Pretending to Read Sylvia Plath at the Performative Male Contest
Sia Madden, BA Politics and Africa and Black Diaspora
Last week, a performative male contest was held in Soho, a meeting point for performance in every sense of the word. If there is anywhere that knows about performative males, Lord knows it’s Soho. The only thing that would have been more fitting is if it had been held at the Aime Leon Dore cafe on the corner of Broadwick Street.
For those liberated from overused social media terms, ‘performative male’ is for men what the ‘pick-me’ is for women. The performative male co-opts interests - including but not limited to Clairo, matcha, tote bags, ‘Brat’, Sylvia Plath - to attract women. People (a dating startup) is now rounding up all of these men (and some women in drag) in your local city park (Soho Square) to compete to see who can do it best.
The archetype of the performative male is rooted in liberal sentiment. It’s fundamentally about men distinguishing themselves from their increasingly mainstream alt-right counterparts, virtue signalling through diverse intersectional media to appear more approachable, safer even, in the eyes of women. It is a valiant effort on the part of men who actually interact with the source material, and for those who do not, it is a valiant effort to bait women into sleeping with them.
Performative male archetypes are governed by what is deemed to attract female attention; however, it’s widely understood by women that these attempts are precisely that - a performance. Discourse on feminism and therapy, particularly, is weaponised to capitalise upon women’s desires; however, the shallow nature of the engagement with these topics becomes painfully evident within romantic contexts. As it turns out, simply buying critical feminist theory isn’t enough. Opening it on the train and then going on your phone also does not count. You have to actually read the book, unfortunately.
It’s definitely positive that we’re moving in a direction where we can begin to dismantle the self-seriousness and pretentiousness which has proved to be an issue for the Left. But we’re lying to ourselves if we think that the performance ends when the contest is over and everyone packs their unread copy of All About Love away into their Mubi totes. As the contest exemplifies, we simply cannot help but perform - it is what, as Judith Butler famously wrote, constitutes gender altogether. The self-consciousness of desire is inhibiting us from truly satirical interpretations of how we perform identity. Are they performative male contests or performative male exhibitions?
