In Defense of the Performative Man

One of the internet’s biggest fixations of 2025 is the "performative man.” He’s culturally iconic and easy to spot: iced strawberry matcha in hand, Charm by Clairo in his headphones, and perhaps one of those tiny Joan Didion books peeking out of his back pocket. Online, he’s mocked under the assumption that he behaves this way for aesthetics or for female approval. Some cities and college campuses have even hosted “performative man contests.” Overall, though, the implication is clear: men simply cannot be interested in the soft, beautiful, and emotional of their own accord. 

In the last few years, “performative” has become both a buzzword and an accusation. Tacked onto just about any descriptor (“performative femininity,” “performative activism,” “performative allyship”), to call someone performative is essentially to call them fake. But all social life is a performance. As Shakespeare famously wrote, “all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players.” And even today, he’s right. Social interaction has always been a type of theater in which we signal to others who we are, where we belong, and who we want to be. We take on different roles according to the audience or situation, not out of deception, but as a means to construct identity.

The problem then isn’t performance itself, but our culture’s deep and arguably toxic obsession with authenticity. We like to think that our interests are pure and undisputed expressions of self, yet what we consider authentic is inherently shaped by gender, class, social expectation, and other external factors. When we call someone “performative,” we’re really saying they’re doing performance incorrectly, and that their self-presentation doesn’t align with our ideas of what’s sincere or appropriate.

In this sense, the “performative man” reveals a double standard. When a man takes care of his appearance or reads feminist literature, he is immediately questioned or considered insincere because those interests are culturally associated with femininity. But gender itself is a performance, and in this way, “performative masculinity” is a bit of a redundant term. Women have been altering their appearance and behavior to cater towards male fantasy for centuries.  Many men also perform masculinity in some sense, whether by lifting heavy weights, yelling at sports games, or lying about their height on dating apps. 

The rise of the performative man could signal that men are actually beginning to consider the female gaze and to explore the softness and vulnerability culturally associated with women. Ironically, the extreme online ridicule this persona faces shows how narrow our cultural tolerance for male self-expression still is. What’s framed as a critique of inauthenticity is, in reality, a demand for conformity. 

More than its gendered scripts, performance today takes on new dimensions in an age of seemingly infinite surveillance. With algorithms, social media followers, and even strangers filming public behavior, online life collapses the distinction between public and private, subjecting every choice or action to an invisible audience. In this way, Michel Foucault’s Panopticism (the idea that we behave as if always under observation) feels eerily prophetic. We’ve internalized the “watcher,” performing both for others, and for the version of ourselves that has learned to expect an audience.

Performance then, is both a mode of expression and a mode of societal control. The “performative man” becomes a casualty of this paradox as every act of softness or femininity is read as a calculated move. But whether his image derives from sincerity, aesthetics, or experimentation misses the point entirely. It was never about the performative man himself but instead what our reaction exposes about us, namely our cultural discomfort with ambiguity.

When we rush to label others as “performative,” especially online, we’re not exposing dishonesty but enforcing conformity. The obsession with calling out performance only (ironically) reinforces the structures it claims to resist, perpetuating a culture of sameness that effectively limits self-expression.