Edited by Alloe Mak and Liam Mason

You’ve seen the memes. You know the phenotype. A man with a slim build and an ironic moustache. A carabiner clipped to thrifted baggy jeans. Patchwork tattoos and hand-rolled cigarettes. Carrying a New Yorker tote bag. Carrying an A24 tote bag. Sporting a slogan t-shirt reading “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE.” Sporting a slogan t-shirt reading “SUPPORT WOMEN DJS.” Wearing wired headphones. Listening to Clairo. Listening to MJ Lenderman. Drinking an oat milk matcha. Reading The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath. Reading All About Love by bell hooks. Reading Slouching Toward Bethlehem by Joan Didion. 

The internet has dubbed these specimens “performative males,” a label ostensibly defining cis-heterosexual men who deceptively adopt a set of feminized visual and cultural codes for the express purpose of attracting female sexual and romantic partners. Birthed in a hyperreal landscape where meaning has collapsed into an endless feedback loop of references, “performative male” is functionally a stylistic movement with no clear origin, evolution, or motivation. Performative male as subculture is an irony-drenched figuration of postmodern fatigue, desperately clinging to any semblance of dissident community through material consumption, self-commodification, and incessant self-reflexivity. As the performative male milieu becomes a fixture of young, urban, progressive circles, I find myself increasingly exasperated by its constitutional hollowness. Considering the performative male as a subcultural project, I find myself echoing this despondent George Santos tweet: What’s the point of it all?

I can imagine that at some juncture, the performative male served as a channel for women to express their (valid!) frustrations with men who posture sensitivity and progressivism only to willfully or ignorantly propagate misogyny. As an arts high school graduate and current film studies major, melancholic misogynists are a constant source of vexation in my life. When I was eighteen, I dated a guy who charmed me with his long hair, Fiona Apple vinyls, Phoebe Bridgers tour tee, proclivity for mumblecore films, and first date at a contemporary art gallery during which he claimed to be reading The Scum Manifesto by Valerie Solanas. I naïvely assumed that because this guy was near completing his liberal arts bachelor’s degree, his feminism would exceed mere lip service. Shockingly, he turned out to be as insipidly chauvinistic as my arts high school peers. The purpose of this essay is not to air out personal grievances, but suffice it to say that, characteristic of his creed, he did not view women’s art or opinions as deserving of authentic critical engagement. Oh, and the cherry on top: when I dumped him seven months later, he still had not finished reading The Scum Manifesto. All of this to say, satirizing male chauvinists is absolutely a worthy cause; in fact, it is a political project that I repeatedly revisit in my own comedic craft. 

But as political satire, the performative male fails spectacularly. Satire requires critique, and if deliberate critique ever existed in the trend, it was instantly subsumed into a maelstrom of derivative content manufactured for virality. In my most good-faith analysis, I can accept that the original performative male reel may have succeeded in “pointing out the irony” of these chauvinistic aesthetes—but even this reading is too generous, because there is no original performative male reel at all. Even if you managed to locate the very first social media post that employed the term “performative male” in its current colloquial context, that post itself would just be an imitation of some other post from a week before, using the same references to mock the same phenotype under some other linguistic banner. I’ve been consuming metrosexual parody content since I joined social media a decade ago, and my introduction to the genre was already a copy of a copy of a copy. 

An irony-pilled, self-aware, urban male who engages in casual sexism is nothing groundbreaking. Replace Clairo with The National, replace matcha with artisanal coffee, keep the ironic moustache: “performative male” is simply hipster pastiche (which itself is grunge pastiche). Here’s some irony for you: the “sexism” subsection of the “hipster” Wikipedia page describes hipster men as engaging in “a form of self-aware sexism that is deemed acceptable given that its perpetrators are conscious of the inherent sexism and objectification of women.” How prescient! Clearly, there is nothing novel about “pointing out the irony” that non-conformist men can be misogynists; in fact, we’ve been “pointing out the irony” of every cultural paradox for the past fifty years. “Pointing out the irony” is meaningless as a political project, especially when the supposed ideological critique is inextricable from its commodified aesthetic. 

As a function of progressivism’s ostensible project to dissolve gender binaries, the performative male proves strangely reactionary. A revisitation to Judith Butler’s original theory of gender performativity elucidates this: Butler posits that gender is not something we inherently are but something we repeatedly do through culturally precedented acts that allow us to be recognized as male or female. Those who “do gender wrong,” those who deviate from the tacit collective belief of what constitutes male or female, are either explicitly or implicitly punished and ostracized, affirming the illusion of gender essentialism. Refracting male femininity into spectacle serves to reinforce the idea that feminized men are “doing their gender” wrong. I don’t believe these men are being “punished” in any consequential way; however, the haste to ironize any man who diverges from established masculine codes doesn’t reveal the artificiality of gender so much as relentlessly hammer in the status quo conviction that there is some essential male presentation in the first place. By diagnosing digressions from traditional maleness as insincere, we’ve recursively legitimized the gender binary after all.

