Looksmaxxing isn’t about womenPenis stretching, bone smashing, and a literal body count: Hulu’s ‘Get Huge’ shows who these men are really trying to impress.
The manosphere has long lamented the tyranny of women’s desire. We are cast as shallow creatures who withhold sex from any man without a chiseled jaw or six-foot frame. From the peacocking pickup artists of yore to the bone-smashing looksmaxxers of today, the argument has persisted that men have to increase their “sexual market value,” or SMV, in order to succeed with women. But Hulu’s Get Huge: Looksmaxxing to Death—a three-part true-crime documentary about a series of deaths within the biohacking community—makes clear that when these men turn to penis pumps or steroids, it often isn’t for women. It’s to one-up other men. Get Huge focuses on influencer Tony Huge, who lives in Pattaya, Thailand with several women, who he refers to as his “harem.” After Tony’s friend and collaborator, Leo Longevity, a penis enlargement influencer, was found dead, the manosphere started speculating about a culprit and pointing to the deaths of two other men linked to Tony. Shortly after filming wrapped, the influencer Connor Murphy, one of the documentary’s key subjects, also died. Get Huge is focused on these mysterious deaths, but it’s also concerned with how boys and men get drawn into this toxic facet of the manosphere, and how Tony’s regimen of biohacking and penis enlargement inspired the next generation of looksmaxxers like Clavicular. I spoke with Jennings Brown, an executive producer of the documentary, and a friend and former colleague of mine, about investigating these deaths, the online evolution of looksmaxxing, penis enlargement as a way to “outmog” other men, his own encounters with the world of toxic male beauty standards, and more. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity. How did you find yourself reporting on looksmaxxing? I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of gender and our perceptions of gender roles and stuff growing up in a conservative area of Texas, where I felt like I needed to do all the things that boys did. You know, I was an Eagle Scout, I did football and wrestling. But I hated all that stuff. Really where I thrived was theater, and during recess I’d always be reading books while the guys played sports. I was very bullied and picked on. Then I went to the University of Kansas and I tried a fraternity, but week one, they’re making jokes about rape culture stuff, so I got out of that.
But I was deeply insecure about being so short. I was in Kansas with all these wheat-fed basketball players and frat guys. The one thing that I thought maybe I could control was how strong I was and, hopefully someday, if I got enough money, I could be taller. I was literally looking into leg-lengthening in these early internet forums—like how much would it cost? At what point in my life could I actually be taller? I was obsessed about going to the gym and counting calories and I had body dysmorphia in college. So that was a seed. Then I came to New York and just felt embraced—for me and my ideas, and just through who I was and not how tall I was. Now I fully embrace my “short king” self, I’m very confident and I don’t have to be ashamed about reading or loving theater. I can also like things that are typically masculine. I can be all these things. Do you value this kind of feminist reporting? Upgrade to paid to support the work that I do here. Paid subscribers make this newsletter possible. When you and I started working together, that’s where I found my calling. I just always loved subcultures and strange communities and fringe stuff and cults. And I was drawn to incels and men’s rights activism and these dark corners of the internet. I was reporting on politics in the 2016 election through that lens. That was when everybody thought Hillary’s gonna win and I’m like, “No, there’s this movement of men who feel very disenfranchised and alienated that are so ready to feel in control and they just wanna watch the world burn.” And Trump was such a champion to that idea of underdog men. My thinking wasn’t that fully formed at the time, but I saw this enthusiasm online that I hadn’t seen since Obama. I became obsessed with that and watching Elliot Rodger become a patron saint for these people. So I was fascinated on a personal level, as somebody who struggles with insecurities and the idea of masculinity, but also just as a journalist, because, oh my god, this is a world that nobody knows how to contextualize. And how did you land on this particular story? My creative partner for this project, Brett Neichin, was really tapped into Andrew Tate and all these people before it was close to mainstream. When Leo Longevity died, that immediately started popping up in Brett’s algorithm, because all these men in that world, these manosphere podcasts, all of a sudden turned into true crime girlies. They wanted to understand how this guy mysteriously died.
Leo was the initial main focus of this project. He was a penis enlargement influencer, and this alpha male biohacking influencer and YouTuber. And then the suspicion around Leo’s death immediately went to Dr. Tony Huge, this other biohacking influencer, and Tony’s right-hand man, Connor Murphy, who was at one point one of the biggest fitness influencers in the world. Leo lived with Tony. When Leo died, Connor immediately moved into his bedroom and started making penis enlargement content and mocking Leo. So of course, everybody was like, it’s either Tony or Connor. As soon as I dug in and started watching these videos, I realized this world was so bizarre and dark and tantalizing. And these characters are like WWE-style. You only get a Tiger King story every so often. That was the beginning of us filming. We very quickly realized it was so much bigger than Leo. So, zooming out a bit, Tony is part of this generation of biohackers who came up in an earlier internet era. How does that old guard differ from this new guard of looksmaxxers, like Clavicular and Androgenic? I started looking into this in 2023 and at that time it was still kind of in the bodybuilding and biohacking world. The manosphere has evolved and now people just think of it as, like, mega podcast bros. But this was a deeper subset that’s been brewing—these men who feel so insecure about their bodies.
