The New Yorker:

In their warped and wrongheaded way, the omnipresent influencer Clavicular and his compatriots are intent on demystifying the ideal of natural beauty.

By Becca Rothfeld

The French, in all their Continental wisdom, have a word for people who are ugly in theory yet beautiful in practice. Someone who is jolie laide (literally, pretty-ugly) ought by rights to be unappealing, but, somehow, she isn’t. Her features are strange and unexpected—and all the more compelling for their divergence from the usual tidy symmetries. Canonically jolie-laide celebrities include Charlotte Gainsbourg and Barbra Streisand, of whom her “Funny Girl” co-star Omar Sharif once said, “The first impression is that she’s not very pretty. But after three days, I am honest, I found her physically beautiful, and I start lusting after this woman!”

As far as I know, no one has made much of the inverse phenomenon, yet it, too, is in ample evidence. If some people are beautiful because they are so fascinatingly ugly, there must be people who are ugly because they are so fastidiously beautiful, people who have achieved technical excellence at the expense of erotic charisma. And no one is more laide jolie, more sculpted and faultless, more wooden and sexless, than the paradoxical figure who goes by the name of Clavicular.

Né Braden Peters, Clavicular is an exquisitely contemporary creature—a streamer, a TikToker, and a platform-hopping influencer famed for the dramatic lengths to which he is willing to go to attain physical perfection. In interviews, his flawlessness is uncanny. His arms, enhanced by daily testosterone injections, bulge out of the tight sleeves of his polo shirts; his superbly proportioned face is oddly inflexible, even when he is speaking emphatically or attempting to make an expression. Watching him, I could not shake the feeling that he has a smooth mound where his genitals are supposed to be, as if he were a giant Ken doll (and, indeed, he has acknowledged that his punishing testosterone regimen has shrivelled his testicles and perhaps even rendered him infertile, a price that he is willing to pay for the privilege of becoming the world’s most handsome man).

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