In Defense of the Performative Man

A checklist for the performative man: Wide leg jeans over boots, a tote bag (bonus points if it’s from an obscure bookstore or record shop - demerits if it’s from Shakespeare and Company), workwear items, a carabiner on the belt loop and a matcha latte. 

But the trend extends beyond style and items, as most trends do. This caricature also dictates the books these men read, the music they listen to, the politics they claim to ascribe to, and the beliefs they tout. Central to this stereotype is this man’s empty claim that he enjoys feminist literature (they have not gotten past page five of All About Love) and cares about women’s issues (even though he seems to have a very elementary understanding of them).

Is this kind of “performance” unique to a man with these particular calling cards? I’d like to argue that in the age of the internet, we’re all performing at a certain level. And the worst part is, is that even if you’re not, you still are perceived to be. Yes, the style elements of the performative man trend have come to appear as contrived, textbook, and, well, performative. However, I think this goes for many style trends that stem from social media. The temptation to look stylish and emulate those we admire online can often lead us to following too closely and too completely, because we can. In the age of Tiktok Shop and Google Lense, it’s all too easy to find exact replicas of anything we see on the internet, and essentially download an “aesthetic” item for item. While momentarily cool, trendy and interesting, such wholesale adoption of another’s style quickly appears like mimicry and cheap imitation. While those who you essentially stole from continue to change and evolve their style with time, you are left scrambling to discover your newest “core.” 

There’s the sentiment that performative men “pretend” to care about women’s issues, weaponizing them by transforming themselves into a sympathetic figure that increases their appeal and trustworthiness. When this is revealed to be a facade, it can feel not just disappointing, but in fact sinister and alarming. I think that this can be true of some men, but I also have another hypothesis; perhaps some men who aspire to be active community members, allies to women and minorities, creative, educated and well read, see these trends and all that they’re shorthand for and adopt the style elements aspirationally. 

The glee with which women called out and maligned men for following these trends felt more like revenge than anything else - revenge against a man who misrepresented himself and did not act in accordance with the values he espoused, or perhaps revenge against the men who have always used fashion and style to categorize and reduce women to specific archetypes. Assumptions about women linking hair color to intelligence, or immodest dress to promiscuity, have been longstanding and damaging. Why shouldn’t women feel empowered to critique men in the same way? 

This brings up my final point, which is to discuss why we take such pleasure in categorizing people by their style, and further categorizing their style into a laundry list of cliches. The performative man is certainly a trope of a man that I've seen walking around the streets of Chicago, and I do admit that it takes on a certain humor and irony now. However, I would be naive not to see that someone might look at me and place me into a couple of boxes as well. I believe that social media has taught us that everyone can be categorized, understood and either written off or accepted based on certain criteria. Now, we see a carabiner and matcha latte and we think, “yes, I know who you are.” The categorizing allows us to make sense of the real world the same way we make sense of the internet. And like the internet, specifically social media, this act of categorization places us in the position of the viewer for which content is presented to us through a complex algorithm. In this role, we become the arbiters of authenticity, sifting through images and assessing the reality that they’re based in - and notice that, within this system, we remain the only thing that’s actually real. 

But the internet is not real life. The performative man is just a construct, just like how a “dumb blonde” is a construct or dark academia is a construct or gorp core is a construct. I don’t say this to deny that the performative man trend is touching on a very real phenomenon, but I think we’re remiss if we do not turn the mirror around and look at all the ways we might be superficially engaging with a culture of identity by dressing or “performing” it rather than actually being it. Perhaps you’re not, and that’s why such a trend is annoying to you. Or, perhaps you also make claims about who you are and what you care about without engaging with them in a meaningful way - in which case, you and I can relate.