Obviously, women have been dealing with this for a long time, and now the current state of the internet and social media has figured out how to exploit men in this way. I can’t check anything without getting stuff about GLP-1s and erection pills and hair loss stuff. It’s all coming for me. Women, I think, to generalize, want to at least live long enough to have kids and to raise a family. But these men are just like, oh, if I don’t increase my SMV, my sexual market value, by age 20, I might as well, you know—they take it to such a toxic level that you’re having these men dying of heart attacks in their 30s. I knew there was something there that all this talk about the manosphere was missing, really it was the kind of stuff that you and I had been talking about in Slack, in the newsroom, for years. So I’m filming with these guys and out in Thailand in November 2025. Elon Muscular and Tony are like, “Have you seen this kid Clavicular before?” This was before he got frame mogged by the ASU frat leader and really blew up, but he was really starting to catch hold and they’re like, “He’s using all the stuff that we talk about but he’s making it more mainstream.” Some of the early YouTubers, these biohacking, bodybuilding YouTubers, at first they’re criticizing him, like, “Bone smashing, meth taken to suppress your appetite? This is too much.” Now they’re all more so embracing it, because he’s made it so big. We immediately reached out to Clavicular and he was citing them as his inspiration. He said on a podcast, you know, “I learned how to grow my penis from watching Leo Longevity videos.” Connor Murphy, he said, was a huge influence. At the time, Connor and Zyzz were seen as the godfathers of looksmaxxing. It wasn’t about bodybuilding and competitions. It was about a very particular type of body with a chiseled jaw and being the ultimate Chad. Connor was the first to go viral in that world. That aesthetic movement begot the looksmaxxing movement. And so you had Androgenic who was idolizing Connor. He was doing all these surgeries and livestreaming it in Thailand, while living with Connor and Tony. And then Connor and Tony, their traffic’s going down. So they start using makeup and bone smashing and stuff to emulate Androgenic. It was this weird ouroboros of toxic male beauty standards.
When I started this three and a half years ago, this was very fringe. But these looksmaxxers took the dogma that Tony preached and blended it with gamer culture, which is really incel culture. Video games are where a lot of incel language comes from—like this idea of, oh, you don’t like your avatar. You can maximize, you can get a new outfit, a new look. You can level up. You can ascend. We have to talk about penis enlargement. What did you learn about the world of penis enlargement while reporting this doc? What are the techniques that they’re using? What is the community like around it? And why are they doing it? It’s so funny. We had to be very careful with how much penis we could include. There’s another great documentary that just came out, Manhood, that’s more about the people who are getting the surgeries and more about the actual surgical process that I recommend. But the main thing Leo was pushing in his most popular videos was how to uncircumcise, which is basically stretching the foreskin. And the main thing that Clavicular took from him was stretching the penis. It’s called handbagging. You grab your penis. You have a bag with weights in it. And you just hold your penis way down. It helps stretch it. And Clavicular said he’ll just do this when he’s driving in the car, just have his penis hanging down. Connor did it and he claimed it gave him an added inch. He was like, “I don’t know, I never saw Leo’s penis, but I think I was the superior version.” At no point do they talk about how this makes sex better or helps with women. It was all: “Who’s bigger?” Make of that what you will. Looksmaxxing is ostensibly oriented around getting women, being desirable to women, right? But obviously misogyny is rampant in these worlds. And it seems like people like Clavicular don’t really care that much about having sex. It’s more like the idea that they could have sex. How much does approval from women really matter in this world as opposed to approval from other men? That’s the big question. I feel like you can answer so much better than me. But from what we observed, look, Tony wants what he calls his “harem” to create this halo effect that’s like the Hugh Hefner and Playboy Bunnies. To be this alpha male. For him, it’s more about influence and trying to have all these kids in a very pronatalist Elon Musk kind of way. But with Clavicular, he talks about just increasing your SMV so that you can outmog other men.
With all of this aesthetic stuff, even the penis enlargement, it does not seem like it’s for the pleasure or desire of women. I think it’s clearly peacockery to try to outmog the other men. It’s a culture that dehumanizes the women as, like, NPCs, non-playable characters—another gaming term—that really just help you compete and level up. Then it’s on to the next mission. It’s this void that you’re never going to be able to fill. I come mostly from reporting on cults and cult-like groups. And you notice that anytime there’s distrust and a crumbling of mainstream politics or religions, that creates a God-sized hole or a leader-sized hole in a community. And anytime there’s that instability, you have to fill that void. And it’s easy for these grifters with these quick fixes to fill that. And right now, with the age of algorithmic anxiety, TikTok and all that, it’s where they prey on your insecurities, it just comes for you. I think about back when I was dealing with my own body dysmorphia and insecurities. With leg extension surgery, I was just looking in janky online forums. If I had TikTok to exploit that and show me only these videos, who knows what path I would have gone down.
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