Performative Men or Anti-Intellectual
Graphic by: Téa Sklar
The man we’ve been waiting for has arrived. He has fluffy hair, he listens to Clairo, he owns a chunky white cable knit sweater paired with wide leg jeans, and he carries Sylvia Plath in his local business tote bag slung over his left shoulder. He claims to be a feminist and he’s studied Jamaica Kincaid, but instead of approaching him, you scoff and label him just another performative man.
Accusing men for being performative– like a witch in Salem– has pushed us into a new witch hunt: the green-matcha scare. The fresh virality of the intelligent, reflective, socially-aware man has taken over Pinterest boards of all gender identities alike, yet its popularity as an aesthetic rather than expression of authentic identity feels manufactured as a coverup for an anti-intellectual movement.
The true performative man is as the name suggests– a performance: curated and constructed persona motivated by romantic marketability or social acceptance. This meta-irony implies that one can “do too much”– that self expression has rules and lines that are taboo and has us asking bigger questions: is Mitski only good on a mood board? What are we unconsciously deciding are acceptable feminine vs masculine material objects? And when will we finally be honest and admit matcha is not all that?
We’ve spent so much time fighting to make space for free and safe self-expression; this performative panic feels like three steps backward. It promotes and reinforces societal expectations of masculine-presenting people. We’ve worked so hard to create theses spaces and now that they’re being occupied, now that people are adopting a new comfortability in how they present themselves– let that be the cable knit sweater, the pinky ring, iced caramel macchiato, and Virginia Woolf– their interests are dismissed as superficial.
Why can’t we believe that the so-called performative man might have genuine taste and curiosity? By assuming it's all for aesthetic and validation, are we not perpetuating the very patriarchal expectations we’ve fought to undo?