Yes, I'm a performative female. Does that make me awful?

Hi! My name is Marie Le Conte and, for as long as I can remember, I’ve been a performative female. Most recently, I could point you to the book I bought in a second-hand shop in Brooklyn last year. It was Hungarian and achingly postmodern, bordering on the unreadable. I bought it because I was due to have dinner with a man I fancied a few days later, and felt that dropping, casually, the fact that I was reading that novel, would hopefully impress him.

Another notable example was Nick Cave, the Australian rock star. I’d always broadly liked him as a teenager, but only truly got into him when courting then trying to retain the attention of some band singer when I was 18. After him came the Virginia Woolf novel I read because I was seeing a former English major; the John Donne poem I learnt by heart to impress the boy who could recite all manners of things from memory; the vintage corset I bought because a crush had mentioned he liked burlesque.

Over the past two decades, I have spent minutes, hours, days and hundreds and hundreds of pounds on a multitude of things which I believed could get me laid. I have shaped and reshaped my interests in order to ensure that the people I liked would notice me, and be interested in me. Does this mean I’m awful? Does it mean I’m a fake, a phony, someone who shouldn’t be trusted and who, in some circumstances, could be seen as dangerous?

That’s the conclusion I reached after reading about the “performative male” trend, which spread through TikTok then the rest of the internet. A performative male, if you managed to miss all this, may be “reading green-flag feminist literature and drinking overpriced matcha lattes”, as well as carrying disposable cameras. According to a GQ piece on the topic, they crucially behave in this way “not because they especially love those things – although, yeah, some of them do – but because it’s a material signal to the female gaze”.

Over at the New York Times, it’s explained that a performative male “might wear wired headphones and baggy pants, and he would most likely be carrying a tote bag… and would be quick to reveal his collection of vinyl records”. In short, he “curates his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likable to progressive women”.

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Now, I assume that reading this made you fall off your chair, so I’ll take this slowly while you recuperate. Yes, the rumours are true: some young men have been trying to attract the sort of women they wish to bed. I know, I know. Do try not to pass out again, and please keep a glass of cold water to hand. These new generations really have gone feral. What will they think of next?

Jokes aside, however, it seems worth pointing out that this silly trend has quite a dark undercurrent. Over the past few years, countless liberals and progressives have been wondering how to bring young men back from the brink, and ensure that they never fall for the alluring poison of Andrew Tate and other men’s rights activists.

It’s a thorny question, and no-one could pretend to have all the answers, but surely one step in the wrong direction is to paint harmless behaviour as inherently harmful, purely because it’s men doing it. Women will often joke about having to spend seemingly endless evenings smiling and nodding as their handsome dates or long-term boyfriends tell them about whatever it is they’re interested in.

Trying to paint those women as somehow manipulative or toxic would rightly make you sound insane, so why shouldn’t men be allowed to indulge in a bit of peacocking, if they believe it may get them the girl of their dreams? Who among us hasn’t agreed that this movie was bad or this album was good when really, deep down, we were just trying to find common ground with the object of our affection?

Oh, and in case you were wondering: I lost touch with the band singer not even a year after we’d first met, but I still listen to Nick Cave at least once a month, 15 years on. I never got to love Woolf’s prose but I am still incredibly fond of Donne’s verses. There are many, many things in my life today that I got to because I was trying to impress or attract someone, and I couldn’t possibly be less ashamed of it. I wouldn’t be the person I am today without them, and isn’t that a nice thought?

I did finish the Hungarian novel in the end, by the way. I didn’t enjoy it and it took me weeks but I’m glad I got there. It did impress the guy when I mentioned it in passing. We didn’t get together straight away but we did get there eventually. It’s been a few months now and it’s going well. Maybe I’ll tell him about my great literary secret at some point; maybe I won’t. It really doesn’t matter.