On a recent autumn weekend in London, Reign, a 25-year-old design teacher, made what he would later learn was a bold decision. He headed out to the capital’s Design Festival event without a bag. In what he thought was an obvious solution to a practical problem, he placed the book that he was reading in the back pocket of his trousers.
Then the jokes came.
Having The Poetics of Space by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard poking out your pocket is a telltale sign of being a performative male — Reign would learn when he bumped into two friends on the Overground who ribbed him for the book’s placement.
“For god’s sake!” Reign remembers thinking, “Can I not carry a book around without a bag and not be labelled as trying to achieve something or having an ulterior motive?”
Since August, the internet has been awash with jokes about the “performative male” — a man who seems to be performing a version of masculinity that appeals to women (gentle, intellectual, introspective, edgy, arty) through signifiers such as Labubus, tote bags, Joan Didion books and iced matchas. While the discourse is largely light-hearted, some men can’t help but feel frustrated by a discourse that derides men for engaging with things that are perceived as feminine, or at odds with traditional macho models of masculinity.
From the beginning, a performative male has been conceived as an identity fashioned with the female gaze in mind. The term is thought to be reminiscent of earlier disparaging tropes, such as the nineties and noughties “poser”, or the “softboi” of the 2010s — men who are not like other men and thus worthy of romantic attention.
As GQ puts it, the performative male aesthetic is “designed to tick, methodically, each box of perceived female desire.” Performative men are not reading Sally Rooney because they enjoy her work, but “because it’s a material signal to the female gaze, a horny homing beacon blinking out into the Hinge-era dating universe.”
But for men like Reign, who grew up with two sisters and lots of women in his family, this cultural reading of male behaviour is reductive. Why is the most logical justification for a man reading a book that he’s trying to get laid? “The unfortunate reality is that it belittles or ridicules or ostracizes [people]”, he says, “It makes them feel a bit odd or singled out because of the way that they do a certain thing.”
Almost as quickly as the performative male hunters took to TikTok, other social media users began attacking the online trend. Rachel Connolly, journalist and author of Lazy City, wrote in The Guardian of her skepticism about the avid witch hunt for male “red flags”. “Some toxic men will indeed carry a Daunt Books tote bag,” she wrote, “but if you see a red flag in every one, you will write off a lot of decent, well-intentioned people”.
When I spoke to Ivo, a 31-year-old who works in film, over the phone, he confessed he’d just got back from a cafe in Nunhead, where he’d tried his first iced matcha latte. “I’ve been genuinely scared of asking for one because I’m so aware of the image of it,” he confessed, “I actually was so disappointed that I really liked it.”
@gregoryscoffee All he’s missing is a camera #performativemale #matcha #labubu #fyp #lol
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Ivo’s friends had already been sending him memes about being a performative feminist, joking that he should go to the performative male contest taking place in Soho on Saturday, following similar viral competitions held in cities from Jakarta to Sydney to Seattle (Sonder Dating, who organised the event, said it was a “lighthearted way to poke fun” at the trend, adding that “no harm will actually be done to said performative males” and that they are “avid supporters of tote bags and Sylvia Plath”).
While Ivo thinks that the performative male trope is valid — “I think there is a very real phenomenon that has created this stereotype” — the fear of being labeled performative does sometimes get to him.
“It makes you feel less unique,” he admits, “I definitely feel an innate competition to be a little more interesting than maybe other guys... It’s almost like a competition to be more authentic than someone else”.
For Angus*, a 28-year-old entrepreneur, the performative male trope is annoying because it stops men being able to explore things that are traditionally perceived as feminine. “Should we just stay as the white, heterosexual, homophobic male?” He asks.
Angus says his friends frequently tease him for being performative — and he finds their joshing immature. “People just need to relax and stop judging everyone,” he says, “You only care if someone’s performative if you’re insecure about yourself.”
In a culture where so many young men feel disenfranchised and lonely — and with popular manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate to turn to — are we right to deride those who pursue another path? If we mock men for listening to broey podcasts and for reading The Bell Jar and listening to Lana Del Ray, where do we expect them to turn?
For Reign, even if men are performing softness, trying to be “more sensitive and less scary,” he thinks that’s worlds better than the alternative. “Those are all good qualities. I’d much prefer that to be the trend and have people trying to be more gentle and creative or artsy or more of a reader.”
“If people keep pretending to be soft and sensitive and read nice feminist literature — brilliant. Maybe they’ll end up doing those things. I think we should stop calling it out,” he says, “Maybe we should lean it a bit more”.
*Name has been changed
