Alexandra Hill ’28 is a prospective English major and creative writing minor. She does research at the IIC Conservation GIS lab and is a member of Vox. When she’s not submitting her columns late, you can find her yapping, daydreaming, or dancing really badly. Contact her at abhill@wm.edu.
Julia Peavey ‘28 is a neuroscience major from San Diego, California.
She enjoys editing and (occasionally) writing for The Flat Hat and loves to watch movies. Contact her at jjpeavey@wm.edu
The views expressed in the article are the authors’ own.
YikYak betrayed us.
We are simply girls who love matcha, so when our friend showed us a post that said, “Do you know any good matcha places around town? Btw I love Clairo,” we were overjoyed.
“What did people reply?” we asked, eager for some new cafes to try — Clairo seemed like an excellent vibe for them, after all.
We were immensely disappointed by the lack of matcha recommendations in the comments. Instead, YikYakers announced, “I love Lana Del Ray and I can play guitar,” and “Virginia Woolf inspires me. DMs are open.”
Somehow, this serious matcha question was … a joke?
This YikYaker wasn’t a real matcha lover. He was a performative man.
Given the rigorous journalistic credibility of this article, our dear readers most certainly are neither YikYak doomscrollers nor performative themselves. Thus, we generously offer you the opportunity to step into the faux leather loafers of the performative man.
Allow us to set the stage (Get it? Because you’re performing?):
You walk down Colonial Williamsburg’s Prince George Street, the echo of your aforementioned “leather” loafers matching the beat playing through your wired headphones … is that “Glue Song” by beabadoobee? The strap of your Trader Joe’s tote digs into your leather jacket-clad shoulder, and you move your Labubu keychain aside to pull out a copy of “We Should All Be Feminists.” You cannot recall ever having read it, but the carefully color-coded annotations sprouting from every page say otherwise. It must’ve been life-changing. You open Instagram to follow Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and pre-order her next work. You notice that your bio reads: “ceo of child-like wonder,” and you take a moment to reflect on all the women who inspired you as a child — you will journal about this later. Seeing that you’ve posted a story, you click it open: “The Future is Female” shines back at you in bold, unwavering letters. One person has liked it, so you immediately DM her a book recommendation and some accompanying mood music.
But how did you come to be this way? Why are those girls you pass by pointing and laughing at you? What does your presence say about culture and society?
Well, we’re glad you asked. That’s just why we, your friendly performative analysts, are writing to you today.
To start, the performative man has a singular goal: to steal women’s hearts. The green drink, the baggy pants and, of course, the soulful guitar all are part of an orchestrated act to attract. The performative man is also known for his display of emotional intelligence (He’s a feminist due to his deep empathy for women.) and vulnerability (He bravely shares that sad girl guitar solo.) The performative man paints himself as exposed, connected and heartfelt, but it is deliberately counterfeit. Of course, this sort of script for catching and reeling lovers is nothing new, but the performative man becomes the butt of the joke because of it.
Interestingly, the cultural and behavioral elements performative men are infamous for are, in general, considered feminine. These individuals listen to artists that are more popular amongst women, consume media about women’s empowerment and communicate their feelings (something we know no man can do).
That bit in parentheses, beloved reader, was beautifully composed semi-sarcasm, but it brings up a larger looming question. Even if the performative man’s use of fraudulent identity to secure a lover plays an active role in the patriarchal system, what are we doing by labeling support of women’s rights and emotional intelligence as inherently feminine? Why are these qualities jeered at as mere performance in men? We already have a problem with stigma around emotion and vulnerability in men, seen, for example, in men’s underrepresentation in therapy. The performative label of these qualities seems to perpetuate these stereotypical and limited views of gender.
