have put my phone down. I do not. Neither do 4.2 million others. Unfortunately, the cultural impact of this is damning: the teenage tongue is fluent in incel ideology. Subhuman. Foid. Stacy. Dehumanising terms plucked from manosphere forums are now casually drifting through school corridors, rattling the halls with an ease that should terrify us. The manosphere, that sprawling online ecosystem of misogyny, self-worship, and barely coded rage, has learnt to repackage itself. Dig a little deeper, and find less fashionable terms like sluthate: too raw for the school corridor, but identical in ideology. Vocabulary is just the surface. A peer-reviewed study of 22,000 incel forum comments found that incels consistently justify sexual assault as a form of revenge for their involuntary celibacy – such data reflects a widespread cultural fixation on sexually conquering women, quietly lurking beneath Clavicular’s shiny new jargon.

At its core, Clavicular’s content delivers a single message: a man’s value is measured by his cheekbones, and a woman’s by being worth the hammer. Neither Clavicular nor Tate authored this ideology. They simply made it watchable, repackaged in flashy suits, cigar-lit preaching, and comically-shaped hammers. The algorithm, indifferent as ever, did the rest. Somewhere, Clavicular’s replacement is already auditioning. We will definitely tune in then, too.