An encounter with a performative male isn’t uncommon, whether in an online space or in person. They’re easily identifiable once you learn what to look for: tote bags, vinyl records, wired headphones, Labubu keychains, baggy denims, loafers, silver rings, matcha in one hand and feminist literature in the other. Who are they? Where did they come from? What should we do about them?
A performative male, as the name suggests, is someone who attempts to present themselves in a certain way, adopting specific characteristics to, in general, make themselves more appealing to women. Their performance consists of dramatic outrage at gender inequality, reading Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” on public transit and asking if you’ve heard the new Clairo-Laufey-beabadoobee album.
Despite being popularized on social media in 2025, performative males aren’t the first of their kind; an influx of softboys, or softbois, took over a niche corner of the internet around 2019. A similar idea, softboys were men who presented themselves as sensitive, artsy feminists who weren’t afraid to cry, write poetry or listen to underground artists such as Radiohead, all in the hopes of attracting romantic attention.
In both phenomena, the world of social media immediately took to making fun of them. It’s hard not to! The blatantly obvious attempts at appealing to the opposite gender through vintage turtlenecks and oat milk are hilariously embarrassing. All over the internet now, you can find parodies of these performative males: People mimicking and mocking their behaviors via short-form videos and photo shoots.
Are we being too harsh, though? Is it too mean? After all, is it impossible for a man to like both Clairo and astrology?
Cosmopolitan delivered quite a jarring criticism toward these performative men, writing in its own article about how irritating, fake and shameful these performances are. The New York Post criticized them for hindering actually progressive movements regarding feminism with their insincere and manipulative actions, describing them as bottom-tier panderers.
My take? Ultimately, it’s never that deep!
These performative males are a community easy to laugh at, and most of the time, that’s all they are! Because of the popularization of this term, many of those performative men you might see online are just character types acted out to elicit laughter from the general populace. It’s funny! That’s all there really is to it.
Pursuing attention from those you find attractive is a natural reaction. There will never not be people who put up a certain act, whether consciously or otherwise, to try to impress a potential love interest. In fact, much of the time, people are just having fun doing harmless things to make their monotonous lives a little more interesting.
So, drink your strawberry cold-foam matcha lattes and cry over Laufey songs; if nobody is getting hurt, then why not?
