This is one of those windy pieces of discourses I was going to let blow through my saloon doors and ignore, but for whatever reason I’m going to indulge my worse impulses and try to figure out what I want to say about being a dude in 2025. Before any of that, and believe me, I’d be fine if you clicked on that little “X” next to this tab in your internet browser and didn’t read any further. But before that, I’d like to suggest you read my friend
’s analysis of the term “performative” because it’s a beautiful bit of expository writing and overlaps quite a bit with my own feelings about this whole thing. Basically, if you’re going to spend 8 minutes reading about the “performative male,” you should read Jack’s piece because it’s inevitably going to better than whatever the hell is below this paragraph on this page.I cannot read in a bar or in a cafe. I don’t work very well in them either, but reading is specifically difficult for me to do. I’ve taken books to Hartley’s to read by candlelight through the bottom of a pint of Guinness but I end up scanning the same page several times over before giving up and scrolling on my phone. I’m dispositionally prone to distractions. If I have patched into another conversation by way of eavesdropping I find it almost impossible to extricate myself. Even in my own head other people’s voices have a way of drowning out my own.
This, thankfully, inoculates me against the perfomativity discourse because I just refuse to bring books into those situations now. But what of my bar-reading brethen? Just because I can’t shut off my own nosiness, doesn’t mean that, somehow, doing something as innocuous as bringing your book to the bar suggests something nefarious or underhanded. I swear I’ve seen men reading books in bars every actually like, e.g. the dude trifecta of Dune, Blood Meridian, or Infinite Jest.
The whole conversation around performativity is somehow both extremely stale and annoying in a way that feels very modern. I don’t think that’s by coincidence.
We’ve become an ahistorical society, and there is this tendency among a lot of people to assume something they’re experiencing for the first time is completely unique to the world. Men are doing things to get women to sleep with them? Please call the Nobel committee, alert the MacArthur people, get Jimmy Kimmel’s booker on the phone.
I could armchair psychoanalyze that habit but, honestly, I think it’s more to do with being in your early 20s and mostly depending on internet aesthetics as your lens onto the world. And listen, there are people who would tell you that this online addled discourse is categorically unimportant in the real world, but I actually think this is one of those times that the internet does bleed into real life. People are worried that being interested in something is cringe. What a miserable way to live life.
Here’s an incomplete list of what I’ve seen people call performative:
Matcha lattes
Books written by women
This one is especially funny to me because it dovetails with the other internet issue of men not reading novels. Are men reading too much or are they not reading enough? Make up your mind!
Labubus
Tote bags
Wired headphones (?)
All of this came together at a performative male contest in New York which I’d argue says a lot less about this particular conversation and more about people’s relentless desire for attention and general social media derangement1. But, honestly, there was something interesting there as people performed a sort of meta-masculinity, a self-conception pointed outwards. But all I could think about was that the existence of performativity suggests that there is something like an anti-performativity, which I guess would be a perfect state of authenticity where that guy reading the book at the bar *actually* enjoys Sally Rooney or Joan Didion or whatever. But how does one prove it one way or another? Do we do on-street pop quizzes, ask them about the legitimacy of their interests? So much of this conversation smacks of a desire to make people insecure about themselves to the point that we’re attempting to transform simply liking things into something cringeworthy. Jack puts why this is so irritating very clearly:
There is something really odious about the adolescent impulse to point out someone else’s everyday, ordinary social ambition, and to condemn them for it. Someone wants favorable attention? Who doesn’t? On the specific subject of the ‘performative male’: I read in cafes and bars because it’s nice, usually because I’ve been working at my desk all day and would like a change of scenery, but of course there are occasions, too, when, in the back of my mind, I’m also wondering if someone interesting will be there and strike up a conversation. Sue me.
The whole performativity conversation echoes its way down the valley. Clothes are performative. So are tote bags, or a haircut or buying vinyl or CDs or cassettes. It makes me wonder what isn’t performative, which of course is where the whole thing falls apart. This is all Baudrillard 101, but it’s worth considering given all this chatter about authenticity and performativeness. An active choice to wear something or read something is also an active choice not to read or wear something else. When your dipshit cousin chooses to only wear his alma mater’s football shirt or your uncle only wears ill-fitting polyester suits, they are making an active choice to signal something about themselves that is both positive (“here is what I stand for”) and negative (“here is what I am against”). We are all performing and not in the dumbass “world’s a stage” kind of way. Authenticity is a trap, a bottomless pit where people think they’ll eventually find real meaning. Wear what you want, read what you want. Don’t let the scolds get you down.
The people climbing over the fences to see Tame Impala DJ at the The Lot recently was on a similar wavelength. People crushing forward to get the best picture for their Instagram story or TikTok. I was genuinely disgusted by it
Thank you for making your article available. It is funny because in some ways it is a new version of an old debate. It strikes me of Sartre’s action/belief “bad faith”