Anti-performative is just as performative

Reflections on The Performative Male and the need to keep up with a culture that evolves faster than you blink.

I’m reading the book Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino - a feminist lens to culture and internet shaping womanhood as a whole. I do this on the weekend sitting on a green embroidered mat under the shade of trees in Bangalore’s Cubbon Park - the city’s primo place for working Gen-Zs to touch grass, post Instagram stories, and feel like the main characters they’ve told they are.

But of course, *I’m not like them* and I show this rebellion quietly to myself by not clicking a picture of the fact that I’m doing this. Maybe I’m doing this because I deactivated Instagram a month ago and can’t cash the picture for social capital. 6 months ago, the trend of *The Performative Male* flooded my entire feed. The performative male is the quintessential 21st century man, and comes about a decade after the MeToo movement’s inception. Once elite women of all cultures over the world captured the internet, there was a new discourse around female safety and gave some much needed rejuvenation to the feminist movement in the 21st century. It fractured the 2 genders and started an offline running conversation between men. Some men sincerely defended the #NotAllMen narrative in real life, some proudly reposted stories of their wokest female friends. The male feminist is a rare breed, and even rarely represented - until then - on the internet. But you wanted the woke female baddie who came with her progressive views and independence because it made for more interesting partners. Abs weren’t enough anymore and men hypothesised that substance, surely, would help them become the man a feminist thought was a unicorn.

Jia Tolentino writes about individuality and how much of it is shaped by performance. There’s a constant feedback loop of who you want to be, how you show it, and how people react to it. In the age of social media, she argues, performance has gotten much easier and far more disconnected than it used to be in the 20th century. You can now, for a brief hour, put a blanket on patchy grass and prove to the world you’re a reader who likes cozying up with a book on the weekends. From what I hear, it makes for an excellent Hinge prompt too.

The disconnect from who are and how we want to be perceived is clearly encapsulated by The Performative Male. Men knew exactly which of their friends spouted Joan Didion at the sight of the first red-haired girl they’d find - and how they were no better as partners in any meaningful way of how they treated women in real life. Hence the performative male was known by men and women alike. Unlike most trends of the internet, there was something deeply uniting about this trend. Women wanted to be more wary and men wanted to finally call out their peers for not being true to who they were. The entire internet was mocking the epitome of male performance in today’s culture. Ironically, this was much like the father looking down on his son after having shaped them into who they are. Like the mother who fought for her daughter’s education but then scorned at her not obeying her in-laws in the way they had to. The system creates you. And as soon as you acknowledge the system and play by its rules, you’re mocked still.

This has bred anti-performance. A chronically online dude like me who actually liked reading was suddenly too self conscious to do so. I did everything in my power to prove to myself that I’m not merely performing at this stage of the world, online or offline. I was me, I was real, I had real interests, and wanted to not feel like an actor.

There’s a growing faction of my generation who agrees with me. Who drops a big chunk of their salaries on the weekend to go to a fancy place and then not click a picture of the food, because it’s cringe. There’s also the fair-skinned, skinny woman who doesn’t wear makeup intentionally to make a point to the world, and more so to herself. You want to perform just enough to be accepted by the system, but god forbid you’re on the extreme ends of the bell curve and get noticed in the wrong light. How daunting we’ve made social interaction, where we create social signals and every few years we mock them out of fashion.

You could talk about the past in centuries, or decades in the 1900s. Fashion trends were in for years on end. Beverage and tobacco brands would enjoy their respective cultural waves for years on end. But now, talking about a decade feels shallow. Because so much happens at the same time, a paragraph or a few dozen arbitrary objects - bell bottoms for the 70s, the walkman in the 80s, the pager in the 90s - cannot even begin to sum half a year, let alone 5. The New Yorker’s piece on ‘The Summer of Nothing’ alludes to the hyper-personalisation of culture to extent that the mainstream doesn’t exist anymore. You don’t have to listen to this summer’s song because Spotify will make a personalised mix just for you. You don’t have to watch Game of Thrones because Solo Levelling - a manhwa - has just as big a social community that for the moment you’re doomscrolling, the trend feels real and all-encompassing.

Social media has fastened cultural loops of what’s in and what’s out. You could try to maximise social capital and end up a laughing stock of cringe. You can quit the internet and quit the game altogether. Or you can be someone like me, who aches for being a part of something bigger, and drive yourself crazy for trying to toe the line between what’s culture appropriate. Of the any 3 paths, winning comes to neither.

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