While modern-day matcha, Labubus and wired ear buds are relatively recent in the world of pop culture, the act of being performative is nothing new. These key characteristics are identifiers of what the internet has titled “performative males”. “Performative male” is an overarching term that describes men who disingenuously take on conventional “feminine” hobbies to attract female attention. It is most commonly used to exemplify the inauthentic adoption of these new traits. Its popularity mostly stems from the fact that the performative male does not always realize that others view him as performative – he believes the world sees him as genuine.
It may seem like this trend just popped up out of the abyss that is the internet, but I believe it did not originate in the modern era. While it may not be to the same degree as today, humans have always been performative. Currently, the quality of performing has been so hyper-saturated by social media that we can only recognize it in extremes. Yet, being performative is an evolutionary technique utilized by humans across all times and places. It goes deeper than sitting outside reading feminist literature and sipping an ice-cold matcha – it strikes us to the core of who we are as humans. Even you, dear reader, are performative every day without even knowing it. To tell you why, we have to go back in time.
Grab your tote bags and feminist literature and travel back with me to the days of the cavemen. When humans were hunter-gatherers, remaining in groups was necessary for survival. Not only did group work increase food production, but it also provided safety in numbers. But the question remains: how does one get accepted into the group? By fitting in. Or, in other words, by conforming to what the overwhelming majority classify as the norms of the group. After years of evolution and adaptation, a clear pattern was ingrained into human biological systems: those who remain in groups have a better chance of survival than those who don’t. Performing became critical for survival. While we may not be those same hunter-gatherers anymore, the remnants of this principle still hold true when we look at the social pressures of today.
Flash forward to the days of Ancient Greece. Aristotle claimed that “humans are political creatures.” He was not referring to the Democrats and Republicans that we know of in the present day. Instead, the term “political” refers to the community-centered social life that we as humans design and interact with. As years passed within our evolutionary cycle, our desire to interact with others became more than an instrumental good. While safety does come with numbers, social belonging became an intrinsic goal for humankind that went beyond simply surviving.
All these years later, even after we replaced togas with oversized baggy jeans, Aristotle’s idea still holds true. Each human has a desire to be social, and I believe performative males simply take that desire and run with it to an extreme.
In the modern era, consumerism and widespread social media have changed the performative playing field as we know it. The presence of large-scale trends has created an idealized schema of what it means to be performative. Now, when we see matcha, a Labubu or a Laufey album, we immediately think “performative” without knowing the underlying context. Those items and habits have become symbols that have characterized what it means to be performative. Our pre-assumed idea of performative people has been warped into a trend that can shift at the whim of one viral video. But being performative is not restricted to these characteristics alone. We so often forget that each and every one of us performs every day. We all change little things about ourselves and our personalities based on the environment we are in. Oftentimes, we engage in behavioral adaptation so often that we don’t even recognize when we are doing it. Being performative, it seems, just comes naturally to us. That deep-rooted desire to be truly political creatures has not yet been satiated within us.
Much has changed over time, but we are still performing just as we did all those years ago in the days of the cavemen. We shouldn’t be surprised when we see a performative male in the wild because performing is nothing new.
