VALIDATION NOT TRANSFORMATION
“Performative males are radical enough to retweet the right ideas but not enough to realise that they are shouting them over women”
They are sipping through thick layers of misogyny and fake feminism through the straw of an iced oat matcha latte. You may have seen the most recent iteration of the performative male being born as a push back against the red pilled hyper masculine alpha male ideology, these males noticed that women were not impressed by the excessively macho male, so men embodied something different to separate them from this crowd.
A performative male is someone who aligns his behaviours and lifestyle with what will be rewarded by society at the time, he is not doing it from his own intrinsic desire, he's doing it to get the validation and approval of others, usually women. The facade lurs people in and those who are caught within the performative males’s grasp are exposed to what's beneath the mask. Disingenuous personality and character with the objective of coming across as favourable to the female gaze. Consciously engineered, men adopt a soft boy aesthetic to appear more approachable to women, but it often fails due to perceived inauthenticity. In distancing themselves from the ‘not all men’ crowd, performative feminists believe that they are beyond criticism, allowing them to claim a victory simply for showing a vague awareness of the issues that women face.
When a man trades a gym selfie for a copy of ‘Wuthering Heights’, he is applauded as an enlightened, emotionally intelligent, secure trailblazer of modern masculinity, earning social capital for the same interests, emotional fluency and the softness that women are constantly labelled as basic or too emotional for. This performative shift highlights a biting double standard: men can treat feminine traits like a seasonal costume, gaining praise for the performance whereas women are constantly penalised for those same traits. The performative male selectively borrows the ‘vulnerable aesthetic’ under all these baggy cardigans and the constant unempathetic “I get it” comments, men have no idea and do not absorb the systematic risks and challenges women face. Performative males are radical enough to retweet the right ideas but not enough to realise that they are shouting them over women. Men can easily take off this ‘soft boy’ persona whenever it stops being useful to them, or when challenged, they are able to reassert their traditional power. The danger of this trend lies in how it disguises misogynistic ideas as a romanticised social commentary, reinforcing harmful stereotypes about women.
Social media has not just given these performative men a stage, it has given them a direct script and even a costume department. Performative males are wearing symbols that were popularised on TikTok such as labubus, because in a world of choices, why not choose from a preselected template that every single person is following. The TikTok algorithm has turned ‘softness’ into a high-engagement commodity, rewarding men for an aesthetic while they remain untouched by the systemic misogyny that women are forced to navigate daily. Performative males could only exist in today society, social media hollows out dissent and turns it into aesthetics, subcultures were originally collective forms of resistance but when we all become consumers, identity became something that you wear once and throw away rather than something that lives inside you. Performative feminists just do not have the time to put any meaningful thought into their actions before the trend cycle continues and another political cause takes its place. On a deeper level, these performative males are just hyperreal signposts, miscalculating a display of sensitivity is just a distraction reminding us that yes whilst all of this is fake, somewhere under capitalism and cosy cardigans true authenticity is being commodified for clicks.
Ultimately these performances of feminism are less about genuine discussions of gender equality and more about gaining attention through controversy and implication. Don't act surprised that the aftertaste of this iced oat matcha latte lingers with the same old traditional gender views.