This summer, while working as a barista in Montreal, I saw my fair share of Carhartt- sporting, mullet-rocking men, who would come into the café with their carabiners jangling only to order an iced matcha latte. Meet the frightful “performative male.”
You didn’t have to spend the summer in Montreal to notice this latest fad. The average Instagram user or TikTok watcher has most likely become aware of the term after it blew up this past summer. However, we McGillians are lucky enough to go to school in Montreal. The “performative male” goes beyond the memes for us, as our city is full of them. We are cursed with living among the legends, getting to see them (or match with them on Hinge) up close and personally.
For those of you who have never seen one in the wild, or those of you offline enough this past summer to have missed the term altogether (props to you), a “performative male” is a newly defined male archetype, rooted specifically in their aesthetic signaling. This aesthetic consists of a moustache, a mullet, wearing workwear, drinking matcha, using exclusively string headphones (through which they listen to “Bags” by Clairo on repeat), always having a carabiner and a tote bag on hand, and having a pierced nose and painted nails. Despite its deep roots in aesthetics and taste, this surface level phenomenon has a deeper necessary quality.
Performative men pride themselves on being feminists and caring about women. From empathizing with and idolizing Clairo, indie pop singer known for her confessional lyrics, to an annotated copy of Feminism is for Everybody by bell hooks sitting on their side table, this is a crucial and key part of their identity. Winner of Montreal’s performative male contest, Shahzaib Sultan, even went on to say in his online acceptance speech: “Keep performing as long as you respect women, because this is all it’s about.”
Despite the term’s extreme popularity this summer and the great increase in performative men I’ve noticed walking around Montreal, the concept of the “performative male” is far from new or revolutionary. Judith Butler, one of the most prominent feminist philosophers, coined the term “Gender Performativity” in their renowned book, Gender Trouble (1990), and they famously expand upon this idea in their essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory” (1988). The premise of this theory is that one’s gender and associated gendered traits are in no way natural, but come from the “stylized repetition of acts” that we come to believe are innate. What she argues is that we are all actors who have forgotten we are on stage, who have performed in this play so many times that we believe it is our reality. Though Butler was imperative to the development of this foundational theory, they were not the first person to view gender this way. Simone de Beauvoir, renowned French existentialist philosopher and feminist thinker, famously wrote in her book The Second Sex (1949), “One is not born, but, rather, becomes a woman.”
A key part of gender performativity is that this performance has been happening since before we as individuals were born and will continue even alter we are gone. Butler states in Performative Acts and Gender
Constitution: “But neither do embodied selves pre-exist the cultural conventions which essentially signify bodies.” We never have and never will encounter a body or person that exists before society gives it a meaning. However, these gendered characters we perform, because they are a social construct, are susceptible to change, evolution and revolution. The prime example of this is the “performative male,” our latest subversive gender performance.
If gender is a performance, then the “performative male” is only the newest character in our play. Their “stylized repetition of acts” consists of ordering matcha, reading Sally Rooney in a public park, and manipulating their current situationship. Repeat. Their “stylization of the body” includes (but is not limited to) growing a moustache, putting on rings, and adorning their jorts. Repeat.
The “performative male”’s subversion of gender norms forms an essential part of their identity. For the first time, an allowance for the deviation from heteronormativity to represent the modern masculine. However, we must ask ourselves, how subversive is the “performative male” from the stereotypical masculine male persona we’ve known all these years?
To answer that question, I present you with another.
Why do we all pursue our performance of gender so devoutly? This may seem like an obvious question, but in the journalistic pursuit to analyze the “performative male” and his significance to our society, it is a crucial one. There are many philosophical, anthropological, and scientific reasons to justify why we feel a need to perform our gender, one of which being the pursuit of sex.
At the core of the “performative male” is the quest for romantic attention. Our society has curated an entire aesthetic based on this. The “performative male” performs feminist fluency and emotional intelligence as a tactic in love. Their greatest performance of all is that they care about women, and that is not a gender or a personality trait — it’s the commodification and appropriation of feminism. Most men appearing to read feminist literature in a café do so not in the name of understanding women and their struggles, but in that of impressing them. This is why the “performative male” is so sinister.
However, the fact that performative men pretend to care about women is not revolutionary — it’s in the name! What is so interesting is why we as a society are so obsessed with this latest performance. For the first time, men are not trying to play the role of the masculine hero, but are attempting to emulate what they think women want. Historically, men have held the power in deciding their partner, and women have had to bend to these powers. However, the “performative male” phenomenon shows that women are no longer at the whims of men’s sexual preferences. Men are dipping their toes into “feminist” traits for the first time not in pursuit of identity or liberation from toxic masculinity, but for romantic and sexual leverage. Despite their newfound social popularity and deviation from gender norms, this “new male” is not evolving masculinity. It is simply repackaging it with the hope of being more likely to get some play.
Nonetheless, for once, this performance is not a “phantasmic ideal of heterosexual identity” as Judith Butler once described. Modern men are dressing more diversely, exercising emotional intelligence, and entering the feminist sphere. Yes, it might just be a performance, and this is inadequate. That being said, they are consciously no longer emulating toxic masculine ideals. Culturally and socially, despite the jokes, this is a new, extremely important gendered act we have never seen before.
Simone de Beauvoir would not have imagined her books gallivanting through city streets in the tote bags of the twenty-something-year old men of 2025, and I’m not quite sure how it would make her feel. Would the disingenuity of it all dishearten her? Or would she be in awe at the mainstream way in which men are deviating from toxic masculinity? We’ll never know. What I do know is she would be turning in her grave if she knew we were falling for their vinyl collections and Hinge prompts about astrological compatibility – so this semester, keep your wits about you.