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In case you haven’t heard, America is suffering from a bout of Chad fever. Our timelines are billowing up with the sculpted bodies of debonair young men—cheekbones sharpened to a rapier point—dispensing specious advice about how, with enough time, patience, and surgical intervention, you too might look like them. It is a vanguard that seems to have materialized out of thin air, arresting digital culture with ironclad norms, taboos, and an indecipherable argot all its own. Case in point: In February, I read a tweet so opaque it might as well have been scripted in an alien language. It was posted by an account called @Kick_Champ, which highlights the daily slate of drama on the alternative livestreaming platform Kick—the central atelier for the Gen Z manosphere. @Kick_Champ is especially interested in the startlingly ascendant “looksmaxxing” scene, a facet of the Chad demimonde in which men take drastic measures to amplify their sex appeal.
Here is the tweet, unabridged:
#2 ranked Chad Androgenic has LANDED in AMERICA and is actively SEARCHING for the ASU FRAT LEADER who FRAME MOGGED Clavicular.
Attached was a video of a handsome twentysomething, in a shaggy haircut and a tight black tank top, loitering outside a nightclub, eyeing the crowd with nefarious intention.
Stay with me while I break that down: “Chad,” as a noun, was originally spawned in the incel forums of the 2010s and is shorthand for any man deemed to possess apex attractive qualities—broad shoulders, a strong chin, clear skin, and so on. As such, Androgenic is the name of a manosphere influencer known for possessing cartoonishly huge biceps and an uncanny waist-to-shoulder ratio. ASU Frat Leader is a different manosphere influencer who, weeks earlier, had starred in a much-memed clip in which he posed next to a streamer named Clavicular—the biggest star in this scene; more on him later—showing off his more impressive physique. (This is what frame mogging means: showing up a fellow Chad with the enfeebling power of pure mass.) Androgenic, then, was on the hunt to establish dominance with his build, avenging Clavicular in the process. If you allowed me to translate, the tweet would read like this: “Androgenic has landed in America to show ASU Frat Leader that he has bigger muscles than him.” (He eventually succeeded in that objective.)
That tweet, like so many others that have surfaced out of the looksmaxxing community lately, quickly went viral. It’s been viewed by more than 5 million people, many of whom—like me—are baffled by this bizarre coterie of swole twentysomethings punishing their fellow man with triceps striation. I haven’t been able to look away, in part because there is one lingering question that has yet to be sufficiently answered: What exactly does it mean that Androgenic is the “#2 ranked Chad”? Who decided that? Under what jurisdiction? Is there some sort of canonical authority taxonomizing the bodily makeup of jacked Kick streamers? More importantly, is this just the way the world works now?
The answer to those questions is yes. Sort of.
There is, indeed, a domain called OfficialChadRankings.com. It was registered in early February by a 20-year-old from Canada who offered me zero identifying details, other than that he is currently enrolled in college and studying finance. The website’s homepage hosts—you guessed it—a lengthy hierarchy of aspiring Chads, and as of this writing, Androgenic is ranked first on the list, two spots ahead of his nemesis ASU Frat Leader. The 20-year-old, whom we’ll refer to as Michael going forward, said he created the site after watching a video uploaded by an influencer by the name of NocturnalKent, in which he referred to himself as the society’s “No. 1 Chad.” This gave Michael an idea: If people were arguing about who reigns supreme in the looksmaxxing ecosystem, then why not put together an actual ranking?
And so the Official Chad Rankings, and its criteria, were born. The benchmarks for the site’s evaluation are fairly straightforward. A Chad’s overall evaluation is judged by 10 distinct qualities, all split evenly in the aggregate. Ten percent of the grading is derived from height, another 10 percent comes from body frame, and yet another 10 percent is established by “transformation”—as in, how much work a specific Chad has put in to accentuate their physical attributes, including “weight loss, muscle gain, grooming improvements, or facial refinement.” Other categories denote business acumen, social media resonance, and, on the softer end of the spectrum, “personality,” which the Chad Rankings define as “confidence, composure, and perceived dominance.” The hierarchy is updated every two days, and Michael judges the movement by the conduct of his collected influencers—the latest mogging incidents—and input from the site’s community, who, in the tradition of American Idol, can cast votes on whether a specific Chad is a “rising star” or “overrated.” The site has proved to be fairly popular: According to Michael, a total of 600,000 visitors have reached his URL—a clientele, I assume, composed of feral zoomers eagerly awaiting the ebbs and flows of the leaderboard, and passersby morbidly curious to see if the Chad Rankings actually exist in the first place.
It is hard for me to wrap my mind around how an unregulated ledger applying mathematical rigor to hilariously unparsable qualities like “personality” ever managed to lodge itself in the looksmaxxing milieu, but Michael had a plan. He, along with the three people who work on the site with him, flooded the zone. They replied to the X accounts chronicling the manosphere—the ones circulating livestream highlights, like @Kick_Champ—with links to their rankings, hoping to gain traction in the algorithm. It worked, and the idea of an Official Chad Ranking entered the bloodstream of rank-and-file posters. According to Michael, that’s because virality on X, in its disfigured, Muskified incarnation, is driven by conflict, debate, and interminably warring standoms. Michael was basically chumming the waters.
