Take one livestreamer, a coded vernacular about jawlines and clavicle width, and seven months of public media traces between December 2025 and July 2026. Track how his specific style of masculine authority moved from fringe forums into mainstream news coverage, and back out again as parody. That’s the design behind Containment Failure, Diagnostic Masculinity, and the Diffusion of Looksmaxxing: The Case of Clavicular, published in Journalism and Media by Dag Øivind Madsen of the University of South-Eastern Norway, and covered Sept 6, 2026 by PsyPost’s Eric W. Dolan. Madsen’s paper traces a five-stage pipeline and coins a term, “diagnostic masculinity,” for the specific kind of authority Clavicular built: not an aspirational lifestyle to envy, but a diagnosis of your bodily “lack,” followed by a coaching subscription that promises to fix it. René Girard never saw a looksmaxxing forum. But in the 1960s and 70s, he mapped the exact mechanism underneath it — desire borrowed from a model, rivalry that escalates when the model can’t be matched, and a group that resolves the unbearable tension by finding someone, or something, to blame.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	How “diagnostic masculinity” and looksmaxxing spread from fringe forums into mainstream visibility through livestreamer Clavicular
Who ran it?	Dag Øivind Madsen, University of South-Eastern Norway
Where and when?	Journalism and Media (MDPI), 2026; covered Sept 6, 2026 by PsyPost
Analysis window	December 2025 to July 2026, using public media traces and platform visibility indicators
The five stages	Vernacular incubation, infrastructural assembly, controversy acceleration, mainstream translation, parodic consolidation
Coined term	”Diagnostic masculinity” — platformed authority built on naming and ranking bodily “lack,” then monetizing the fix
Independent corroboration	BPS’s The Psychologist and Psychology Today separately document the psychological toll of looksmaxxing culture
What Girard already argued	Desire is triangular, borrowed from a model — and when the model can’t be equaled, imitation curdles into rivalry that needs somewhere to land

The Quick Version

A 2026 media-studies paper traces how one livestreamer’s “diagnostic masculinity” — ranking men’s bodily flaws, then selling the fix — moved from coded forum slang into national news coverage through five identifiable stages. René Girard described the underlying mechanism half a century earlier: desire isn’t something you generate on your own. You borrow it from a model. When that model is close enough to imitate but too close to ever fully match, the imitation turns into rivalry, and the rivalry needs a target — women, other men, or, when nothing else is available, yourself.

What the Study Actually Found

Clavicular (born Braden Eric Peters) spent up to 14 hours a day on looksmaxxing forums during COVID-19 lockdowns, by his own account, and has documented anabolic steroid use going back to age 14. That biography matters to Madsen’s argument, because it’s part of what made Clavicular legible as an authority rather than a crank: he wasn’t selling a fantasy from outside the subculture. He was its most online member, turned into its most visible one.

Madsen’s five-stage model traces how that happened. Vernacular incubation is the slang itself — PSL scores, “mewing,” “bonesmashing,” the whole coded dialect that only makes sense if you’ve spent time in the forums. Infrastructural assembly is what turns private slang into something the rest of the internet can find: clip accounts, Discord servers, a livestream format built for constant redistribution. Controversy acceleration is where Clavicular’s specific biography did its work — a viral Cybertruck incident, antisemitic singing on stream, arrests, and a hospitalization after an on-stream drug overdose, each one pulling in viewers who came for the spectacle and stayed for the content. Mainstream translation is journalists and commentators picking the story up, which both exposes it and legitimizes it as a thing worth covering. Parodic consolidation is the last stage — the point where the mainstream has fully absorbed the figure and started making fun of him, which looks like containment but is really just the final, most durable form of visibility.

The coaching business sits at the center of all five stages. Clavicular’s “Clavicular System,” a $50-a-month program, reportedly earned him over $100,000 a month at its peak. That’s the engine of “diagnostic masculinity” as Madsen defines it: an influencer who doesn’t sell you an aspirational life you might attain. He tells you what’s specifically, measurably wrong with your face, and then sells you the fix for it.

