If you’ve gotten this far without being made privy to the purported horrors of being “brutally frame-mogged,” then consider yourself lucky, if not divinely protected.
Use of the phrase has proliferated on social media as of late alongside other similarly millennials-perplexing terms—think “looksmaxxing,” “jestermaxxing,” et al.—whose early origins have been widely linked to the larger incel subculture. More recently, this grab bag of terminology has become synonymous with Clavicular (pictured above being brutally frame-mogged by various skyscrapers), a streamer and influencer who bills himself as “the face of looksmax” while routinely paling around with far-right figures.
In light of Clavicular’s recent arrest and subsequent release, which itself led to a New York Times reporter joking that the streamer had “freedom-mogged” police, you may be tempted to spend a chunk of the precious time you have left on this earth learning the meanings of “mogging” and related terms.
As much as we would personally advise against that, suggesting instead that you spend your time doing almost anything else, we have begrudgingly put together a quick guide.
Keep reading if you feel your time has no value.
Looksmaxxing
This one, incredibly, has a Merriam-Webster entry. The oft-cited dictionary authority defines “looksmaxxing” as, in part, “practices, especially among young men online, to enhance their physical appearance.”
The level of severity to which one subscribes to “looksmaxxing” varies significantly, with some of the more extreme measures apparently undertaken by devotees to the practice underscoring the absurdity that very much seems to define our current era.
“Maxxing” doesn’t only apply to looks, as “jestermaxxing” has also entered social media vernacular, but we’ll get to that a bit later.
Frame-mogged
To again pull from Merriam-Webster, which is an admittedly trite thing to do, “mog” and related variations is widely understood to come from the original acronym AMOG, i.e., Alpha Male of Group. This, of course, is certainly in line with the decidedly incel-y history we referenced earlier.
In short, to “mog” someone is to outdo them, meaning that to be “brutally frame-mogged”—to borrow a phrase from a meme, itself spurred by this caption of a clip taken from a Clavicular stream—is to have been bested in terms of physical appearance. More specifically, it means that one person has amassed a build that is, for one dumb reason or another, considered more desirable than another.
Jestermaxxing
“Jestermaxxing,” in contrast to looksmaxxing, refers to instances of behavior designed, whether in earnest or not, to appear attractive without hyper-focusing on one’s actual appearance. This can mean attempting to be funny, etc. “Jestergooning,” seemingly, is alternately used in a similar context.
Clavicular attributes it all to “dumbasses on Twitter”
Clavicular, however, has distanced himself from much of the terminology. In the below clip, he’s seen arguing that much of it stems from “dumbasses on Twitter just writing random words.” He also made a specific mention of “jestergooning,” saying it’s “not actually a thing” despite its recent popularity on social media.
“Every single person loved, for some reason, the lingo,” he said. “That’s not even the lingo that I use at all. This is just dumbasses on Twitter just writing random words. No one understands. It’s just random gibberish. All the vernacular that you guys have seen go viral on Twitter is not actually [looksmaxxing] terminology. It’s just random dumb shit.”