Word of the week: Mogging

Who's the alpha in this group?

Mog — a slang term meaning “to outdo in attractiveness or appearance; to assert dominance based on physical appearance” — was a distant runner-up in the American Dialect Society’s vote for “Informal Word of the Year” for 2024. It may have been ahead of its time, because in the last twelve months mog and mogging have surged in usage while expanding their meaning. Today, according to Merriam-Webster, mogging is “a more general, humorous term for various displays of dominance or superiority.”

I tumbled down the mogging rabbit hole after seeing some commentary about Clavicular, aka 20-year-old Braden Peters, an internet personality who is obsessed with looksmaxxing¹ — another 2024 WotY runner-up: it means “enhancement to ‘maximize’ one’s attractiveness or appeal” — and who on Christmas Eve intentionally ran over a man with his (that is, Clavicular’s) Cybertruck. The man survived; the Miami police did not press charges. Florida, man!

Three days after the Cybertruck “incident,” Clavicular sat down with Daily Wire podcaster Michael Knowles, a conservative Catholic, for a two-hour interview during which Clavicular said, with a straight face, that he wanted to be a “peak human” “in all metrics.” “I don’t want to only mog in looks,” he told Knowles. “I also want to mog in wealth, I want to mog in status.” He wanted, he said, to be “a full-package mogger.” To that end, he spends “$50,000 to $80,000 a year” on peptides, not to mention the steroids and the crystal meth and whatever he does to enhance the prominence of his collarbones (hence his alias).

Making the rounds: On December 29, 2025, Clavicular chatted with white nationalist Nick Fuentes about his DNA, which apparently wasn’t sufficient in its original state. “Ascend,” by the way, is another bit of mogging jargon; it means “to enhance,” especially one’s looks.

Clavicular — who, let’s recall, had attempted manslaughter by wankpanzer just three days earlier — shared some Big Thoughts about U.S. politics, too. He speculated about a possible presidential contest between Vice President JD Vance and California Governor Gavin Newsom:

“JD Vance is subhuman, and Gavin Newsom moggs…. [Vance]’s got a very short total facial width-to-height ratio, he’s obese, very recessed side profile, whereas Newsom is like [a] six-foot-three chad.”

(Helen Lewis, who interviewed Newsom for an Atlantic profile, confirms Clavicular’s assessment: “Having met Newsom, I can report back that a) unlike most men who claim to be more than six feet tall, he’s not lying about his height; b) he does indeed mogg, which is Gen Z incel slang for dominating someone else, usually through being hotter or more athletic; and c) he has a well-formed strategy for making himself the Democratic frontrunner.”)

Clavicular’s “chad,” by the way, isn’t the “hanging chad” of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. It’s a slang term, usually capitalized, for a powerful, sexually successful male; the term and associated memes originated around 2017. “Gigachad”? That’s Chad to the max, or maxx.

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And what about mogging? It’s unrelated to British dialectal mog, “to move away.” Here’s the Merriam-Webster explainer:

Mog is apparently based on AMOG, an abbreviation of Alpha Male of Group, referring to the pseudoscientific archetype of the “dominant male” popular in the so-called manosphere, an Internet subculture associated with misogynist beliefs and extremist ideologies. AMOG emerged by the early 2000s, and mog by 2016, when the latter term is found in male Internet forums describing taller, more muscular men—judged superior—appearing alongside shorter, less built, and thus supposedly inferior counterparts.

“Mogging” appears to be transnational. The price of a “This Dude Mogs” T-shirt on Monsterry.com is quoted in euros.

(The alpha-male archetype is “pseudoscientific” because it’s untrue: “Primate societies in which males ‘win nearly all aggressive encounters against females are actually rare,’ according to a study published in the journal PNAS.”)

It’s rarely used this way, but mogging also exists on the distaff² side. See, for example, the rise of Mar-a-Lago Face, aka Real Housewives Face: surgically altered, steamrolled and plumped with Botox and fillers, and framed by implausibly long and wavy hair extensions. The women who go in for this uncanny-valley reconstruction are, like their male counterparts, sending a message. As columnist Tressie McMillan Cottom put it in a recent New York Times roundtable discussion: “Bodies are a status symbol. So, as a status good or a status symbol becomes more accessible, you need something else to become the status good — the signal that you are wealthy, that you are highly educated, that you are elite.”

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Mogging sounds, frankly, exhausting and kind of sad — a desperate effort to prop up an exaggerated sexual binary that may appear, in an era of they/them and gender-neutral bathrooms, to be on the wane.

But don’t count the moggers out just yet. Where there’s a will there’s a capitalist way, as Man Cereal attests.

“Cereal got its balls back”: Truck with a load of Man Cereal, which comes in four flavors, including Fruity. Sighted in Brooklyn by Philip Gourevitch. Hat tip: Sam Corbin.

1. I can’t explain the double-X, which also appears unnecessarily in doxxing.

2. I love this old word, a metonym for “woman” since the late 15th century. Its original meaning was “a long, cleft stick for holding flax while spinning”; the association stuck because women of all ranks and classes worked at spinning wheels. The counterpart to the “distaff side” of humanity was the “spear side.”