What Did Girard Mean by Mimetic Desire?

Mimetic desire (French désir mimétique; Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, 1961) is the claim that desire isn’t generated from inside a person — it’s borrowed from a model, someone whose wanting shows us what’s worth wanting. The closer and more attainable that model seems, the more imitation curdles into rivalry, because now the imitator believes the model’s advantage is something he could actually take.

Girard called this structure triangular: there’s a subject, an object the subject wants, and a model who shows the subject that the object is worth wanting in the first place. Crucially, the model doesn’t have to be a hero. In Violence and the Sacred (1972), Girard’s clearest cases are models who are close enough, socially, to be rivals rather than idols — what he called “internal mediation.” A medieval saint, remote and unreachable, inspires imitation without rivalry. A rival businessman in your own industry inspires both.

Clavicular is internal mediation built for a platform. He isn’t a distant icon of masculinity. He’s a visibly damaged near-peer — documented steroid use since adolescence, forum hours logged like a confession — whose “lack” gets named in the same breath as everyone watching. That closeness is the product. It tells a viewer: this gap is closable, I am not fundamentally different from the man diagnosing me, and the $50-a-month coaching is the bridge across it. Girard’s whole point about internal mediation is that the bridge rarely closes. It just makes the rivalry more intimate.

Why Does Looksmaxxing Spread Like This?

1. Diagnostic masculinity manufactures the lack desire needs. Girard’s subjects don’t walk around with a pre-existing want. They need a model to show them what’s missing. Naming a bodily “deficit” — jaw angle, clavicle width, a PSL score — manufactures exactly that lack, on demand, for anyone who watches.
2. Livestream intimacy manufactures internal mediation at scale. A forum post is text from a stranger. A livestream is a face, a voice, hours of apparent access. That intimacy is what makes the model feel close enough to rival instead of merely admire — the precise condition Girard said produces the sharpest imitation.
3. Ranking systems convert private insecurity into public rivalry. A PSL scale doesn’t just tell you your number. It tells you everyone else’s. Once desire is public and comparative, Girard’s theory predicts exactly what the forums show: men watching each other’s scores the way rivals watch a shared object neither can fully possess.
4. When no one can win, the tension needs somewhere to go. Girard’s answer to unresolved rivalry is the scapegoat — not a metaphor, a mechanism. The forums document where the blame lands: at women who supposedly withhold status, at “Chads” who have what can’t be earned, and, when both targets run out, at the self — the bonesmashing, the steroid use since 14, the overdose on stream.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The claim isn’t that a twentieth-century literary theorist predicted a 2026 media-studies paper about a specific livestreamer. It’s narrower and more interesting: Girard’s specific claim was that desire mediated through a close, rivalrous model produces escalating imitation that the group eventually discharges onto a target. Madsen’s five-stage pipeline is a trace-level map of exactly that mechanism running at platform speed, with monetization built into every stage.

It connects to Rousseau’s account of amour propre — the comparative, status-anchored self-regard that Rousseau thought civilization manufactures rather than removes. Girard’s models and Rousseau’s comparisons are doing adjacent work: both describe a self that can’t generate its own sense of worth and has to borrow the yardstick from someone else. It also sits close to Hegel’s theory of recognition, since what a PSL score ultimately measures isn’t bone structure — it’s whether you’re being recognized as mattering, with a number standing in for an answer no algorithm can actually give.

Russell’s diagnosis of envy as a habit of comparison belongs here too, since Russell located the damage in the comparing itself, not in any particular gap it measures — which is exactly what makes a ranking forum so efficient at producing misery regardless of where any individual actually ranks. And Mozi’s argument that partiality is the structural cause of conflict rhymes with the scapegoating stage specifically: once “Chads” and women become categories outside the circle of concern, blaming them stops requiring an argument. It just requires the category to already exist.