“The people debating who they thought was the biggest Chad could now reference something that had the word official in the name,” he told me. “It gave them a bit of power.”
Michael has made some faint attempts to monetize the rankings. He offers a $4 membership tier, which allows subscribers to add one name to the overarching rankings. (This is likely why Olympic champion figure skater Alysa Liu is currently sitting at No. 32.) But Michael notes that his current number of patrons is sitting in the dozens, and that the rankings are far from a lucrative enterprise. If he were to cash in, it seems likely someone would need to buy the domain off him—and Michael did admit that he has fielded a few offers. Would Barstool Sports ever purchase the Chad Rankings? Could we soon make wagers on ASU Frat Leader’s quest to claim the first-place title? It’s not impossible to imagine.
Here again, though, I must reiterate that there is something inherently faulty about administering thoughtful calculus to the looksmaxxing community—particularly because it’s difficult to tell how seriously the stars of this subculture take themselves. I’ll give you an example. Earlier this month, Androgenic featured in a different viral tweet, again posted by @Kick_Champ. Here it is, in its original diction: “#2 ranked Chad Androgenic suffered a MASSIVE CORTISOL SPIKE after a fan SNATCHED his WIG exposing his TRUE HAIRLINE.” In the attached video, a bystander sneaks up behind Androgenic and rips off his curly, boy-band locks, revealing a grody buzz cut. This was the sort of development that ought to be catastrophic for his spot in the Chad Rankings, but at least to my eyes, the whole affair looks entirely staged. Androgenic reacts like Curly from The Three Stooges. He runs after the interloper in the same way Tom chases down Jerry. It’s vaudeville. It’s pro wrestling. It’s camp! It is, quite literally, a wig snatching. And therein lies the contradiction in Michael’s creation. How can we ever adjudicate the Chads when the Chads themselves are giddy with shamelessness?
Michael, for what it’s worth, fully understands that tension. “This is mostly a meme to us,” he said, mentioning that his website came together through a mix of “humor and curiosity.” I don’t think he could take any other approach, especially considering how flippantly his subjects seem to regard his rankings. I did manage to get in contact with Clavicular, who—with 435,000 Instagram followers, a robust presence on Kick, and a recently published New York Times profile—has become a legitimate celebrity looksmaxxer. He told me he had “no idea” there was an actual website publishing a Chad ranking. He’d seen the tweets referring to his current rank, but that was it. When I spoke with him, he was the No. 4 Chad. Asked if he was offended by his spot in the hierarchy, he chortled, saying, “Oh, yeah, I’m devastated.”
Clavicular, of course, is a slippery figure. He has advocated some psychotic measures for maintaining a pinnacle physique. (He asserts that methamphetamine is a good way to avoid weight gain, and he is a proponent of “bonesmashing”—that is, hitting one’s face with blunt objects, inflicting subdermal microfractures, so it may appear more masculine.) In other words, like his fellow Chads, it is literally impossible to tell how forthright Clavicular is being at any moment, and I think you could say the same thing of the Chad Rankings. It is an authority, yes, but only in the unreality of looksmaxxing.
And if I may speak plainly for a moment, I do think that is a good omen. A decade ago, all of the jargon presented here—Chads, looksmaxxing, mogging—was wielded exclusively by bitter men who felt betrayed by the world and the women who inhabit it. Inceldom was animated by violent grievance, an understanding that, dispossessed of the correct jawline, men were doomed from birth. It fomented hatred. It inculcated radicalization. It is, when you consider the swooning intimacy rates and riven gender politics of the 2020s, the root of our discontent.
Personalities like Clavicular and Androgenic are captured by some of the worst inflections this culture has to offer. Clavicular in particular has partied with alleged sex trafficker Andrew Tate and white nationalist Nick Fuentes. He also ran into controversy after injecting his girlfriend with a fat-dissolving agent. These men are not good role models—not even close. But I find it vaguely reassuring that some of the most prominent figures spouting incel idioms are going about their business with Looney Tunes aplomb. They are a faction of idiots, something to point and laugh at. The necrotic sexism still pervades—the people of this realm are fond of the term foid, derisive slang that roughly translates to “female humanoid”—but given the vaudevillian direction of the scene, its principal characters have been given little choice but to lean into the joke. As I was writing this story, Clavicular uploaded a video of him satirizing the opening scenes of American Psycho. There he was, standing in Patrick Bateman drag, tapping his face with a hammer.
Is it worrisome that impressionable kids, transfixed by a Kick broadcast, might be indoctrinated by these faulty ideas? Absolutely. But whether the manosphere realizes it or not, the culture at large has determined its entire project to be a farce. In fact, there is a cockeyed website ranking their latest humiliations, week after week. Maybe, just maybe, that means society is beginning to heal.
