The paradox of male performativity
I recently got into a tiff with a friend of mine about the pink heart stickers he had stuck onto his shoes. “I feel like women will like it,” he joked at the time, after I had given him the leftovers of my unwanted crafting materials. I was on the phone with him later when I asked him how much he thinks women influence his performance in the world. “I don’t think they do,” he told me. “I think it’s just me.” So, I brought up the stickers. When I seemed to insinuate that, in my mind, this act fell under the category of the so-called ‘performative male,’ he got defensive.
The ‘performative male’ has become an increasingly recognizable figure both online and in our day-to-day lives—the matcha, the feminist literature, the wired headphones, and just enough heel drag to suggest that capitalism has not yet conquered the plight of belt marketability. The term seems to elicit a decidedly negative reaction. But what does it mean to label someone ‘performative’ when all expressions of gender are to some extent performed?
While it may be true that this particular performance is often deficient in the feat of challenging patriarchy, I think we have taken the notion of performativity and conflated it with an inauthenticity that is far more pejorative than it should be.
Whereas inauthenticity expresses something that is not part of your identity, performance is expression intended to influence another person. By the latter definition, performance is not an aberration of social behaviour—it is social behaviour. We dress, speak, and gesture with some awareness of how we will be received. Sociologist Erving Goffman famously theorized social interaction through precisely this dramaturgical lens: we are constantly presenting versions of ourselves to one another.
Women are certainly no strangers to this. In Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride, Roz observes: “you are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.” Atwood describes a woman who has so thoroughly internalized the possibility of male observation that she becomes both performer and spectator, imagining herself through the eyes of the man who might be watching. The ‘performative male’ offers an interesting inversion: what happens when there is a woman inside watching a man? Perhaps he sticks pink hearts to his shoes. Perhaps it is because some part of him enjoys how women might interpret them.
I spoke to another friend of mine about this inversion. “I think I do a lot of things for the female gaze,” he told me. “And I feel a tension, because yes it can sort of feel like virtue signaling, but I also think it’s a good thing that men are starting to feel like they should perform for that gaze a little.”
There is something subversive, even beautiful, about men being conscious of their own performance and their capacity to freely experiment with the boundaries of masculinity. If we insist that the man drinking matcha and reading feminist theory is performing while the man drinking black coffee and refusing to cry is simply being himself, we have quietly accepted hypermasculinity as the authentic male default.
Wanting women to perceive you as safe does not necessarily make your safety fraudulent. Nor does reading feminist literature become meaningless because you enjoy what doing so says about you.
In another conversation with a friend of mine, he expressed that women are not necessarily the intended audience for this performance. In fact, for many of the men I interviewed, their performance was just as much about distinguishing themselves from other men—and from an idea of masculinity they did not want to embody. One interviewee described this feeling more explicitly: “I have a great deal of shame about being a man. And I think it’s a big thing a lot of men don’t want to deal with—to live with this tension of pride and shame.”
Aesthetic distance offers an appealing solution to that discomfort: patriarchy becomes something practiced by another kind of man. So, the problem is not the performance itself, but when the performance becomes absolution. Every single man that I interviewed told me that they believe most men who adopt the stereotypical aesthetics of the ‘performative male’ feel less complicit in patriarchy than other men. I asked them if they themselves felt the same way, and each of them answered “yes.”
As I have learned in my many years as a woman, patriarchy is not something we can transcend. Further, no amount of self-consciousness can absolve us from the structures in which we participate.
Performance is an integral part of our society. However, we cannot allow performance to replace identity, and the subsequent identity to exempt us from adequate accountability. Performance is not an indication of moral integrity.
When we are discussing the nature of performativity in regards to authenticity, we have to ask ourselves, “what is the intention behind this performance?” If the answer is to indicate to anyone, yourself included, that you stand up for values that challenge patriarchy, that you advocate for women, and that you want to learn from women, then you need to act the part.