There is a new man in town. You may have spotted him posing with an oat milk matcha pretending to read a copy of The Bell Jar. Or maybe you saw him seeming to listen to Lana Del Rey deep cuts but his earphones weren’t plugged in.
Maybe he makes a point of carrying tampons around with him for women in need. He’s called a “performative male” and is a relatively new archetype gaining traction – and inspiring mockery and critique – online.
Labubus are a key component, he will probably have one dangling off a bag or belt loop. Point-and-shoot cameras are optional. He’d like you to think he has read Sally Rooney’s entire back catalogue and that Joni Mitchell is his favourite musician, but he doesn’t know a single lyric.
There is a menswear element, too. He’s likely to wear baggy trousers, perhaps made from Japanese selvedge denim, Vivienne Westwood chrome hearts necklaces and a tote bag, ideally emblazoned with feminist slogans. All of this posturing has one end goal: to look good in the eyes of (progressive) women.
According to J’Nae Phillips, a trend forecaster and the creator of the Fashion Tingz newsletter: “A performative male is less about who someone is than about how they curate and project masculinity in public – usually online. He is someone acutely aware that manhood is being watched, assessed, and consumed, and so he stages it.”
On TikTok, women are sharing sightings of people they deem to be performative males in public – reading highbrow literature, maybe even filming themselves as they do it, between sets at the gym.
Content creators are seeking to skewer the archetype, with men performing like “performative males” for knowing audiences. In one video showing what it could be like to go on a date with a performative male, the man in question plays Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) on a ukulele having just shushed his date in order to finish reading a chapter of an Angela Davis book.
From Seattle to Chicago, Sydney to Jakarta, contests in the vein of last year’s celebrity lookalikes have been held for performative males. Men have held copies of Joan Didion upside down and implored schools to start teaching “herstory” instead of history. At a contest in Ottawa, a contestant named his mum as his cultural and aesthetic inspiration.
As the organiser of the Seattle contest, Lanna Rain, told a local news station: “My best description of a performative male is a man who wears feminism and softness and certain music as a guy to allure women without actually knowing anything about what they’re putting on or talking about.”
Marcus Jernigan, who won the contest in Seattle, said: “To me a performative male is a man who partakes in certain activities or listens to a certain genre of music with the intention of attracting women.” He thinks it “stems from men who genuinely participate in these aesthetics but unfortunately have them stolen by those men who have ulterior motives”.
The performative male has been likened to the poser of the 90s. But there are key differences. Dr Ashley Morgan, a masculinities expert at Cardiff Metropolitan University, said that where performative masculinities perhaps used to mean men showing off with things such as fast cars in order to impress other men, the 2025 version looked more inclusive. She saw a positive in that the performative male was offering a different take on masculinity, helping to expand what it can mean.
It can also be seen as the offspring of the “softboi”, an archetype from the late 2010s. A softboi was in touch with their emotions – not like the other guys. For Philips, they share DNA. But while the softboi “flaunted niche music taste, claimed emotional depth, and differentiated himself from the ‘basic’ masculine mainstream”, and “performed sensitivity”, by contrast “the performative male is broader: he can perform toughness, tenderness, politics, spirituality, or even incompetence, as long as it’s theatrically framed”.
The performative male lands against a backdrop of discussion over whether masculinity is in crisis. In the US in 2023, nearly half of men believe traditional masculinity is under threat. But what even is “masculinity” today – starkly different ideals of masculinity are jostling for dominance. “As traditional gender roles dissolve, men look for new scripts to inhabit, and performance offers a way to experiment with them publicly,” said Phillips.
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Given the rise of manosphere and, in some quarters, a return to unabashed toxic masculinity, men who want to separate themselves from such thinking and behaviours arguably have reason to want to signal, publicly, their more “enlightened” ways. But the flip side is that the perceived end goal of many of these “performative males” is to woo women they hope will be attracted by their feminist theatrics.
Phillips thinks it can be seen as the other side of the trad wife movement, which, she said, “is about restaging femininity in a hyper-stylised way – curating domesticity, submission, and nostalgia for imagined stability”. The performative male, she said, was “its mirror: a hyper-awareness of masculinity as something to craft and showcase”.
Both, she said, “are symptoms of the same cultural moment: people seeking clarity, identity and validation in a chaotic world, turning to heightened gender performance as a stabilising, aestheticised refuge.”
Eugene Healey, a brand strategy consultant, looks at the irony of the performance in performative man content. In a video he points to a quote from the philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” As Healey said: “The men making this content do have these haircuts, do listen to Clairo, they do rock a small top, big pant, tote bag combo and in an effort to get ahead of their own reputational issues they have to prove that they’re above it.”
But, he added, being conscious of the performance was not the same as transcending it: “Self-awareness doesn’t free us from performance, it just adds another layer to it.” The truly radical act, in his view, would be to drop “the performance of being above the performance”.
For others who truly like the things these performative males pretend to like, they find themselves in a tricky spot. As one social media user said: “Let me enjoy my matcha and tote bag. I’ve been doing this since 2020.”
