Performance anxiety

From incels to the performative male, Gen-Z is caught in the crosshairs of a masculine identity crisis

Hi everyone! Today’s essay is a rare guest post by my friend

Shanti Escalante-De Mattei

, a PHD student and writer covering art, tech and the internet for WIRED, The Guardian, etc. I always enjoy her takes, so when she told me she wanted to write about the “performative male” trend for Pleasure-Seeking, it was an immediate yes. Can’t wait to hear your thoughts, and if you enjoy what she wrote, be sure to follow her work here.

A herd of abandoned Matchas spotted at my local thrift shop

The performative male drinks matcha iced lattes, wears Birkenstocks, listens to Clairo on his wired headphones, and reads feminist literature, like All About Love by bell hooks, or else books written by women, such as Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath, or Sally Rooney. He can easily be spotted in a cafe, performatively writing in a notebook, or in the street, performatively taking a photograph. He typically sports a mustache and a taper fade mullet. There’s a Labubu dangling off of his tote bag. Maybe he wears nail polish. He is said to live in Silver Lake or in Bushwick.

All of these signs of male performativity can be found in “starter pack” format memes that barely differ from one another but have reached a kind of critical mass that resulted in a New York Times trend piece about this new “social media archetype.” The Times defined this type as a man who “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likeable to progressive women,” with one interviewee comparing them to the posers of the 1990s and early 2000s. Another name for the performative male is the “manipulative male.” He is overly estrogenic, but in the name of getting pussy. As yahoo! news put it, “Gen-Z has created a new kind of man to avoid.” If it’s not kind of obvious where this is going, a recent Instagram Reel shows us what the anti-performative male looks like: he watches sports, drinks beer, and has a Zyn tucked between his gum and cheek at all times.

It occurs to me that we are living in exceptional times. Throughout modernity, young women were typically the object of controversy. How they spoke or danced or dressed—these things were all seen as concrete signs of societal degeneration. For example, anthropologists like Miyako Inoue and Laura Miller have traced how women’s speech and slang in Japan has been torn apart by commenters in mainstream press since the late 1800s up until the present. With each new change in how women could enter the workforce or manage their sex lives, their lifestyles and especially their language were taken up as proof of cultural loss, discontinuity, and moral corruption. But it seems to me that in the past ten years, the real subjects of scrutiny are now men. Headlines on the male loneliness crisis, incels, the conservative voting patterns of Gen-Z men abound while trend reports and online commentary obsess over their fashion choices, reading material, and facial hair. Now men, too, can be picked apart for signs of societal collapse.

With each new change in how women could enter the workforce or manage their sex lives, their lifestyles and especially their language were taken up as proof of cultural loss, discontinuity, and moral corruption.

This is not, of course, the first time the young men have been representatives of crises. The 1990s brought a cruel focus on “super-predators,” a concept developed by the conservative political scientist John J. DiIulio Jr, who served as director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives under President George W. Bush. He claimed that an explosion of violent “urban” (read: black) youth were going to take over the country in endless riots and robberies like some kind of domestic, ethnic sleeper cell that could be activated at any moment, a theory that fueled a moral panic and subsequent “tough on crime” policies that exposed a generation of children to adults sentences. Yet, while moral panics around young men have tended to focus on myths of violence this now seems to be changing slightly. Because of the internet, men have been exposed to the pressures of performance in a way that is quite novel.

Anthropologist dana boyd in an early ethnography of Myspace wrote that because our bodies cannot be read for signs of class/race/gender/etc online, young people have to learn how “express salient aspects of their identity for others to see and interpret,” with the Myspace profile representing a “digital body” where individuals must “write themselves into being.” I imagine that the conscious effort to represent signs of the self, such as the signs which denote one’s gender, probably incited a new kind of uncomfortable awareness of the realities of gender performance for young men.

The consequences of this new awareness started to become clear to me when I was 15. One day I decided to go on 4chan to better understand this incel phenomenon that I had begun hearing about. I heard incels hated women, but when I went on this forum I saw how much they hated themselves. Most of the posts I saw that day featured pictures of “undesirable” physical features like recessed chins or skinny torsos. The poster would anonymously upload these photos asking other incels to confirm if these body parts made them unloveable. The answer was always, “Yes.” The culture on these incel forums affirmed again and again that genetics had doomed these individuals to a lonely life. I remember so clearly staring at a picture of someone’s thin wrist and all the horrible comments he received about how, because of that wrist, no one would ever love him. This abuse stood in such stark contrast to the feminist culture that was raising me on Tumblr, which for all of its issues affirmed to me that I was deserving of love and respect no matter what I looked like or what kind of lifestyle choices I made. I wondered why men didn’t have what I had.

Women and queer people have produced and absorbed an enormous amount of theory on gender and performance which has diffused into popular culture and have perhaps provided some buffer or options for young people flailing in the radioactive flare of the non-stop Internet panopticon. I can’t help but think that the extreme swing to the right among Gen-Z men has to do with the fact that men raised on the Internet came to the horror of performance without any culture that could possible affirm to them that they had options outside of trying to achieve some kind of totally defensible traditional masculinity built on muscle, domination, and mockery.

Aesthetics mean nothing at all, yet somehow they’ve become political texts. They mean nothing because they have come to stand in for politics.

Why is the “performative male” performative? Because he takes on signs that exist outside of “natural” masculinity. And it’s not that I don’t understand that the word performative is meant to denote that these signs are taken up “inauthentically” : these men don’t actually like to read or drink matcha lattes, they just pretend because they want girls to like them. But we all perform a self we think could be loveable! If dana boyd saw in the early 2000s that the internet made people distill the self into a set of blunt signs that indexed certain affiliations that make up “identity,” we are now experiencing the inverse, where the oversimplification of political affiliation, gender, etc. into literal objects (book, shoe, drink) seeps into our lived performances, creating a kind of flatness that is identifiable and feels “inauthentic” —you can see it in a person’s fashion how much time they spend on the internet. But being a looksmaxxing, Andrew Tate listening, raw-meat-eating Twitter bro is just as performative as anything else. That we only call men who take on “feminine” traits as performative affirms to me that the problem isn’t inauthenticity; we are just replicating that same old mockery that punishes men for not falling into a stupidly narrow set of behaviors that apparently make up manhood.

Aesthetics mean nothing at all, yet somehow they’ve become political texts. They mean nothing because they have come to stand in for politics. After all this defensiveness I’ve expressed on behalf of men I am only left with the feeling that I am compensating for a silence. There is a gap that is waiting to be filled, there is a voice that should have responded to that kid who posted his wrist on the incel forums asking if he could ever be loved. It should have been one of you.