Mogging mainstream media

Media is shifting to audience-focused models. The growth of newsletters is a critical component of thee strategies. We are undertaking a research project, in collaboration with Beehiiv, to understand the state of publisher email strategies. The responses will form the basis of a research report The Rebooting will release next month. The report will detail:

The survey takes about 10 minutes to complete.

Take the survey

This is the first edition of The Argument, which will feature expert points of view in a conversational format. To kick it off, I invited my former colleague John McDermott to make the case why the rise in popularity of the so-called looksmaxxer Clavicular is more than just an Information Space sideshow. Instead, it signals how men’s lifestyle brands have lost their cachet with Gen Z men.

John is a writer whose work has appeared in Esquire, Rolling Stone, GQ, The Guardian and elsewhere. 

John: Late last month, right in the midst of his crossover from niche internet creator into a mainstream media fixation, looksmaxxing influencer Clavicular tweeted: “Im getting emails from all these media platforms, who the fuck is rolling stone magazine LOL. Tired of these washed outlets trying to clout chase.” 

What most impressed me was just how arrogantly dismissive Clavicular was of mainstream media. Here was an influencer saying that Rolling Stone — one of the most venerated institutions in all of American journalism, a publication once synonymous with what is considered cool and countercultural — was completely irrelevant to him. 

Rolling Stone? Never heard of it. Clavicular likened the magazine to an annoying teacher who assigns homework right before the final bell on a Friday afternoon. Rolling Stone’s (entirely normal) comment request wasn’t just an imposition, it was beneath him. How dare they even ask?

Clavicular — for those uninitiated in the world of gooning, maxxing and mogging — is the nom de guerre of Braden Peters, the 20-year-old streamer on the video platform Kick and the foremost figure in the looksmaxxing male subculture. Looksmaxxers believe aesthetic beauty is the most important aspect to a person’s success and will therefore go to extremes to optimize their appearance, including using steroids, getting chin implants and undergoing hair transplant surgery. The looksmaxxing subculture is often associated with the Far Right manosphere, though Clavicular himself professes to be apolitical. Clavicular’s is a politics purely of aesthetics; he prefers Gavin Newsom to JD Vance, for example, because of Newsom’s superior bone structure.

Those of us who still write for legacy media outlets have known for years that the power balance between the once-revered glossy magazines and the celebrities they cover has completely inverted relative to the halcyon days of magazine publishing. Celebrities no longer need the Vogues and Esquires of the world to publicize their new project or to humanize their image. They have social media and self-produced documentary series for that.

It’s now the magazines that desperately need the celebrities. Scoring an exclusive profile of a high-profile celebrity is one of the only ways a dying magazine title can introduce itself to young audiences and claim, if just for a moment, a sliver of cultural relevance.

Clavicular understands this innately and spelled out in his tweet with his signature cavalier bravado. Rolling Stone stands to gain more from writing about Clavicular than Clavicular, a man with his own sizable, devout following, stands to gain from cooperating with a Rolling Stone reporter on a story.

Clavicular proved this yet again just last week, when his media team flexed its performance enhanced muscles in the face of yet another titan of the bygone golden era of magazine publishing. Rather than acquiesce to a request for comment from The Atlantic, Clavicular’s PR representative Mitchell Jackson responded to the reporter with a photo of Atlantic owner Laurene Powell Jobs in a bikini, chumming it up with Jeffrey Epstein’s right-hand woman Ghislaine Maxwell.

Jackson told The Bulwark that giving them a comment was “not moggable.”

Jackson, a disgraced former journalist turned flack for media reprobates, is the perfect PR representative for both Clavicular and this particular moment in media. Jackson, a former star reporter at Vice, lost his career in 2017 after BuzzFeed published emails between Jackson and Milo Yiannopoulos, former columnist for Breitbart and star of the alt-right. Jackson has come back as a PR rep for some of the most controversial figures in media (his biggest client is Candace Owens), and he knows all the dirty tricks reporters try to pull and how to counter them. 

More importantly, Jackson understands that legacy media is weak, and it lacks the power it once had to “cancel” someone. Just a few years ago, a single negative article — hell, one bad X thread — could result in someone losing their livelihood. But cancel culture fatigue and a corresponding rightward “vibe shift” in political values, combined with the hands-off moderation policies of platforms such as Rumble and Kick (where Clavicular streams), have made Jackson’s clients un-cancellable.

It would have been unthinkable in the summer of 2020 for a white male to habitually drop “N” bombs without having his life and career immediately and irrevocably dismantled, but now it's part of being a media sensation. Clavicular got a GQ profile out of it.

This power imbalance is obviously terrible for journalism, as it has produced tons of spineless, star-fucking profiles from magazines scared to lose access to a PR agency’s client roster. I experienced this firsthand in 2023, when Esquire assigned me a profile of Jay Shetty, the self-guru to the stars. When I went back to Esquire with evidence that Shetty had lied about his backstory and was running a pyramid scheme in the form of a life-coaching school, Esquire killed the piece. (The article was published a year later in The Guardian.)

