Recent rape charges against the 20-year-old “Looksmaxxing” influencer Braden Eric Peters—better known by his online moniker Clavicular—are but the latest reminder of how the digital manosphere teems with gender double standards and a dangerous laissez-faire attitude toward predatory, assaultive behavior from its name-brand promoters. Peters, who came to prominence via a set of videos peddling a regimen of looks-improvement to heighten male success in encounters with women, is facing two felony charges, one for rape and the other for drugging a person for sexual intercourse, as well as a misdemeanor for providing alcohol to a person under the age of 21.

But to make sense of how Peters acquired the sense of entitlement behind his alleged crimes, we need to take stock of the reactionary online community that elevated him to global attention. The manosphere bills itself as a refuge from the excesses of the freedoms won by feminists—such as independent sex work, and control over sexual decision-making—even as it dogmatically rejects the agency women gained through the struggle for sexual independence. Influencers such as Peters signal to an aggrieved anti-feminist audience of men and boys that women’s freedom and choice should be tolerated only when they benefit men. Peters has claimed to boast a personal “body count” of around 150 sexual partners, while he argues that women who have any sexual history cannot form authentic emotional bonds with their partners.

For all the manosphere’s seeming devotion to traditional patriarchal gender roles, its exponents are not throwbacks to traditional ideas of unchallenged male authority. The older model of male dominance had prescribed marriage, financial dependency, and familial responsibilities, but the masculinity preached by Peters and other manosphere influencers promises sexual access without commitment, dominance without responsibility, and the freedoms of sexual liberation without any corresponding gains in gender equality.

Peters, from his perch as a self-help guru, has also whitewashed some of the uglier features of the manosphere gospel by swapping raw and overt misogyny for routine fitness tracking and facial symmetry charts. He’s repackaged the grossly predatory vision of total male dominance of Andrew Tate—recently arrested on sex-trafficking and rape charges after fleeing prosecution in Romania for similar crimes—for a new generation of young men and boys. He vows to outfit his followers with the same suite of hypermasculine advantages in establishing their dominance that elevated Tate and his brother Tristan to online renown—wealth, status, and sexual achievement—under his prime directive of or Looksmaxxing.

In the isolation of the 2020 Covid shutdowns, Peters set out to chronicle from his childhood bedroom his new campaign to optimize his appearance. His toolkit included a needle, a hammer, and various powders. Drawing in misguided fashion on a two-century-old study by German surgeon Julius Wolff that professed to find that microfractures in the face would force bones to heal thicker with an enhanced underlying structure, Peters popularized the practice of “bone smashing.”

On livestreams and social media, he took hammer after hammer to his cheekbones and jaw. To stay lean and suppress his appetite, Peters began ingesting methamphetamine and adderall. On an April 2026 livestream, he unintentionally overdosed. He also mentions using steroids, drugs to combat hair loss, and illegal peptides meant to alter body composition and appearance.

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Peters preaches these methods of alleged self-improvement as part of a broader goal: to maximize his male audience’s “sexual market value” (SMV). This measure of masculine attractiveness, needless to say, isn’t a prescription for men and boys to practice kindness, empathy, or intelligence in the romantic and sexual pursuit of women and girls. It serves, rather, as a strict, gamified equation that renders the sexual conquest of women as an all but inevitable consequence of dominating the sexual marketplace.

In his livestreams, published guides, and paid online coaching courses, Peters models for young men and boys how they should relate to women. He designates women and girls as “targets” and “slayables,” and encourages his audience to refer to women as “foids” (female humanoids). He also urges followers to identify as members of his “clan.”

On a 2026 summer trip to Paris, Peters reported to his followers that the women he encountered there failed to respond to this formula and make themselves sexually available to him. He claimed that they were “probably lesbians” or part of a flawed gene pool. This was par for the course in his daily messages to the manosphere; he consistently acts as though the autonomy of women is a maladaptive trait, and dogmatically dismisses any claim to female equality as an outlying aberration.

Peters’s ideological blindspots are also a defining feature of the manosphere, and betray an unacknowledged but devastating flourish of bad at the core of its bleak vision of gender relations. He and his fellow influencers deny the basic humanity of women while they rely on the very women they scorn to affirm their own sexual dominance.

The manosphere thrives on this contradiction: Its version of patriarchy is parasitic on the ability of women to be sexually, socially, and financially independent—if not ever equal.

