in the expansive sea of internet lingo, a new and incredibly boring twist emerges in the figure of the‘performative male’, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of the 2020 ‘male manipulator’. how creative. if i felt the need to emphasise this and also insufferably flex my work on Freud, i might invite you to engender some analysis around the quote that “the finding of an object is in fact the refinding of it”, but i think it speaks for itself. bluntly put, this ain’t about him.
in summary, to the sweet summer child who has not been cursed with such knowledge, the‘performative male’ typically dons visible signs (as one would a costume) that function as an outward display of his personality: in a consumerist culture that defines its participants through the items they own and flaunt, the individual assumes traits associated with the cultural capital of the feminine. he might read feminist literature in public, flashing a MUBI tote bag, or listen to Bags by Clairo at full volume on his morning commute through wired headphones, while his AirPod Pros sit comfortably in the back pocket of his unwashed Levi’s. God forbid you ask him about Audre Lorde though, he’s barely ten pages into The Handmaid’s Tale.
the case of the performative male is doubly irritating: both the existence of the performative male who strives to prove to you that he’s “one of the good ones”, and the man who mocks this undefined concept to dunk on the feminine and promote the homogeneity of the patriarchal masculine force. what has irritated many online is that this elusive figure may not find himself seeking these facets naturally or organically, but more unsettlingly, to consciously align himself with a concept of masculinity perceived as trustworthy – a farce of faux softness to hide his disinterest in the rights of marginalised communities, or his undercover misogyny, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. it has been questioned if this is constructed as a disguise of one’s own active role in upholding patriarchy. clearly, no one is going to crucify you for listening to Beabadoobee, but i think it important to self-reflect on whether it is enough to be perceived as a trustworthy man, or alternately, simply going outside and being one.
it is intriguing to me that the idea of the ‘performative male’ is a recent or sudden phenomenon, because, frankly, that is incorrect. men have been donning traits perceived to align them with safety and vulnerability (the anti-masculine) for quite a while. and of course, in a judith butler sense, to be a man is to perform the expected gender role of masculinity. something rarely mentioned is that the majority of men are performative – in the direction of other men. they become a caricature of a hazy idea of maleness, homosocially, to secure the validation of other men, their brothers-in-arms. violence at football matches, dramatised displays of aggression, perceiving women as conquests – these malodorous habits seek to gain a pat on the back, a rung up the ladder of masculine social capital.
of course, it’s impossible to ignore the capitalist element of the performative male. this is something you can buy and obtain in seconds: these signifying markers are meant to indicate something deeper and more esoteric but are entirely centred around consumption. the fundamental crux (my signature phrase taken from a rant about DILFs) is that more widely, and perhaps more insidiously, we are becoming defined by the items we consume, and precisely what it means to consume them. rayne fisher-quann excellently details this in her 2022 Substack article, ‘standing on the shoulders of complex female character’: “the aesthetics of consumption have, in turn, become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable: your existence as a Type of Girl has almost nothing to do with whether you actually read joan didion or wear miu miu, and everything to do with whether you want to be seen as the type of person who would.” one only needs to turn to the Friends tab on Spotify as an example of this panopticon – you cannot guarantee who may be watching, and thus have to act as if watched constantly. of course, this foucaldian thinking began with a centuries old prison model, but could this not be imagined as a kind of prison itself?
this microdose of a sort of surveillance state is not limited to the performative male. fisher-quann particularly notes its dynamic to womanhood: “i am still filtering my experiences through the eyes of a consumer; the desire to editorialize our own experiences… has become an autonomic facet of womanhood as unavoidable as breathing”. accessorising your personality with specific strains of media and the symbols of billion-dollar corporations is beginning to encroach upon the rituals of daily life. even in private, we perform to invisible audiences, flattening ourselves to easily consumable objects. i would like nothing more than to introduce a positive note at this stage, but my pessimism fails me. with social media slowly infiltrating every aspect of our lives (which i also partake in #notahypocrite) it is difficult to see beyond it sometimes, as if characters on a stage. all i can hope is that we are all freed from these mind games to prevail as our most authentic selves.
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