What does performative even mean?

What's the difference between a performative male and a guy who reads? Is there one, or is all male pro-social behaviour a manipulative tactic? The fact that we have to ask speaks to deeper horrors.

The ‘performative male’ trend is one of my favourite memes in recent years, mostly because I am a self-confessed man-hater who enjoys it immensely when they are the butt of the joke. It’s even more fun when the men who are the subject of this meme are in on it and the gentle bullying morphs into good natured self-depreciation. Everyone is having fun and maybe one of these men will even read some bell hooks non-performatively.

But, the question certain critics of the meme have asked is: is there such a thing?

Sorry to the man in this stock photo, I’m sure your funky glasses and cool tattoos are not performative!!!!

For those of you who do not doom scroll to feel something (or rather, to avoid feeling something), a performative male is essentially a young man who is thought to perform behaviours favourable to women in order to appeal to them and come across as ‘safe’.

Your typical performative male wears baggy jeans with a cropped tee shirt that vaguely gestures to queerness without committing to it. He has his keys on a carabiner which dangle at his hip in a style popularised by lesbians and carries a tote bag in which you can find a book by bell hooks or Sylvia Plath. He likes stereotypically ‘girly’ things like matcha lattes and skincare but isn’t embarrassed about it because he knows gender is a construct and he is free of its cage. His hair is styled in a way that says he looks after himself, but isn’t vain. He is a man, but he understands women. He is safe. He is an ally. He’s all yours.

This is, of course, a delightful portrait of a person plucked straight out of an indie romcom. Except, a critical element to the performative male is that their persona is inauthentic, a fiction solely acted out to catch the eye of a certain type of progressive, well-read and left-leaning baddie. He is, in all respects, actually a manipulative fuckboy donning the aesthetics of an enlightened feminist in order to get in your bed. The truth of it is actually fucking scary, if you really think about it.

The performative male is low-key a horrifying concept, which is likely why the meme persists. If you don’t laugh, you’ll cry. The jokes are a way to take back some power in a dynamic in which women are so victimised and marginalised. In Australia, one woman is killed every 9 days on average by a current or former partner. Dating as a heterosexual woman is a nightmare and young women bear it by making memes.

Since the performative male meme took off on TikTok, it’s resulted in hilarious competitions in which people try to be the most performative among males (I personally adore these games).

@thesneakerlaundryWe ran a Performative Male Contest in Sydney 😭🙏🏼 #performativemale #sydney #sneakerlaundry #matcha #aus

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However, things have inevitably progressed to that uncomfortable space where people think it’s okay to post pictures of random men they see in public and dub them performative males for reading on the train. How much of this is still a joke?

By now you’ve probably come across some discourse on the apps about whether the performative male meme has become too mean-spirited and gender-essentialist. What if these guys just happen to dress like that and read Sylvia Plath? Why are we making fun of boys who try to engage us, when that’s kind of what we want, isn’t it? Like, are we making it embarrassing for men to read ~women’s~ literature in a way that resembles a bell curve meme? Are we unintentionally pushing the idea that they should stick to ~manly~ interests, therefore mirroring the very conservatism we are critical of? Why are we reinforcing ideas on what is male and what is female in the first place?

These are all valid questions, but my knee-jerk reaction was defensiveness: let the girls have a laugh, will you? Men are literally killing us, they can handle us teasing their too-tight t-shirts. Especially considering that performative is the key word when we talk about these guys: we’re specifically referring to the inauthentic, fake ones. But then I wonder: how can we even tell the difference?

There’s a running gag in my friend group about my husband (a straight white man) being a trendy lesbian in another life. He’s been wearing his keys on a carabiner since before TikTok was a thing. He loves queer theory, sobbed in When I Saw The TV Glow, his current favourite author is Rachel Cusk and I’m embarrassed to admit that he reads more classic feminist literature than I do. He carries around a massive totebag, is always reading on the tram, and likes to buy our veggies from the local farmers market. And yes, he does love a tastefully cropped tee.

He fits all the aesthetic hallmarks of the meme, which was quite a rude shock to him when he realised it, but the key difference is he really is just like that (lol). But if I met him now, in this specific dating scene, would I believe that?

What makes a man performative versus authentic? How do we judge their intentions? How do we know, truly, who anyone is? And how can we be so arrogant as to assume?

And anyway, in a world where consumption is identity and we style ourselves in a way that we feel best displays our interests and values, isn’t everything performative? Surely no one believes that our interests exist in a vacuum that doesn’t acknowledge culture and counterculture, trends and subversions?

Let’s talk about clothes, for instance. I am a Muslim woman who wears a hijab and dresses modestly. Isn’t my decision to veil a way for me to perform being a Muslim woman? Does that make me any less Muslim? What is the difference between the performed and the real, if both involve the same action?

I mean, this is basically what Judith Butler proposed three decades ago when they coined the theory of gender performativity. It’s interesting that performative males have brought their work into such shining relevance.

It’s also interesting that our suspicion of “performative” behaviours by men (which do undoubtedly happen) also come at a time of widespread suspicion around gender in general. The performative male trend feels like a symptom of a culture where people are suspicious of what they perceive to be the “wrong” ways to perform gender, and the natural conclusion of this is, of course, “transvestigating” people who don’t fit conventional, narrow, white supremacist ideals of gender.

Because really, at the end of the day, this meme probably had some people wondering “well what is a REAL man, if this is a performative one?” As we know, when we start trying to define gender and give it boundaries things get conservative really fast: just look at trad wives, alpha males, ‘I’m just a girl’ memes and the divine feminine.

Gender is fluid, gender is flexible, gender is what we make it to be. By no means am I saying we should cancel the performative male meme (like I said, I think its hilarious and I really enjoy it), but I do think we should be careful of, and dare I say interrogate, the sneaky gender essentialism that is working its way into our subconscious and manifesting in our social media trends.