(RNS) — Braden Peters, a streamer who goes by Clavicular, posted a recent video last week announcing he would broadcast his life 24 hours a day for a month on Kick, where he has about 250,000 followers.
“I live in a luxury condominium in downtown Miami, the penthouse,” Peters said with a deadpan affect in the video. “My name is Clavicular. I’m 20 years old. I believe in looksmaxxing — the idea of maximizing physical attractiveness by any means necessary in order to ascend.” He looks directly into the camera, as if addressing a mirror.
“My ratios are almost golden now.”
Peters, who has said he is Catholic, speaks about self-optimization in the language of religion: discipline, hierarchy, “ascension.” In the larger looksmaxxing community, physical transformation is treated as a moral imperative, one obtainable by persistent self-denial and the pursuit of an ideal form. To some observers, including religious scholars and Catholics in his milieu, the ethos resembles a kind of inverted asceticism: a life structured around sacrifice and perfection, not to a higher power, but to the self.
“Religious asceticism is oriented toward Jesus Christ and the spiritual life, as opposed to the carnal life,” said Jordan Castro, a Christian cultural critic, co-director of the Cluny Institute and author of the book “Muscle Man.” “(This community) is just oriented toward something completely different. It’s very, very different.”
The video continues following Peters as he walks through his apartment, rattling off in a flat cadence all the substances he says he takes and pausing …