For magazines whose revenues and staff are dwindling, publishing a profile that is skeptical of and tough on its subject is often too much of a risk, financially and culturally. There’s the threat of getting caught in a costly protracted legal battle, or, even worse, looking foolish, such as GQ features director Katherine Stoeffel, who was memed into oblivion for asking Sydney Sweeney tough but fair questions about Sweeney’s controversial American Eagle ad campaign.

The humble truth for an old school magazine features writers like yours truly is that Clavicular is entirely right — our medium is washed. The Claviculars of the world have the clout now, and we can only chase them. We have been mogged.

Brian:  I’m not as deep in my Clavicular studies as you are, but I cannot say I was surprised by his dismissal of mainstream media. Rolling Stone, GQ and Esquire have been “washed” for a while now. They lost their identities in their pivots to video and SEO, trying to be everything to everyone with atrocities like “shared content desks” and anodyne Game of Thrones recaps. Clavicular’s base of young men didn’t grow up with Rolling Stone covers on their bedroom walls.

The Information Space rewards the Claviculars. That's why everyone from The Guardian to Rolling Stone to GQ to The Gray Lady herself have lined up to divine What It All Means. Vox had an explainer of jestermaxxing, which is helpful to people like me. I blame Daniel Kolitz for knowing about gooning.

I’m most interested in what this means for these lifestyle publications that have embraced being “brands” as their economic value. They do not have nearly the tie to the young-male audience as Clavicular and other Information Space characters who are expert at hacking the attention economy. Instead, they’ve bet on using their journalism to front brand activation and commerce businesses. 

Legacy media needing to profile Clavicular, rather than Clavicular needing a media profile, is a sad commentary on the shifting power dynamics of the Information Space. I would think a better approach is to opt out of this fetid part of the Information Space. For instance, I’m impressed by what Lindsay Peoples has done with The Cut. She’s made it very relevant, but without losing its brand identity.

Does it really matter if reactionary young men aren’t into Rolling Stone or GQ?

John: As someone who did grow up cutting out photos from his dad’s Rolling Stone magazines and tacking them to his bedroom wall, yes, I am supremely bummed that the publication is irrelevant to this generation of young men. 

And it absolutely matters that these young men, especially the right-leaning ones, aren’t reading Rolling Stone and GQ, and I write that not just because my income is somewhat reliant on the health of those titles. (I contribute to both Rolling Stone and GQ.)

Part of this is due to, as you point out, magazines churning out low-grade, SEO-optimized content online and sacrificing their brand value. This was depressing to watch in real-time, but I know the media game; magazines had to find a way to fund the important, resource-intensive journalism they continued to publish in their print editions.

The bigger reason why these magazines lost young male readers is that, in the 2000s and especially in the 2010s, they adopted an increasingly Leftist tone and ethos that many young men find alienating. In their attempts to “go woke,” for lack of a better phrase, and attack “toxic masculinity,” they lost young male readers who used to be their primary audience. 

Those young guys instead gravitated to media figures who told them to embrace their masculine natures. Many of these figures, such as Andrew Tate, were even more toxic than the male role models of the past. The rightward political shift among young men has been blamed on the manosphere itself, but the mainstream press is just as culpable.

The Cut is a perfect example of a publication that has remained focused on its core readership, educated, culturally aware young women, and continues to serve them quality journalism, even amid such massive shifts in culture and politics. 

But where is The Cut for young men? It doesn’t exist. There is no prominent male-focused publication that covers men’s issues with genuine intellectual curiosity and without drifting toward performative male feminism on the Left, or reactionary male chauvinism on the Right — which is a shame, because it is, regardless of your politics, a fascinating moment for men and masculinity.

Brian: We have arrived at synthesis. Clavicular represents a particular version of masculinity that I don’t believe is dominant or even will prove long lasting. I’m not going to cosplay Scott Galloway, but it’s clear we are in a period where young men are not doing great in many areas. Clavicular represents nihilism of being marginalized and facing an uncertain path to economic and personal success.

I don’t know if the counterpoint will come through an institutional media brand. It’s more likely to be a YouTube creator brand. Final thing: Any nominations for the anti-Clavicular?

John: I agree; the looksmaxxing trend will prove to be a short-lived overcorrection, and we’ll hopefully settle at a more rational take on masculinity.

As for an anti-Clavicular, I don’t know who it will be, but I’m eager to see who emerges. The mainstream press is eager to dub Hasan Piker “the Joe Rogan of the Left,” but Piker is a Leftist extremist, to the point that he once said America deserved 9/11. More recently, he’s been an apologist for China’s authoritarian regime. Not exactly the type of guy all men can rally around.

I don’t think the next ascendent male figure will be a YouTuber, though. Last year, I wrote in Rolling Stone about a male-dominated, anti-woke literary scene in downtown L.A. The cool indie lit bros are bringing back old-fashioned literary fiction available only in print. The anti-Clavicular might very well be a writer who shuns YouTube and constitutes a return to a more traditional, gentlemanly, intellectual masculinity.

Brian: I like the notion that the new punk rock will be opting out of the algorithmic short video doom loop. At the risk of again playing the role of Grandpa Simpson shaking his fist at clouds, I have hope that being Extremely Online will become Extremely Uncool. Thanks for doing this, John.

Send me your feedback by hitting reply or emailing me at [email protected]