Another week, another somewhat fictional online buzzword to parse. This time it is the “performative male”, basically the idea that posturing straight men only read books to get laid, outlined in recent trend pieces including the New York Times, Vox, Teen Vogue, Hypebeast, GQ and millions of TikToks.
According to the Times, this man “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women. He is, in short, the antithesis of the toxic man.” Apparently these heterosexual men who read Joan Didion, carry tote bags and listen to Clairo are not in fact human beings who enjoy things but performative jerk-offs who don’t really care about any of that girly stuff and are just trying to impress their feminine opposites. As Vox put it: “think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski”. Reading! Enjoying music by women! Perish the thought.
Each piece differed slightly in what it defined as the key characteristics of the performative male, but they all shared one detail: he drinks matcha lattes.
This was unsurprising. For three decades the latte has been the favored blog-whistle of the trend piece writer. It signals liberalism, femininity, gayness, pretension, gentrification – ideally all of the above – so reflexively that its origins as an insult are rarely revisited.
It began in earnest in 1997, when journalist David Brooks writing in the Weekly Standard coined the term “latte liberal”. He was trying, disparagingly, to give name to the crunchy consumerist leftism of the time, in which organic vegetables and world music had become part of the social justice hamper: “You know you’re in a Latte Town when you can hop right off a bike path, browse in a used bookstore with shelves and shelves of tomes on Marxism the owner can no longer get rid of, and then drink coffee at a place with a punnish name that must have the word ‘Grounds’ in it, before sauntering through an African drum store or a feminist lingerie shop.”
Brooks wanted to hint that leftism is a luxury only the bourgeois can afford – an idea encapsulated by the earlier formation of champagne socialist. But the latte proved a stickier, more evocative symbol, painting liberals as soft and effete.
In 2004, lattes really entered politics, when a Republican Pac ran an ad accusing presidential candidate Howard Dean of being a “latte-drinking, sushi-eating, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, body-piercing, Hollywood-loving left-wing freak show”.
Lattes also became a byword for gentrification. In 2000, when the Brooklyn neighborhood Williamsburg was, the Times bemoaned at the time, reaching “the point of hipster saturation”, the final straw was “a local Italian specialty store and a working-class institution … advertising the arrival of the Chai latte”. In New York Magazine’s 2005 feature L-ification, the publication mapped out how gentrification was spreading further east into Brooklyn along the route of the L train with little latte icons, a milky glyph of whiteness by that point understood by everyone.
Noticeably, the latte form remains permanent, even as the type of latte shifts. Newt Gingrich accused New York mayor Bill De Blasio of “small soy latte liberalism” in 2014 – emphasising that the only thing more girlish than drinking a big dairy milky coffee was drinking a small vegan milky coffee. On Drake’s 2010 song Thank Me Now, when he’s asking the woman he’s left behind if she still thinks of him, he croons: “But do I ever come up in discussion / Over double-pump lattes and low-fat muffins?”
Now the performative male has once again given rise to the idea that there is something inherently disingenuous about a milky beverage. Interestingly as the latte has changed colour, from white to green, the stereotype has expanded beyond the white liberal: matcha hails a diverse new generation of milky boys.
The idea of the performative male started out mostly as a joke on TikTok, where knowing posters would show a man reading at the gym, for example, and joke that he was pretending. Contests in which men meet in parks to compete to be the most performative have been funny, postmodern, heterosexual versions of drag.
But with each passing write-up, the knowing humorous element was been rinsed away, until Vox earnestly announced in its piece that the “MeToo movement showed us that even supposed ‘nice guy’ could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse – that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield”. If you see a man with a matcha latte, you need to run!
None of the pieces particularly wanted to reckon with the fact that, as Judith Butler put it, “gender identity is a performative accomplishment” to begin with, or that Arthur Schopenhauer was complaining in the mid-19th century that a performative reader “usually confuses the purchase of books with the acquisition of their contents”. Do we read in order to get laid? Only since forever.
Ironically much of this ribbing comes from the same people who decry a crisis of masculinity, and worry for future generations of boys who feel like they lack purpose and companionship. Yet in the world of the performative male, even having female friends and drinking milky coffee is a divergence from true masculinity.
Why is the latte such an enduring emblem for this distrust – a way to call men you do not like effeminate?
Partly it is the allegory of milk, the pursed mouth of a graphic designer on a coffee cup as a surrogate for the Madonna del Latte, the thousands of medieval depictions of Jesus nursing at Mary’s breast. Grown men drinking milk has always been laden in symbolism, the blend of nurture and eroticism evocative of a sexual infantalization. It is why so many films from A Clockwork Orange to Babygirl centre milk as a poison beyond a place of regular intoxication. When Kelis sings that her milkshake brings her boys to the yard, the lyric is so heavy in implication that the exact innuendo she is reaching for is irrelevant.
Even the ancient Greeks used to have their own version of the latte joke, belittling the Persians who drank milk: Aristotle said Empedocles described it as “whitish pus”.
But the milk in the context of the latte also turns coffee, a drink which was sold as fuel, bitter black stuff for TV detectives and the working man, into a sweet little treat. A latte fundamentally dilutes the taste of coffee and so it is easy to present those who drink it as watering down their wine. Even though the iconography of the latte liberal is now so strong it has stretched to drinks that do not contain any coffee to begin with. According to the performative male trend pieces, drinking a matcha latte indicates to women that you are soft, feminist-leaning and worldly (after all, it’s from Japan).
Even though the latte is supposed to be this bastion of girlishness, women are not exempt for being chastised for drinking them, although the latte trope for them is more often a reflection of being superficial than performatively feminine. The logic of this makes little sense: latte liberal men are supposedly too European to be masculine, yet iced latte girlies are gormless Americans sucking on the straw of consumerism. No matter, the two sit side by side, one clutching a hot cup of simp soup, the other a pumpkin-spiced lobotomy. They are a pair one can project all their prejudices towards, without having to interrogate any of it too much.
The irony is that hipsters and gentrifiers in coastal towns are rarely drinking lattes these days. They are much more likely to be sipping on a single origin V60 that’s been carefully weighed out on a digital scale. Indeed the stereotype could easily be flipped around – that it’s red states where complicated online Starbucks orders and Stanley cups filled with 32oz of latte abound. In the best survey of the coffee Americans actually drink and how it aligns with their politics by Diana C Mutz and Jahnavi S Rao, the differences were negligible. Although it is true that liberals do prefer lattes over conservatives (16% v 9%), the same research found liberals also prefer the more masculine-coded espressos over conservatives by a much bigger margin, and the vast majority of Americans prefer brewed coffee.
But the milky latte stereotype persists because it is creamy and white (or green) and vaguely Italian. When GQ is asking “Are Matcha Men the New Soy Boys” you have got to wonder if gendering beverages has become the most performative act of all.
