Kulturkampf

[Potato]

Oh man, The Guardian is just a parody of itself at this stage...

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2025/aug/22/labubus-bell-jar-tampons-performative-male-attracts-attention

Labubus, The Bell Jar and tampons: the ‘performative male’ attracts attention

There is a new man in town. You may have spotted him posing with an oat milk matcha pretending to read a copy of The Bell Jar. Or maybe you saw him seeming to listen to Lana Del Rey deep cuts but his earphones weren’t plugged in.

Maybe he makes a point of carrying tampons around with him for women in need. He’s called a “performative male” and is a relatively new archetype gai
ning traction – and inspiring mockery and critique – online.

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There is a menswear element, too. He’s likely to wear baggy trousers, perhaps made from Japanese selvedge denim, Vivienne Westwood chrome hearts necklaces and a tote bag, ideally emblazoned with feminist slogans. All of this posturing has one end goal: to look good in the eyes of (progressive) women.

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On TikTok, women are sharing sightings of people they deem to be performative males in public – reading highbrow literature, maybe even filming themselves as they do it, between sets at the gym.

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Eugene Healey, a brand strategy consultant, looks at the irony of the performance in performative man content. In a video he points to a quote from the philosopher Slavoj Žižek: “Even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.” As Healey said: “The men making this content do have these haircuts, do listen to Clairo, they do rock a small top, big pant, tote bag combo and in an effort to get ahead of their own reputational issues they have to prove that they’re above it.”

But, he added, being conscious of the performance was not the same as transcending it: “Self-awareness doesn’t free us from performance, it just adds another layer to it.” The truly radical act, in his view, would be to drop “the performance of being above the performance”.

For others who truly like the things these performative males pretend to like, they find themselves in a tricky spot. As one social media user said: “Let me enjoy my matcha and tote bag. I’ve been doing this since 2020.”