The charges Peters now faces are deeply rooted in this bait-and-switch stratagem. In May 2025, Peters connected with Aleksandra Vasilevna Mendoza—the then-16-year-old victim in the recent lawsuit—to become the “female face of looksmaxxing” in order to boost his streaming profits. He promised to boost her online presence and success, following the tried-and-true manosphere blueprint: woo women and girls with the promise of greater financial independence while reaping the bulk of the monetized returns on their content for his own gain.

In this move, too, Peters was following a well-known manosphere playbook. Harrison James Patrick Sullivan (known online as HSTikkyTokky or HS) operates his own agency that promotes OnlyFans accounts—where women produce sexually explicit content that typically delivers an outsize share of profits to account distributors. In an interview with Louis Theroux, HS said that he “would disown his daughter” if she had an account herself. Andrew and Tristan Tate, the kingpins of manosphere culture and influence, built their online empire on the same model of ruthless sexual exploitation. According to Business Insider, two of Tate’s female confidants, Georgiana Naghel and Luana Radu, controlled TikTok and OnlyFans accounts of the women recruited by the Tates and coerced them to produce pornographic content under violent duress.

In response to the recent charges, Peters took to X to deploy the standard gaslighting technique that predatory men employ when the law or female accusers seek to hold them accountable—deny, attack, and reverse victim and offender (DARVO). Much as the Tates have done in their legal fights, Peters blithely announced that this sort of attack “happens to all successful young men,” and that “people try to come for your money.”

However, as Peters’s case plays out, the cultural impact of the manosphere needs to be forcefully disowned. In a nonstop barrage of content, the influencers in the manosphere offer a model of sexual freedom that treats men’s desires as entitlements and women’s boundaries as obstacles for men to overcome. Under the misleading aegis of reclaimed masculinity and self-help, men and boys are taught that consent is secondary to their desires, and that their decisions carry more weight than any woman’s or girl’s words, physical autonomy, or protests ever could.

The manosphere has attracted a mass online following by mining a lucrative market in men’s dissatisfaction with their own lives. Amid widespread concerns about male loneliness, influencers like Peters offer an artificial supply for an all-too-real demand among younger men for connection and female validation. Rather than addressing underlying conditions that leave men feeling isolated or inadequate, the manosphere sells them the promise that if you Looksmaxx hard enough, wealth, status, and female adoration will inevitably follow and magically make those feelings disappear.

A 2025 Pew Research study found that roughly equal shares of US men and women say they’re often lonely, but men are far less likely to reach out to broader networks for support. A 2024 review from Am J Mens Health of 13 studies found that masculine norms emphasizing self-reliance and emotional stoicism limit men’s opportunities for social connection and emotional support, leading to increased feelings of loneliness. The same review also found that rejecting homosexual or gender-radicalized men served to cultivate social connection among men dedicated to denying their own affinities with men who don’t conform to straight or patriarchal gender expectations.

This reluctance to seek support suggests a shortage of nonpatriarchal physical, real-world male role models for young men and boys. Lacking mentorship in their day-to-day lives, they turn online to fill the void; there they encounter virtual influencers in the mold of the Tates and Peters, offering parasocial father and big-brother figures who promise likability and direction while peddling an isolating, unhealthy, and deeply corrupt vision of manhood

Peters offers men struggling for connection an answer in physical perfection, increasing sexual market value, and the seemingly effortless sexual conquest of women. But this product will never satisfy the demand. It substitutes physical validation for adequate connection and sexual predation for meaningful intimacy. For the legions who make up Peters’s “clan,” the promised fulfillment fails to materialize—which is a great commercial boon to the influencers marketing a panoply of instant fixes under the false pitch that they will ultimately satiate it.

Meeting men’s needs requires offering something beyond another set of instructions to reach social acceptance. It requires giving them the opportunity for something that few educational or digital spaces have supplied: space for honest conversations that develop the tools they need to foster meaningful relationships with women, with one another, and with themselves.

In our conversations with fraternity men through our group What They Don’t Say, we have seen how we can engage in searching assessments of sexual assault and toxic masculinity without also treating young men like they bear responsibility for the harmful expectations that they have been raised to cling to. Conversations about consent, rejection, and sexual pressure become opportunities to examine those expectations instead of occasions to assign collective blame and point fingers. We challenge the ways men have been taught to understand women—but we also ask them to take responsibility for how they treat and represent one another. We challenge young men on the premise that their fulfillment should depend on women, rather than themselves.

The manosphere has made a business out of selling men solutions to problems it helps perpetuate. Interrupting that cycle requires giving young men the genuine freedom to question the expectations they’ve inherited without shame or stigma. The more young men and boys can affirm their own worth and build relationships that sustain it, the less there is for influencers like Peters to sell them.