You know him. Or at least, after all the online ruckus about the performative male, you’ve heard of him. Clairo pulsing through his wired headphones, he’s seated three tables across from you, sipping a matcha latte and flipping through the first five pages of The Bell Jar. He looks up from the same line he’s been reading for the past ten minutes to give his mustache a stroke, makes uncomfortably intense eye contact with you, tugs on the collar of his The Smiths graphic tee, and slouches in his chair, obviously engrossed in the literary subtext of the fig tree metaphor. When he leaves, he tucks the book in his tote bag, running a hand through his mulleted hair.
We’ve seen a lot of online discussions about performativity lately. From the performative male that swept internet discourse in the spring – reaching the notoriety capable of motivating several “performative male contests” across the globe – there’s been a retaliation from the side of men, who have now branded women interested in motorsport “performative F1 females.” Not only does this kind of rhetoric reinforce a normative gender divide, one in which men and women are opposed to one another in some sort of battle for social capital, it also obscures some truths about performance in everyday life.
This labeling system, declaring pastimes and hobbies “inauthentic,” originates from very resonant conclusions that we’ve drawn within our culture. Women are no safer with the guy who paints his fingernails and streams Mitski than with the guy who fishes on the weekends and declares himself a proud brother of Sigma Chi. A population of girls really do masquerade as sports fans and beer drinkers in order to cater to men, sometimes regurgitating sexist rhetoric in order to project themselves as a “cool girl,” a mindset feminists have labeled “internalized misogyny.” A lack of sincerity in our actions and intentions should be called out, if only to protect ourselves from allying with people who don’t actually like or care about us. But I also think it’s important to acknowledge that everyone, even the most honest person, is a little bit performative. The question shouldn’t be whether or not we’re performing – the question should be, “who are we performing for?”
Let me explain. There’s something evidently problematic about an attempt to appeal to another group by changing your behavior or appearance. The denial of your true self will always come back to bite you: whether you move cities, bleach your hair or your teeth, or invest in that capsule wardrobe, you’re still you at the end of the day. Change at your core doesn’t happen overnight. If you are the kind of person that’s willfully sabotaging or repressing parts of your identity in order to align with normative society, or even a subculture you find attractive, you might want to think about the fact that you’ll be you until you die. No take-backsies. You are going to have to learn to live with your quirks, superstitions, clumsiness, foibles – and you shouldn’t undermine yourself to appeal to a dominant hierarchical power, because then you’re just cursing yourself to a lifetime of subservience and a denial of self-actualization. Not that any of this is easy: this is the perpetual struggle of human existence in a fucked-up world. But the “performative male” trend or the accusation of being a “performative F1 female” doesn’t always fit within the “I’m crushing my soul to be accepted” framework. Online, we need to be careful about how we’re defining social performance, because not every social performance is a bad thing: it could be someone’s attempt to become a better version of themselves. What’s notable about the productive manifestation of this aim, however, is that it is, more often than not, attached to a desire to perform for yourself; to use ritual and intention to enhance your quality of life.
I am a doomscroller. The bedrot, hair undone, “It’s that damn phone!”-accusation–from-my-mother kind of doomscroller, which involves me thumbing through social media at practically any free moment, including when I’m eating. Lately, I’ve wanted to expand my library of cultural knowledge. I feel like dead intellectual weight, so I’ve been challenging myself to consume more visual art, cinema, literature, cultural criticism – basically anything creative that might help me generate my own ideas.
Instead of doomscrolling while eating breakfast, I’ve started to read Artforum, because I decided I wanted to be the kind of person who reads Artforum over breakfast. This is a ritual, one I’ve constructed, one that isn’t natural to me, but a performance I’ve put on, alone, in my living room, for the past two weeks. And it is a performance – most days, I still have the urge to doomscroll – but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s inauthentic. It is a manifestation of the kind of person I want to be, which comes from me. It is a performance for myself, in which I am both actor and audience, watching myself play the role of a person I’m proud of. Most importantly, it makes me feel accomplished, like I’m working towards my goals, which certainly gives my ego a little sparkle as I start my day.
This isn’t to say, “go be your own voyeur.” Margaret Atwood once wrote about the female experience, “Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it’s all a male fantasy: that you’re strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren’t catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.”
Oftentimes women are self-conscious, even while alone, of their appearance: her hair mussed from sleep, her eyelashes stubby without the crust of mascara, her stomach bloated after a day of eating, she wonders how she would be perceived by the male gaze, if a man were here, in this moment, a man she wanted to be perceived as attractive by. This kind of performativism is a manifestation of patriarchal oppression, one that means that even a woman’s own mind and self-standards has become an enemy in her own pursuit of liberation. This is the girl who disinterestedly watches F1, masking her agitation as the boy she likes turns red-faced, spittle foaming at the corner of his mouth, screaming at the television about Ferrari strategy. I’m not promoting that kind of performance either, the one in which she’s performing for the male gaze, besieged by thoughts of inadequacy due to her “imperfect femininity” as she stares at the TV, or as she lays in bed, alone, accompanied only by her sheets and her whirling mind.
It’s important that when enacting any performance, we examine, thoroughly and sometimes brutally, who we are performing for. There is a difference between a woman sleeping in lingerie every night because she imagines herself as a man’s object of perfect desire, or because she luxuriates in her own body and feels a sense of self-assurance celebrating her own sexuality; there is a difference in a man listening to Clairo – even if female indie-pop isn’t his preferred genre – because he’d like to expand his taste or know what all the hype is about, and a man who has tuned into “Sofia” because he’s hoping that any one of five women in this birchwood-floor café will notice that he is a softboy and a feminist.
In an increasingly self-isolated and self-centered society – flaws that are only exacerbated by the visual panopticon that has arisen from modern day social media – it must be noted too that some social performance can actually be good. Sacrifice of comfort and yes, the performance of social roles, is necessary for maintaining community. If you love someone, sometimes you do have to help them move their awkwardly-shaped couch up four flights of stairs as they move into their new apartment, plastering a smile on your face even as you stub your toe, and not holding the fact that you helped them move-in over their head for the remaining thirty years of your friendship. This isn’t a sacrifice of a crucial part of one’s identity, but it is a suspension of short-term comfort and expression in exchange for the long-term satisfaction of not only showing up for someone, but being the kind of friend that you want to be. Community is a burden that requires social performance – it demands that you, often exhaustingly, show up as the version of yourself that can love, practice empathy, and internalize that relationships cannot be viewed as a transaction. You cannot do something good, and then wait in anticipation for your chance to seize upon your “owed” emotional or physical labor from another person. You hope that they do this for you in return, but much of community is just that: extending faith in others.
Rather than a broad slandering of all performativity, I think we should critically examine what roles we are performing and why. Are we performing “F1 female” or “man-who-reads-bell-hooks” so that we can be sexy to someone? Or are we performing “girl-who-journals-before-bed” because we want to be the kind of person that prioritizes self care, putting their phone aside for the sake of uncovering self-knowledge, or simply being one with ourselves? Are we performing “person-who-goes-out-every-night” because we love nightlife, or because we want to appeal to a group of people whose attachments we believe depend on our willingness to down five shots to German dubstep? And are you performing friend-who-calls-back-at-two a.m. because you’d like to be considered a good friend? Life, to a certain extent, is a performance. But the question really should be: what is the intention of your show? Who’s the audience? Are they good sports or vicious critics? Are you yourself in the crowd, with an empathic gaze, one with fingers crossed, praying for your own liberation? And when the spectacle is over, will they sigh, stand, and say, “Bravo?”
Kira Manelski 
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