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?
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.
