If you live in a major city, you might have seen what looks like a hipster drag show playing out in a park or on a sidewalk recently: a parade of young men strutting with tote bags, holding up feminist literature, and showing off their newly purchased vinyls.
That guess wouldn’t be totally wrong. Over the past month, Gen Z has been holding public contests all over the country, and even internationally, awarding the best impressions of a “performative male,” the latest meme taking off on TikTok.
The slang is a bit misleading. A “performative male” doesn’t perform traditional masculinity à la a “gym bro.” Rather, he’s curated a notably alt, intellectual, and, in Gen Z terms, “soft” aesthetic, often with the purpose of attracting progressive women. Other markers of a “performative male” include drinking matcha, reading bell hooks, listening to women singer-songwriters, and carrying emergency tampons. Think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski.
The trend seems to be largely in good fun, poking fun at men who do, in fact, genuinely like matcha and Mitski. It’s partially inspired by the slew of celebrity lookalike contests last year that highlighted people’s enjoyment of dressing up in silly costumes, as well as their desire for a public square. As Seattle’s “performative male” contest winner, Malik Marcus Jernigan, told me, most of the men participating, including himself, casually embody the joke.
“My friend had sent me the flyer saying I had a good chance at winning, so I decided to participate to make them proud,” says Jernigan, a 24-year-old musician. “I feel as if for the most part it is either ‘performative males’ poking fun at themselves or women poking fun at them online — all lighthearted in nature.”
But there’s also a darker interpretation: Maybe these men are not what they seem, and perhaps their tastes and behaviors are all a deception. The “performative male” has joined a group of suspicious masculine archetypes that came before it, like the two-faced “wife guy” and toxic “male manipulator.”
So how did these signifiers of a “performative male” come to fall under suspicion? Should you really be worried about dating a man who listens to Clairo? Is it so bad to be “performative,” when gender is inherently a performance?
How the internet’s nicest guys came to be suspect
From “hipsters” to “soft boys” to its more derogatory offshoot, “cuckboi,” the internet has long questioned the integrity of this genre of men who eschew traditional representations of masculinity, either through their personal style or consumption habits.
In the age of TikTok, the average person, even one who doesn’t live in Bushwick, has become a lot more familiar with men who embrace a sense of freedom around gender. According to Jordan Foster, assistant professor of sociology at MacEwan University, the app has given average men a “historically novel public visibility, making a significant difference to their public presentation and also their ability to play with their gender presentation.”
Still, this exposure to and wider acceptance of this genre of men hasn’t exactly made us less confused about them. On the one hand, they’re often assumed to be emotionally intelligent and “unproblematic,” politically progressive if not outrightly feminist. But is it really all an act?
It seems like the internet is caught in a perpetual cycle of glorifying and later questioning the integrity of these men whenever they gain publicity. Pop singer Harry Styles, for example, was once lauded for dancing with men in his music videos and wearing feminine articles of clothing. For a time, though, he also faced charges of “queer-baiting,” a term to describe the appropriation of queer aesthetics by straight, cis men for their own personal and professional advantage.
Foster finds that skepticism around men who don these aesthetics is partly a conversation around privilege. “The critique is that men are reaping the sort of social and symbolic set of rewards for participating in these feminized and sometimes queer aesthetics without bearing any of the costs that have typically circled around queer and marginalized men or women,” Foster says.
In his study on “radical” masculinities on TikTok, Foster found that the men who feel comfortable wearing dresses or drinking matchas are often men who already possess “masculine capital” — i.e., they’re cisgender, white, conventionally attractive, middle or upper class — allowing them to dabble in these aesthetics more securely. He adds that these “softboy” signifiers often have the reverse effect of “focalizing their conventional attractiveness.” Take, for example, Styles wearing a pink fringe vest that displays his six-pack abs, or actor Jeremy Allen White wearing tiny shorts that show off his muscular quads.
It isn’t just that these signifiers seem strategic or shallow, but rather, they can read as misleading. The MeToo movement showed us that even supposed “nice guys” could be capable of alleged manipulation and abuse — that in fact, they could use their enlightenment as a kind of shield. Now, the kind of guy who goes to therapy while also treating his partner badly has become flattened into a starter-pack-style meme. And the faux-enlightened man has become a frequent observation in pop culture.
In what could be read as an effort to rehabilitate his image following allegations of domestic abuse from his ex-wife Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt has taken on a more gender-fluid approach to fashion. Before actor Jonathan Majors received two misdemeanor charges in a domestic-violence case last year, he did a viral magazine shoot wearing all pink and discussed how his idea of masculinity involved “kindness” and “gentleness.” These were major celebrities with PR teams. Could their gender flexibility have been an attempt to ward off bad press? It’s impossible to say, but what observers have seen does color the discourse.
Is there too much distrust between the sexes?
Still, it’s also important to recognize the extent to which these immediate judgments can impede young people’s social lives. Playboy editor Magdalene J. Taylor, who also writes the sex and dating newsletter Many Such Cases, says that the “performative male” trend is “aligned with much of the hostility we’re seeing in dating writ large: we don’t trust that anyone’s intentions are good.”
This hostility is visible in the level of suspicion, surveillance, and arbitrary rules that factor into dating right now. From the amount of hyperspecific and downright nonsensical dating requirements that are discussed on TikTok to whisper-network apps that mainly encourage gossip rather than safety, it seems like many people have lost sight of what a healthy level of discernment in dating looks like.
Taylor says, out of all the legitimate warning signs that men can display, someone’s style of dress or tastes in books is perhaps not the thing to focus on. And doing your best to attract a potential partner isn’t inherently deceptive.
“While lying and obfuscating your identity for sexual ends is, of course, wrong and potentially even assault, reading a book you believe women will find appealing is not a lie,” she says. “It’s an entirely normal, well-established social practice of attempting to relate to the opposite sex.”
Overall, though, Taylor says that the level of humor men and women are injecting into the “performative male” trend may suggest that people are slowly pushing away from the idea that a man’s appearance and interests, especially regarding things that are woman-coded, require further inspection. A lot of dudes might just wear and consume a lot of the same basic stuff right now, and if it just so happens that progressive women love it, so be it.
“It’s not a counterattack to ‘wokeness’ per se, but a realization that some of the rhetoric of ‘wokeness’ around heterosexual dating relations imposed new restrictions that did not actually liberate us,” Taylor says. “We’re circling back to a place where it’s okay to admit that you are a person with desires, and that you might act accordingly.”