But why are we so fixated on categorizing what is performative and what is genuine in the first place? Beneath the mockery, parody and cultural obsession with calling out the performative man lies a deeper frustration. It begins with the woeful modern realities of looking for romantic connection — perhaps the 6 foot 7 inch tall environmental engineer who enjoys cooking, journaling and floral arranging was indeed too good to be true. But this frustration of finding what we desire to be merely a pretty, perhaps even meticulously targeted, mirage, extends far beyond the pitfalls of the modern dating scene. Our fear of being deceived by a mere performance extends to every aspect of identity expression.
And performative men aren’t the only ones whose identities have become more performative. The algorithmic curation which dictates our daily media consumption means that gone are the days of hearing a song from an artist who we’ve never previously listened to, of going to see a movie without having read a single snarky Letterboxd review of it, of opening this article without first seeing the wonderful Flat Hat social media team’s compelling Instagram post promoting it.
Without considerable effort to stay offline or cultivate disconnection, we lose the experience of discovering music, fashion and relationships without prior expectations or the influence of what others enjoy. In other words, there is a widening gap between our personal aesthetic and our genuine personal connection to that aesthetic. That gap is, as the accusatory language of our paranoia dictates, performance.
And yet we have a distaste for this naturally occurring performance so much so that guilty pleasures are in fact guilty. We have heinously betrayed our curated aesthetic when we switch our playlist from Marietta and American Football to Taylor Swift’s new album, thus making our Midwest emo-loving identity slightly less genuine.
But why, you may ask, does this brief capitulation to the algorithmic tide matter? In a world of hypercommodified aesthetics and interests, “you are what you like” has never seemed more true. To like popular media makes us basic. To like matcha and Clairo makes us performative. To like nerdily correcting the professor, stargazing at Botedock and streaking Sunken makes us a twamp.
The interests of performative men, with their wired headphones, vinyls and books (ancient relics, we know), reflect a trend affecting Gen Z as a whole: the aesthetic of nostalgia. As an acquaintance mildly put it prior to the Internet sensation of the performative man, “People are walking around with f—ing Walkmans these days.”
Interestingly, Gen Z often yearns nostalgically for times it doesn’t even remember. Rather than simply mourning the loss or celebrating the greatness of our past, we borrow from the past of generations prior. We watch “Stranger Things” and miss the 80s … but we never lived them.
In essence, this nostalgia emerges less from connection with the past and more from a sense of disconnection to the present. Gen Z of America knows an artificial world, where phones become walls between strangers, Instagram feeds become judged covers and loneliness thrives.
The prospect of another reality — one of connection, spontaneity and authenticity — lures us to wired headphones and Laufey’s jazz-like albums. Yet, as in the case of performative men, this attempt at nostalgia becomes another hollow Internet trend and ends up reinforcing the emptiness Gen Z feels. The attempt to disconnect oneself from the modern mediascape ultimately entangles a person within it.
Essentially, although performative men undeniably make funny TikToks, they also speak to a larger culture of regressive ideas of femininity, anxiety around genuineness and dissatisfaction with the modern day.
But enough of this philosophical genius … The truth is, we need more funny TikToks in this world! We need more performative men.
In advance, you’re welcome: we dreamed up some great ideas for the College to implement more performance as a campus. Everyone waiting for the shuttle to Woodlands? Well, why don’t y’all play guitar? We want to see competing Clairo solos on our way to the dining hall, thank you. And to the people reading just one meager book on Sunken, shame on you. Yes, that’s right. You should be reading two or more books, simultaneously, at all times. Additionally, we suggest that our student body drinks so much matcha that a national shortage results, as that is the only marker of true success. Soon, Aromas will have no Grinch-colored drinks left!
And if you still aren’t feeling the performative spirit strongly enough, here’s another way to level up: the future of performance is — you heard it here first! — pseudo-intellectual analyses of performance.
“But wait,” you say. “Isn’t that what this article was all along?” Well, we always knew we had smart readers.
We proudly state that while writing this article, we daintily sipped matcha (with oat milk due to the dairy industry’s evils), sang our prose to the sound of our guitar shredding and informed ourselves with tomes of feminist literature.
And yes, dear reader, our DMs are open.
