If the efforts that society has made towards gender equality aren’t abundantly clear to you yet, men finally have their own version of the ubiquitously unbeloved ‘pick-me girl’ in the form of the insufferably insincere ‘performative male’. Finally, men too can discover what it’s like to have the authenticity of their musical interests called into question on the basis of their gender—a condescension long reserved only for women.
So, what exactly is the performative male? Well, he’s seemingly the definition of ‘a man written by a woman.’ He drinks matcha, ‘reads’ feminist literature, and dons a tote bag while blasting artists like Clairo, Laufey, and beabadoobee from his wired headphones. Or he simply appears to do all this. The performative male’s main intention is, in fact, to signal to women how supposedly progressive and in touch with femininity he is, ultimately in the hopes of attracting their attention and adoration. Because how could a woman ever refuse the advances of a guy who is into Clairo’s music? He must be a feminist!
What started as a funny critique of men who exploit hobbies and interests commonly associated with women has established an archetype of Gen-Z men who desperately want to separate themselves from the infamous hyper-masculine, overtly misogynistic alpha male. But as is the nature of any trend existing mostly on social media, the performative male has been stripped of any actual substance and reduced to a series of tropes to infer exactly what type of guy he is, based purely on how he looks. The more you scroll through ‘performative male final boss’ memes or the videos satirising a ‘day in the life of a performative male’, the more you start to realise that people don’t care if there are men who sincerely partake in these ‘performative’ interests or not. As long as they simply appear to have these interests, there’s no escape from being labelled performative. Which honestly sucks for the guys who genuinely like Clairo’s music.
The problem isn’t that performative males are getting made fun of for being seen to fake an interest in reading or beabadoobee or feminism: after all, if they were real feminists, they’d recognise that women constantly have to justify and defend their own interests to men. The problem is the creation of a narrative that suggests being interested in certain music or hobbies is somehow symptomatic of harbouring a secretly manipulative, superficial personality. This narrative fails to recognise that this pseudo-feminist, ill-intentioned male archetype isn’t infuriating because he listens to Laufey or The Marias. It’s rather because he embodies a hollow, contrived identity in place of his own personality. Probably resulting from the desire to appeal to a social media-bound culture that prioritises aesthetics over depth, and that brands most displays of individualism or genuine interest as ‘cringe.’ If our generation wants an end to performativity, maybe we should learn to stop insulting authenticity. One important question persists, however: is it possible for the performative male to free himself from the shackles of pretence and truly enjoy Clairo’s music? (Or the music of basically any popular female singer, for that matter.) Or are men only capable of using musical taste as a façade for the sole purpose of charming women? Maybe if they get offline and stop curating their identity to fit an algorithmic view of a 20-something-year-old metrosexual man who lives in a major city, they can find out.
“Clairo – Sabrina Carpenter at BST Hyde Park – 20250706 – 100 (cropped)” by Raph_PH is licensed under CC BY 4.0.