A few months ago, I was transported to the frontlines of the performative male epidemic when I attended a Geese concert, a band that has become synonymous with tote-bag-wearing men in their twenties. Having become a fan after being entranced by their sound upon the release of their 2023 album “3D Country,” and having loved frontman Cameron Winter’s solo album “Heavy Metal,” I was anxiously waiting for their next album. By the time the concert came, I had seen them go from a lesser-known band, with iffy ratings on music-rating websites, to being seen as the successor to the Isaac Wood era “Black Country, New Road.” Both bands, in fact, had a beloved lead singer with a unique voice and unique lyrical styles, which, combined with their art rock fusions, proved popular among a certain sect of people. With this rise in popularity came the flooding of what has been termed “performative males” into their fanbase. 

For those uninitiated, who are living in a much better world than I and don’t know what a performative male is, they are the guys you see wearing baggy clothes, drinking matcha, listening to Clairo or Phoebe Bridgers with their wired earbuds while donning a tote bag with books by Patti Smith, Joan Didion, Sylvia Plath or bell hooks (although they probably wouldn’t know to keep her name uncapitalized). Every generation has had a type of this man: in the 1950s it was the Beatniks living mostly in the Bay Area and/or Greenwich Village who smoked pot while reading Ginsberg and Kerouac; in the 2010s, looking back to the 40s and 50s, they called themselves hipsters who, disenchanted by the financial crisis, moved to the Pacific Northwest and drank craft beer while riding fixie bicycles.

The ground zero for this most recent iteration of the performative male is in Brooklyn. With this new generation, they’ve eschewed craft beer for matcha, heavily styled handlebar mustaches for a more disheveled mustache and mullet and cutting edge literature (like Ginsberg or Kerouac) for literature that is either classics or looking back to another period’s style (such as Sally Rooney’s “Intermezzo,” which is, in Rooney’s words, inspired by James Joyce). While the Beatniks were known for their diverse array of sexualities, the modern performative male often co-opts queer style and culture while not actually being a part of the community. 

But why is this? Why are they so copy and paste? While there was certainly homogeneity within the previously mentioned groups, there seems to be a particular emphasis on homogeneity for the performative male. If you throw a stone in Brooklyn you would hit at least a dozen men who look and think the same; with the Beatniks, however, while you might conjure an image of a turtlenecked person in a coffee shop at a poetry reading, their whole thinking was counter-cultural. In opposition to this, the performative male is trying to create a new culture, one that would’ve been counter-cultural at one point but is now the mainstream. This really boils down to a lack of seeing the world critically. While the new generation of hipsters (as opposed to the hipsters of the 1940s and 1950s) were putting on just as much of a performance as the performative male, shrouding everything they did in layers upon layers of postmodern irony and eventually getting to the point of post-irony, they were still able to think for themselves. Where hipster performance was meant to veil feelings through irony, it seems like the performative male is performing feelings, performing opinions. Their feelings are vulnerable yet calculated, giving just enough to seem in touch with their emotions but not actually expressing them in a genuine manner. On top of that, by being able to have a prescribed list of characteristics, wardrobe and media diet that they can fall back on, they evade having to actually put in the work to cultivate a personality. 

It seems to me that we are closer and closer to reverting back to a secular version of Puritanism. The performative male is a symptom of a world in which there is a black and a white, a right and a wrong, where you’re either with us or you’re damned. While I support the underlying political ideology of cancel culture, that being fighting for social justice, it has led to a world where discourse is discouraged because “they’re” wrong and “we’re” right. In a world where one deviation from the accepted norm could lead to ostracism, there are two routes: either believing nothing until you’re told what to believe, which is the underlying driving force of the performative male, or believing in what you believe wholeheartedly, this is the route of the groypers, far-right fans of political commentator Nick Fuentes. 

I would be remiss to not mention the inherent misogyny surrounding the categorization of men as performative. Many of the stereotypes of performative males are typically associated with femininity, such as reading fiction or carrying around a tote bag. So, by insulting men for displaying these traits, are we not enforcing toxic masculinity? There has been very little room for distinction between the performative male and men who are just in touch with their feelings. 

Am I saying that everyone who drinks matcha or who is reading Sylvia Plath is vacuous or shallow? No, obviously not. For one thing, even if they are reading Plath, for instance, in order to impress a woman, what’s the problem? This has always been a phenomenon; I once read “Anna Karenina” to impress a woman. We are living in a world in which it’s reported that not even Columbia University students can be bothered to read a whole novel, so at the end of the day, reading anything is better than reading nothing. 

And so, even if they are reading “The Bell Jar” or “The White Album” to impress someone else, they may fall in love with reading and start forming their own opinions. This applies to music and other forms of media as well, ultimately helping the performative male build his own sense of taste. The performative male should not be the final stage for us 20-something men. The schtick can only last for so long, and what fun is it truly to not think critically about the world? If reading Plath and listening to Cameron Winter excites you, don’t just stop there: Pick up an Iris Murdoch novel, listen to a Scott Walker or Will Oldham album, dig deeper, or else we’re going to all end up worse for it. The surface exists as an entry point, not a resting place. We live in a world where the whole history of knowledge is in our pockets, however cliché it is to say that: Use it to go beyond the surface and see what you can discover.