The viral “performative male” meme trend shows us that everyone wants to break free of gender roles

A few weeks ago, I was catching up with my friend when the conversation turned to the subject of “performative male” memes that had flooded our timelines. We made the requisite jokes (“Performative male contest in my bedroom, stat!” etc.) before chuckling and shaking our heads. Calling men who drink matcha and paint their nails “performative” had always struck me as silly, but of course it was through conversation with another trans person that it would become clearer to me why the trend induces such an eyeroll: “Cis people come so close to understanding that all gender is performative,” I said to her, “only to turn right back around and reinscribe gender norms.”

The so-called performative male is nothing new. It’s this year’s take on ‘the toxic softboy’ or the ‘male manipulator.’ But in the past few weeks, the meme has reached a fever pitch. There have been meta-ironic “performative male contests” in New York, Chicago, Seattle and even Jakarta. (I keep thinking to myself, are all of these lookalike contests just drag but for straight people? But that’s a question for another essay.) The Performative Male is essentially men performing in ways meant to pander to women, downloaded from women’s observations and filtered through The Algorithm. The tools in their arsenal? Matcha, Clairo vinyls, Labubus, painted nails, tote bags, Sally Rooney/Joan Didion/bell hooks (but only ever All About Love) paperbacks—the kinds of signifiers that young modern men might adapt in order to appeal to progressive young women. Supposedly, these are all things that might trick a woman into believing that this man is not like other men. Not so violent. Not so chauvinist. Not so scary to be a subject of desire.

In today’s supposedly post-sexist era, we’re seeing a compulsory urge to taxonomize everything into the gender binary. And maybe this shouldn’t be surprising. The concept of transgender is more mainstream now than ever before, so it makes sense that these “men are from Mars, women are from Venus” style jokes would spur as the subconscious reactions to a perceived destabilisation of the traditional gender paradigm.

In Gender Trouble, seminal queer theorist Judith Butler suggests that “gender is not a noun, but neither is it a set of freefloating attributes.” Instead, gender is “performative,” constituted through “repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of… a natural sort of being.” In other words, Butler doesn’t subscribe to the “born this way” notion that gender identity is an inherent, stable truth; rather, what we understand as gender (and sex) is produced through the continual, violent enforcement of a set of norms. “Man” and “woman” are nothing but impossible, symbolic ideals, and yet the power of these fictions is inescapable.