The Gap Girard Didn’t See Coming

Here’s where the comparison gets more interesting than a clean match, and it’s worth sitting with instead of smoothing over.

Girard’s scapegoat mechanism, in its classical form, resolves something. A community in a mimetic crisis — everyone rivaling everyone, differences collapsing into chaos — finds a victim, expels or sacrifices it, and the group returns to peace. The mechanism has an ending built into it. That’s the whole function: discharge the tension, restore order.

Madsen’s pipeline doesn’t end that way, because the business model needs the crisis to keep running. A coaching subscription that actually resolved a customer’s sense of bodily lack would lose the customer. So the scapegoating in looksmaxxing culture increasingly turns inward and stays open — not one clean expulsion of an outside victim, but a recursive loop where the self becomes the scapegoat, repeatedly, through self-harm practices like bonesmashing and the kind of steroid use Clavicular himself has documented since age 14. Girard assumed the mechanism would complete. A platform that monetizes the unresolved crisis has a structural incentive to keep it from ever completing.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns.

One Livestreamer Is Not a Movement

Madsen’s design is a single, trace-supported case study of one figure’s diffusion across platforms. It’s a careful account of how this specific pipeline worked for Clavicular. It isn’t a representative sample of looksmaxxing influencers generally, and the five-stage model’s fit to other cases hasn’t been tested here.

Public Traces, Not Interviews

The analysis draws on public media traces and platform visibility indicators, not direct interviews with the men consuming this content. It can map how the content moved. It can’t, on its own, tell you what any individual viewer believed, felt, or did as a result.

Corroboration Isn’t the Same Study

BPS’s The Psychologist and Psychology Today document real psychological costs of looksmaxxing culture — rating threads where, as the BPS piece reports, every analyzed thread included insults or encouragement toward self-harm. But those pieces are independent treatments of the broader culture, not direct studies of Madsen’s five-stage diffusion model. Treat them as corroborating the harm, not as replicating the pipeline finding.

Girard’s Theory Explains the Shape, Not the Cure

Mimetic theory is a framework for why this spreads and curdles the way it does. It isn’t a clinical intervention. A man showing signs of body dysmorphia or self-harm needs a clinician, not a syllabus on triangular desire.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Notice where the “lack” came from. Before you treat a bodily flaw as self-evident, ask whether you noticed it yourself or whether a ranking system handed it to you. Girard’s whole point is that the lack often arrives with the model, not before it.
2. Closeness, not distance, is what makes a rival. The influencer who feels most like a peer is the one most likely to pull you into comparison you can’t win. Distance from a model isn’t a failure to connect. Sometimes it’s the thing keeping you out of a rivalry that was never winnable.
3. Ask where your own blame is landing. If frustration keeps finding its way to the same group — women, other men, yourself — that’s worth treating as a symptom of unresolved rivalry, not as settled information about who’s actually at fault.

Girard never heard of a PSL scale and never watched a livestream. He had a theory about the novel, built from Cervantes and Stendhal and Dostoevsky, about why characters want what other characters want and what happens when they can’t have it. Seventy years later, a media-studies paper traced a livestreamer’s own documented steroid use, his forum hours, his overdose on camera, and the $50-a-month subscription built on top of all of it — and found, running the whole way through, a mechanism with Girard’s name already on it.

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This post discusses a 2026 study published in Journalism and Media (Dag Øivind Madsen, DOI: 10.3390/journalmedia7030158), reporting on that study by PsyPost, independent coverage of looksmaxxing’s psychological costs by BPS’s The Psychologist and Psychology Today, and René Girard’s mimetic theory as developed in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (1961) and Violence and the Sacred (1972). The study is a single trace-supported case analysis of one public figure’s diffusion pattern, not a representative sample or a clinical study, and Girard’s framework is an interpretive lens, not an empirical finding. If you or someone you know is engaging in self-harm, please seek support from a qualified mental health professional.