On an unseasonably sunny afternoon not too long ago I was in an Uber commuting to a panel discussion, which was to feature some of the pioneering figures in Lagos’ rapidly expanding rave scene. As it often is in Lagos, the traffic on Falomo Bridge was painfully slow. My driver had progressed from driving with the pace of a snail to inching forward in tiny spasmodic bursts that hardly qualified as moving. In a show of dramatic outrage, I lifted my left wrist to my face and glanced at my wristwatch—which I knew was not working. I looked outside and saw an interminable stretch of cars ahead, barely moving. I was running late. And so, to stave off the feeling of consternation that invariably surfaces in times like this I decided to distract myself.
I tried reading but I was too agitated to adequately savor the text I had begun to leaf through. Exiting the Books app, I headed to Instagram impelled by a throbbing hunger for a quick dopamine hit. I had hardly scrolled for half a minute when I came across a video that was equal parts vaguely familiar, somewhat bizarre, and wholly amusing. It was a video by the San Francisco Chronicle reporting on a ‘performative male’ contest in the city. For the uninitiated, ‘performative male’ is an increasingly popular neologism for describing men who adopt progressive and often feminist visual codes without subscribing to or caring for the underlying progressive values. As the characterization suggests, for this variety of men, the whole thing is a hollowed-out performance of progressive politics, a schtick—a cosmetic path to ingratiating oneself with women.
To paint a hazy portrait of this kind of male: he never passes up an opportunity to wax lyrical about women’s rights. Tote bags decorated with sprightly colored Labubus, T Shirts with texts like “THE FUTURE IS FEMALE,” and feminist texts—think Sally Rooney’s Normal People or Melissa Febos’ Girhood—are core elements of his wardrobe, deployed loudly to signal his progressive leanings. Bonus points if he drinks matcha and shops at the female section of clothing stores. Indeed this variety of men was abundant at the San Francisco Performative Male contest, as shown in the clip.
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One man particularly stands out. Wearing a light blue shirt, brown pants, Ray Ban sunglasses, ginormous headphones; and clutching a cream tote bag, Michelle Obama’s Becoming and a dog leash—all in one hand by the way—he looked like the ultimate performative male. Of the Mandolin—a stringed instrument resembling a guitar—slung across his chest he says: “This is a mandolin I bought a while back to learn how to play. I never learned how to play but it’s a conversation starter.” “This is not my tote, that was not my dog,” he continues. Something about the perfunctory nature of his verbiage gave me pause. I glanced at my tote bag—black, dainty—which sat on the seat across from me and laughed silently.
In the intervening days, I started to notice the ‘performative male’ posts everywhere. This is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, or frequency illusion. “The most commonly given example is when one learns a new word and it suddenly appears everywhere,” Melissa Febos writes in The Dry Season. Online reactions to the trend are split between amusement and holy indignation. In an article for the publication “them,” James Factora argues that all gender is performative, therefore the notion of a performative male is tautological. “The so-called performative male is nothing new. It’s this year’s take on ‘the toxic softboy’ or the ‘male manipulator’,” Factora writes. This sentiment rang so true to my perception of the topic that I made a mental note to include it in this essay.
Rachel Connolly’s essay for The Guardian, Why Fear The Tote Bag-Wielding, Matcha-Drinking ‘Performative Male’? At Least he Makes an Effort, left an even bigger impression on me. In the piece, Connolly essentially dilates on this notion that gender is inherently performative. To this end, she deploys wickedly delightful sarcasm and a refreshing lucidity to make her case. “Imagine that! A person choosing clothes and accessories to increase their attractiveness in the eyes of the gender they are trying to sleep with. Very insidious and unusual behaviour. I can tell you right now I have never once in my life participated in such a charade,” she writes.
Days after stumbling across that performative male clip by the San Francisco Chronicle, I had lunch with a friend at an upscale restaurant specializing in local cuisine. My friend had recently returned to the country from a holiday-turned-globetrotting expedition. And so, for us, it was a reunion of sorts. Moments after I had taken my seat and started to feel comfortable, they arrived. Standing inches away from me, they paused and, smiling, ran their eyes over my outfit: a cropped biker’s jacket I had thrifted from an online store for female clothes, bootcut jeans, a baseball cap, and, not least, a tote bag. “Performative male,” they cooed. “What about me gives that?” I replied laughing. “Everything!”
It is true that the performative male is cliché, cringe, and shallow. It is also true that there is something deeply revolting about cosplaying a stereotype. But I think that the vitriol towards this variety of men is entirely misplaced. Some have referred to the performative male as dangerous, invoking convoluted arguments to make their case. This entirely misses the mark; for one, while the performative male is a caricature, an exaggerated image, all gender, as Factora tells us, is a performance. Also, contrary to what social media might suggest, the performative male is nothing new. But the biggest danger of reducing the performative male to a pejorative is that real progressive men, who may relish a cup of matcha or enjoy donning a tote bag will inevitably find themselves caught in the crosshairs of this sweeping repudiation.
To illustrate the potential unintended consequences of denigrating the performative male with unforgiving intensity, I’ll serve the example of the #MeToo movement in the 2010s. Following the sweeping exposure of sexual offenders such as Harvey Weinstein and the sexual harassment women often face in the workplace—often at the hands of powerful men—came to light, there seemed to be a general sense of contrition and solidarity among men towards women. In that era, men were more likely to call erring men to order publicly, side with women on social media, and refer to themselves as feminists. Sure, there were a few poseurs among their ranks but for the most part, it was positive.
Today, the situation has dimmed several shades darker: the rise of alt-right figures—Trump, Tate, Musk—underscores this. One of the reasons that many of the men who now subscribe to their virulent rhetoric were so easily won over is that men with a progressive slant are treated with suspicion, while the right feverently touted masculinity in a glamorous light, as this New Yorker article suggests. In all honesty, it’s nobody’s fault, women are justified in being suspicious of any kind of men given the patriarchy's far-reaching tentacles. But as Jia Tolentino explains in her seminal essay How America Embraced Gender War, in the war to stave off the onslaught of misogyny that’s increasingly suffocating today’s society, women need male allies. “It’s here that we learn how badly we need one another, in the end,” she writes with an almost transcendental lucidity. By the same token, it becomes clear that by indiscriminately deploying ‘performative male’ as a pejorative, we risk alienating would-be progressive men.
