Picture a man sitting opposite you on public transport. He wields a copy of The Will to Change by bell hooks, and he takes care to parade the front cover or the spine lest any nearby strangers miss the title. He is in his 20s or 30s and conventionally attractive; maybe he has a dangly earring or two. There on his knee rests a tote bag. This man would not engage in loutish, careless behaviour like “manspreading” or placing all his stuff on the seats. And the tote bag probably bears the logo of an ethical brand or a bookshop. The bag is probably adorned with social-justice badges. If he showed you what music he is listening to, it might be, say, Lana Del Rey or Clairo.
Here we have the performative male – a new kind of vaguely problematic man to watch out for. And one who is the subject of all manner of viral TikToks and memes, and media coverage everywhere from GQ to the New York Times, which reported on a recent performative male contest in Seattle. For some reason when I picture him he always has curly hair. Big bouncy lustrous curls. You can probably add your own details, but you get the picture. The idea is that the performative male is a guy who goes about looking feminist and woke. The catch is that his aesthetic is curated to appeal to what he thinks women might like rather than being a totally earnest expression of his interests.
Imagine that! A person choosing clothes and accessories to increase their attractiveness in the eyes of the gender they are trying to sleep with. Very insidious and unusual behaviour. I can tell you right now I have never once in my life participated in such a charade. I will admit, too, that some of this coverage has made me feel baffled by what is apparently considered desirable. The performative male is said to wear several Labubus and drink matcha. I don’t really understand why this would lure women in. It’s even been suggested a performative male might stow tampons on his person. But if I met a cisgender man who made a point of carrying tampons around with him I’d probably telephone the police.
My first thought, when I came across this trend, was: God, straight men cannot win. My second was: yes, this aesthetic is very common – not just with men but with women too. A parade of images flashed before me of all the young women and men I have seen self-consciously clutching their unbroken copies of Angela Davis and so on in coffee shops and on the bus. “A lot of the time they don’t know what they’re talking about,” one of the hosts of the Seattle performative male contest told the NYT, speaking about the kind of men who adopt this look. “It’s just an aesthetic for them.” But I would gently submit that a substantial proportion of the women who take care to post highlighted and pencilled-over pages of bell hooks to Instagram do not put much of the ethos of her work into practice in their own lives either.
After all, performative righteousness is not solely the preserve of young men. I have often felt that the parallel vapidness and popularity of online social-justice messaging has created an entire generation (or two) of people obsessed with the idea of telegraphing their own worthiness rather than practising it.
As the performative male trend has gained traction, I have received a few PR emails about it on behalf of “experts” with funky job titles offering to help counsel young women to spot toxic signs and red flags in the opposite sex. These missives, which I receive every time a new dating trend is coined, are always full of my own personal red flags. One such email on behalf of a “relationship coach” explained that the performative male is dangerous because he “speaks the language of emotional availability but doesn’t practise it”. I am happy to say that, for all its shadowy allusions to grave transgression, I have no idea what this sentence means.
The email included some red flags to watch out for in men:
1) Constant need for external validation
2) Actions that don’t match words
3) Avoids real vulnerability
This is typical of the way pop psychology spreads online, with lists of traits specific enough to sound authoritative but vague enough that they could apply to almost anyone. Yes, these three red flags could be said to apply to plenty of the men I know, and plenty of the women too. But what has any of this got to do with a man drinking an iced blueberry matcha in public? There is a cottage industry of these “experts” who prey on and foster the neuroses of anxious young women. Likewise, many of the influencers I see on my timeline who specialise in dating advice about who to avoid and how to spot toxicity seem to be neurotic, lonely people doling out tips which offer nothing more than a road map to a paralysing fear and suspicion of other people.
Ill-intentioned people come in many different guises. Some toxic men will indeed carry a Daunt Books tote bag, but if you see a red flag in every one, you will write off a lot of decent, well-intentioned people. The truth is that out in the world you will get hurt and get hurt and get hurt. And in doing so, you will learn how to make better choices.
Rachel Connolly is the author of the novel Lazy City
