By Kira Giffin and Preston Crowley
Everywhere you look, he’s there. The faint whir of Clairo’s ethereal vocals, the slurping noise of him trying to drink the last drop of matcha, the sound of hands digging through an abnormally overstuffed tote bag, and fingers peeling through pages of “feminist” literature—Colleen Hoover’s Verity. Accompanied with the mumbling of, “I cry while watching female rage edits,” coughing after to draw as much attention to his self-proclaimed nice guy personality. But what lies beneath these interests, or are the interests in question simply a facade?
The term “performative male” was recently coined in online spaces to poke fun at men who try too hard to get female attention. Even so, the majority of individuals have perceived the meme as nothing more than just that, a meme. But if you know anything about the internet, you should realize that any trend that includes a binary word in one way or another ties back to, you guessed it, gender roles and the patriarchy! To start, every single hobby the performative men enjoy has, in one way or another, been deemed as “girly.”
Yes, it’s funny to poke fun at people who pretend to be somebody for validation. But in the case of those who earnestly partake in these hobbies, humiliating them for enjoying “feminine” pastimes directly correlates to toxic masculinity. Feminism, by definition, is achieving equality for both sexes, so when you put one down for going against typical gender roles—boy like blue, girl like pink—it doesn’t help achieve that goal in any way, shape, or form.
On the other hand, there are the men who just simply try too hard to be “progressive” (AKA doing the bare minimum). Those who think they’ve become the savior of women and deserve to be worshipped also won’t benefit the movement at all. In contrast, it’ll normalize the ideology that men being horrible to women is to be expected—”he’s a man, he’s supposed to act like that”—making it much more difficult to hold the men accountable.
To conclude, the performative male epidemic is simply another example of how ingrained misogyny is in society, whether we like it or not. Simply put, the only action we can take to combat that and work towards bettering ourselves is by making an effort to be conscious of the almost-impossible-to-fully-erase sexism in the public and try not to internalize it. That, alongside going out of our way to scream, “grass drinking male manipulator!” at every man we see reading The Bell Jar (privately or publicly).