(RNS) — Braden Peters, a streamer who goes by Clavicular, posted a recent video last week announcing he would broadcast his life 24 hours a day for a month on Kick, where he has about 250,000 followers. “I live in a luxury condominium in downtown Miami, the penthouse,” Peters said with a deadpan affect in the video. “My name is Clavicular. I’m 20 years old. I believe in looksmaxxing — the idea of maximizing physical attractiveness by any means necessary in order to ascend.” He looks directly into the camera, as if addressing a mirror. “My ratios are almost golden now.” Peters, who has said he is Catholic, speaks about self-optimization in the language of religion: discipline, hierarchy, “ascension.” In the larger looksmaxxing community, physical transformation is treated as a moral imperative, one obtainable by persistent self-denial and the pursuit of an ideal form. To some observers, including religious scholars and Catholics in his milieu, the ethos resembles a kind of inverted asceticism: a life structured around sacrifice and perfection, not to a higher power, …