“Performative Men” have invaded the imagination of 5C students. At our local Performative Male Contest, where students attempted to emulate — or live their truth as — Claremont’s “Most Performative.” The transfixed crowd was a sight to behold: It seemed as though every gender, year and archetype of 5C student had stopped by to get a good look. Gawkers united in the pursuit of sizing up wired-earbud-repping, samba-wearing men try very, very hard not to look like they were trying very, very hard.
Originally popularized through social media, the Performative Male is a man who carefully curates a faux-feminist aesthetic — part indie-sleaze, part political theory syllabus — in an effort to pander, and thereby attract — progressive women, while not necessarily holding the values he projects. Matchas. Labubus. Branded tote bags. bell hooks. Wonderwall on an un-amped electric guitar.
Crossing the digital-physical medium, the explosive popularity of the Performative Male centers around a vision of a comic manipulator, mocked for his femininity and derided for his perceived inauthenticity — if not worse crimes. This microtrend — following in the footsteps of e-boys and male manipulators — is likely destined to die by next month; a harmless mayfly. However as these jokes circulate, they uphold the dated norms of machismo. Understanding the Performative Man before he disappears, as much as we find him corny, may help us better understand our society’s time honored tradition of gender performance.
But why in the first place do we bother to mock these men that are “performing” for women? On the one hand, if we take them at face value, these self-proclaimed “feminists” pose as enlightened tote-toting allies while simultaneously working against the progressive women they’re attempting to attract. Skimming Judith Butler to get laid doesn’t make you progressive — it makes you parasitic. As a result, feminism is appropriated as a trending bandwagon to jump on, instead of an actual effort to address gender inequality and patriarchy. A daunting proposition in a world where cabinet members casually propose stripping women of their rights to vote.
However, on the other hand, the Performative Male isn’t some new species of guy, he’s the latest example of the pendulum’s swing in the familiar dance of gender performance. What makes him important, and why he sparks so much ridicule, is the fact that his performance is actually aimed at women rather than at other men, unlike other microtrends of male expression.
In elementary school, the most charming thing my crush could do was run the fastest mile in gym class. Now, it’s all about how impassioned you are about abolishing the Pink Tax. The only difference is who the performance is for. When masculinity has long been about proving toughness, dominance or insider knowledge to connect with other men, this softer matcha-mustached version gets branded as fake, manipulative or cringey.
The Performative Male threatens the traditional gender dynamics we as a society have seen as natural all of our lives. The real issue of the Performative Male isn’t the fact that he’s performing — because let’s face it, we all curate our appearance in one way or another. The issue lies in the discomfort that we feel when we see men shifting their performance away from being traditionally masculine. Perhaps this shift in performance says less about the performance and more about our hesitation to allow masculinity to become more emotional, inclusive and expressive.
Whether you’ve discovered a truly Performative Male or misconstrued a guy who happens to collect vinyls, the Performative Male-bashing –– while good fun much of the time –– is reflective of a larger trend of gender performance in and of itself. Beneath all the jokes lies a cultural shift worth examining: when men perform for women instead of for men, the performance itself is framed as embarrassing. The Performative Male, then, is less a villain than a mirror reflecting the absurdity of gender performance itself, and forcing us to ask why we only laugh when the performance is for women.
If we blindly revel in the mockery, we’re allowing a culture rewarding hypermasculinity to push its way into the culture on the heels of this trend, empowering the ills of both actual Performative Men and in those who emasculate every male they deem performative.
Maybe he’s just another microtrend destined to fade, the way soft boys of 2020 exist only within the confines of nostalgia TikTok edits. But the impulse to laugh at him will linger, because it’s never really about the guy in the vintage tee; it’s about our collective panic when masculinity starts to cater to women. As much as we may try to pretend like we live in an exclusively progressive bubble, we can’t escape the fact that the dominant culture of our society is still informed by conservative gender expectations.
By broadly mocking men we see as performative, we allow this stereotype to swallow almost everyone. Relentlessly mocking the fake, we flatten the sincere. The result? A culture that punishes self-expression and pushes men into the expectations and norms perpetuated by toxic masculinity. Are we really going right back to demanding men be stoic, macho and emotionally stunted, because we couldn’t handle them being feminists? It might get harder to find a copy of “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but that’s a small price to pay for better men.
Leili Kamali PO ’29 is a recent Iron and Kin promoter from San Francisco, California. She enjoys the smooth rhythms of acoustic guitar, faux-distressed Carhartt and the occasional pump of lavender syrup in her Mallott cold brew.
Ansley Kang SC ’29 is a Clairo-loving, Smiski-collecting Portlander who may or may not have been traumatized by the Performative Male. She is currently trying to get her hands on the Checkmate Labubu series, and will always be at Da Vien coffee for their annual BOGO banana cream matcha deal.