We all know the type, or at least the meme. The tote-bag sporting, wired-headphone wearing, matcha latte drinking, so-called ‘performative’ men flooding our social media feeds, and even threatening to infiltrate our social circles. Such men are defined by the careful curation of clothes, taste, and aesthetic to attract clout – and implicitly women – rather than as an act of earnest self-expression. The issue lies in their affectation. The performative male parades his own worthiness, his emotional availability, his uniquely feminist perspective, but does not practise it, resulting in a clumsy caricature of what appeals to the female gaze. His theatrics are unconvincing – it’s doubtful that he knows the first thing about the feminist authors he loves to vaunt.
While this is a discernible phenomenon in the real world (see how many you can spot around Oxford), the online component is built on a degree of self-awareness. The formula is exaggerated and skewered, either to deride or to self-deprecate. The whole trend is dripping with irony; parody layers upon parody, as every participant is determined to prove themselves to be in on the joke. Such self-awareness does not ultimately free us from the performance, but merely adds another layer to it. The satire in itself becomes another form of performativity: an in-group of men emerges, who reassure their female audience that they get it, that they can recognise and make fun of these performative men, because they themselves are different. In this way, they quickly deflate the aims of the performative male: once it has been named, the device becomes ineffectual.
In fact, almost every permutation of masculinity manifests itself as a kind of performance. Heterosexual men, most noticeably in the online sphere, seem to market themselves according to a self-purported idea of what constitutes female taste. The same impetus can be seen behind the ideology of the manosphere, whose “pick-up artists” structure an entire lifestyle around female attraction. The pressure to perform a brand of masculinity seems to dominate homosocial relationships to the same extent. Is there not a similar element of performativity driving on those men who force themselves to like Guinness, listen to Kanye, and aspire to be “one of the lads”?
Judith Butler argued that all gender is performance: perhaps the online sphere, with its proliferation of social media trends rooted in aspects of masculinity or femininity, is the perfect gallery for this phenomenon. The trad wife movement can, in many ways, be seen as a counterpart to the performative male trend, inasmuch as femininity is restaged in a hyper-stylised manner, curated to appeal to a perceived notion of male desire. The man who professes his difference from the norm, evidenced by his Clairo listening stats, is similarly aware of this need to present, to showcase the expedient gendered persona.
Amongst all these performances, the feminist-literature reading one appears relatively benign. His vapidity is widely recognised, but at least he’s not advocating the violent brand of misogyny that goes hand-in-hand with other ‘masculine’ online discourse. Yet it’s clear how parody can backfire. The instant labeling of these behaviours as aberrant, as a type of specifically female-oriented, and therefore not genuine, masculinity, only serves to reinforce the idea that it is the traditional ‘macho’ masculinity that represents the real deal, the default definition of a socially accepted form of manhood. Once this hierarchy is implicitly established, any deviation is labelled as a farce. In that too familiar way, the trend has become yet another opportunity for men to make fun of other men for a perceived failure of masculinity; their behaviour, and its association with a traditionally feminine aesthetic, is deemed ridiculous. As we irony-poison ourselves to death, we fail to unsubscribe from strictly policed behavioural binaries. Not everything should be so ruthlessly taxonomised.
The problem with the performative male is not his masculinity, but his pretentiousness, his calculated simulation of allyship. Casting the issue in terms of gender is more harmful than humorous.
Or perhaps the trend shouldn’t be taken so seriously. Perhaps gentle mockery is the way to dismantle vacuous virtue-signaling. Or perhaps our only solace is to hope that such men may, in between flashing the front cover of their Angela Davis or bell hooks at passersby, pick up a thing or two.
