As I walked around Newbury Street earlier this summer, someone in front of me caught my attention: an oversized plaid shirt, a white tank tap, baggy jeans, a Labubu clipped to a bag, wired earbuds, a book in one hand, and a matcha held in the other… yes, that’s right–I had seen my first performative male in the wild!

“Performative males,” as dubbed by social media this summer, refers to men with a specific style: they wear vintage, baggy clothing, carry Labubus and tote bags, use wired earbuds to listen to female artists like Clairo and Laufey, drink matcha, and read feminist literature. Performative males might also espouse feminist rhetoric, proclaiming that “period cramps shouldn’t exist” or that “pads and tampons should be free.” In adopting these visual cues, performative males attempt to appeal to women. 

However, despite their outward appearance, performative men are stereotyped as not actually caring about the outward values they adopt–feminism, listening to Clairo, and drinking matcha–rather, they only “perform” this appearance. When asked what comes to mind when she thinks of performative males, Anna Yang ’26 shared, “Matcha, feminist literature… and this sense of inauthenticity, like that all these men don’t actually care about any of the issues they say they do, they just want to project an ideal version of themselves that they think is more attractive. Honestly, my friends and I make fun of performative males all the time–like, if we see someone walking down the street, and he’s wearing a tote bag or something, we’ll call him performative and laugh about it. Like, not in a mean way–it’s just kind of funny to us, you know?”

But how do we know that all men who present a certain way are “performative”? Can we truly know what people believe solely based on their outward appearance? Angelina Fang ’26 remarked, “I feel like [the trend] is just another thing the Internet is clowning on. And it kind of devalues people’s likes and dislikes.” Indeed, the performative trend devalues allyship and feminism: by mocking the idea that men might care about feminism, it treats allyship as something to parody, not as an authentic belief. In doing so, men who genuinely care about women’s rights are dismissed and made fun of.  This separation of men from feminist issues creates a situation where men are afraid to express support at all for fear of being seen as fake, and men who don’t care about feminist issues feel validated in not caring for women’s rights.

Although we should call out hypocrisy in people who don’t truly believe the issues they espouse, the performative male trend is not our battleground to fight in. Instead, we need to support men who believe in feminist issues, not cancel and mock them.