There is another bizarrely reactionary element to this milieu—so much performative male content references reading as shamefully exhibitionist. Consider the viral “u r not a vibe bro” meme—this man isn’t even necessarily feminine, he is simply leaning out his windowsill while drinking coffee and reading a book. When even one’s independent reading is captured for social media mockery, everyone begins perceiving their reading habits through the lens of a potential post; I can’t help but notice anti-intellectual undertones to this instilled self-surveillance, especially contextualized in the current conservative culture shift. Similarly, mediating consumption of music and literature through layers upon layers of self-reflexivity is a categorically vapid and borderline unhealthy way to engage with art. Not only does it deny oneself the wonders of artistic revelation, it is also downright insulting to the female artists instrumentalized in this trend, functionally diminishing their work to a punchline.  

If anything, the only tangible outcome of the subculture seems to be that we have successfully implicated men who adopt feminine aesthetics into the feminized role of persistent self-surveillance. This unfavourable condition is delineated in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, a seminal art historical text that is also one of my favourite books in the world: “Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. … The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female.” While I admit that it is momentarily satisfying to watch the men who newly find themselves in this fraught position squirm (I absolutely derive sadistic pleasure from imagining my aforementioned ex-boyfriend panic about how his faux-feminist signifiers appear to outside observers), this shift holds no radical promise. If extreme spectatorial consciousness is a hallmark of the feminine condition, then conscripting men who assume feminine cultural codes into this condition feels like less of a pendulum swing and more of a brutal beating of the pendulum to ensure the conservancy of sexed binaries and masculine supremacy. Last month, I came across a meme repurposing a section of Berger’s text for the figure of the performative male: “A man must continually watch himself. He is almost continually accompanied by his own image of himself. Whilst he is drinking a matcha or whilst he is listening to Clairo, he can scarcely avoid envisaging himself drinking or listening or wearing a tote bag. From his algorithm he has been taught and persuaded to survey himself continually.” It’s hyperbolic, but it’s felicitous—policing feminine presentation can hardly be considered revolutionary. 

One thing I despise about postmodern theory is its tendency to prescribe social plights without offering any material solutions. So, without further ado, here are my hope-core suggestions on how to create meaning in the meaninglessness of the performative male affair:

In an era where social media births and shapes physical reality, and social semiotics are developed over for-profit social media companies that exploit our attention as capitalism’s last natural resource, engage in this subculture offline! Take your unread copy of Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential to a local café, buy a drink you haven’t tasted before, flirt with the barista, find out she also works as a tattoo artist, don’t exchange instagram handles but promise to return on her next shift, approach the other metrosexual already sitting in the café, compliment his “Directed by Sofia Coppola” shirt, ask him what music he’s listening to, and bond over your mutual agreement that Geese’s Getting Killed is a no-skip album. 

A silver lining I appreciate in this entire affair is the in-person performative male contests that have sprung up across major cities and college towns, and their spinoff contests, such as performative masc contests and performative bisexual contests. I am truly overjoyed to see mass turnout among local communities,  laughing together, in each other’s physical presence. Another optimistic element to these in-person contests is their potential to turn what is otherwise a vacuous pastiche into proper parody bordering on drag. Sure, the contests are still based on commodified aesthetics, and consumerism is central to their premise, but the physically staged exaggeration of gender signifiers can potentially illuminate the absurdity of gender performance. So find your local performative male contest, introduce yourself to three people you haven’t spoken to before, and appreciate the improv talents revealed during the Q&A section of the event. Extra bonus points if you attend one of these contests and don’t post a single photo or video to social media. Bonus points if you expel the irony pill and earnestly engage with the art that is employed as props to performative male stylization. Clairo deserves for her art to be taken seriously across the gender spectrum! 

While I cynically believe that we are too entrenched in what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism to truly revolutionize in any totalizing way; I also believe that the systems of power that structure our society inevitably cause ruptures, and progressive potentialities can blossom within those fissures. Seeking community connection and engaging with culture sincerely are minor forms of resistance to the complete complacency of our bleak state of affairs. So: fewer virtual spaces, more third spaces! At least hipsters had craft breweries!