During the early 2000s, the word “gay” floated through casual speech like punctuation: a throwaway adjective that collapsed every deviation from straight, stoic masculinity into a single insult.
Men who liked poetry, cared about fashion or displayed emotion were “gay.” Songs, sneakers and shirts were “gay.” To be called gay didn’t necessarily refer to homosexuality, but rather an affront for visible softness, aesthetic care and “too much” feeling.
Two decades later, this crude shorthand is not nearly as prevalent, but the impulse behind it remains with an evolved vocabulary. Today, men are not as openly called “gay” for acting or dressing in ways coded as feminine — instead, they are called “performative.”
Before proceeding, three clarifications are necessary. First, this piece takes the whole conversation seriously: from gender theory and the idea of performance to “soft-boy” and “wellness-bro” aesthetics as well as TikTok irony. Second, nothing here equates the teasing or suspicion straight men may encounter for liking “feminine” things with the very real homophobia queer people continue to face. The word “gay” once fueled (and still fuels) bullying, family estrangement, employment discrimination and violence. A cultural side-eye at men who drink matcha or post therapy quotes is not the same thing, nor am I arguing it is. Third, this is a critique of our language and media environment, as well as of a broader, cross-gender drift toward cultural conservatism among younger cohorts, not a judgment of any individual person.
The phrase “performative male” first emerged in activist and academic contexts as a critique of men who publicly espoused feminist or progressive values while enacting little structural change. Somewhere between sociology and social media, the meaning has slipped. What once described hollow virtue signaling has become a cultural shorthand for a certain kind of man: the guy who drinks matcha, posts about therapy, owns skincare products, linen shirts and tote bags or has opinions about Clairo. He’s too self-aware, too concerned with aesthetics and too articulate about his feelings. He’s not problematic, just too “performative.”
That word, wielded with ironic detachment, has begun to do what “gay” once did: discipline men for feminine visibility, only now under the polite veil of social criticism.
This shift in language is subtle but significant. To call a man “performative” implies that his tenderness, taste or sensitivity are not real, but that they exist only to attract approval. The insult doesn’t target toxicity, but rather its inverse: visible care, vulnerability and self-stylization. In doing so, it revives an old reflex: punishing men for embodying femininity while congratulating yourself for moral sophistication. In essence, “performative” has become the 2020s’ socially acceptable way of saying “too feminine.”
Scroll through any social media platform and you will find how this has manifested in the way people talk about the “matcha man,” the “soft boy” and the “therapy bro.” What once signified progress — a move toward gentler masculinities — now reads as suspect. Though the criticism can target hypocrisy or deceit, it tends to be used as the punchline to attack the performance of care itself, as though any visible softness must be manipulative.
This anxiety stems from the digital condition itself. Social media turns sincerity into spectacle; every gesture becomes potential content. “Performative” has become the linguistic catch-all for that discomfort, a way to declare that we “see through” someone’s presentation without examining our own. But when applied to gender, the critique collapses.
Judith Butler’s 1998 essay “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” perfectly exemplifies how all gender is performative. Gender in and of itself is a repeated stylization of the body, not an expression of some inner truth. Masculinity, no less than femininity, is a costume rehearsed into custom. To accuse someone of being a “performative male” is not to expose deceit, but to enforce hierarchy: deciding which performances of manhood count as natural and which reveal the artifice behind the act.
Traditional masculinity itself is a performance so disciplined that it disappears into silence. The unbothered, stoic, beer-drinking man performs authenticity by seemingly performing nothing. He is real precisely because he appears unrehearsed. Against that backdrop, the “performative male,” who aims to be expressive, aesthetic and self-aware exposes masculinity as theatre. So, the culture mocks him, restoring equilibrium through laughter. Both the “traditional man” and the “performative man” are engaging in the process of performing their gender, regardless of if they are doing so through conformity or subversion.
It’s easy to call this harmless irony but language shapes social temperature. The deployment of “performative” to deride men’s engagement with “feminine” reveals our collective discomfort with ambiguity. When the vocabulary of homophobia became too controversial and outdated for pop-culture, we invented a new one that could police the same borders under cover of cultural critique.
The target isn’t deviance but indeterminacy, a culture that celebrates fluidity yet fears its consequences. These men who inhabit the middle between archetypes are tolerated only if their sensitivity seems effortless. The moment their empathy looks practiced or their style deliberate, they become “performative.” We demand sincerity but punish rehearsal, as if growth should be instinct rather than effort.
The irony extends beyond linguistic concerns as online femininity is actively regressing, under the disguise of empowerment. In recent years, social media has produced a wave of micro-trends that aestheticize passivity and dependence under the soft, palatable language of “girlhood.”
“Girl math,” “I’m literally just a girl” and “princess treatment” are all functions of a self-aware shorthand for a kind of deliberate stupidity; infantilization framed as self-love. The rhetoric is ironic, but the effect is not. What looks like humour or reclamation often reproduces the hierarchies it pretends to mock.
Specifically, the emphasis on “princess treatment” exemplifies how contemporary feminism is being quietly repackaged into a romanticized domestic fantasy. Its lexicon of the soft life, spoiled girl era and divine femininity rebrands dependency as luxury and submission as taste. Ultimately, these trends uphold the underlying message that empowerment lies not in equality but in being chosen, protected and adorned by men. What once might have been labeled regressive now circulates as aspirational, filtered through the aesthetics of self-care and the language of healing.
There’s a visible pipeline here, a cultural slip that runs almost frictionlessly through algorithmic trends. From “I’m literally just a girl,” to “you should never split 50/50,” to “men are providers; I should be spoiled” — each step normalizes retreat, rewarding women for shrinking their autonomy into aesthetically curated archetypes. The irony becomes a shield, a way to participate in misogyny while claiming detachment from it. “It’s just a joke” becomes the refrain of an entire generation performing regression as empowerment and functions as a clear signal that choice feminism has invaded the mainstream.
The convergence of these gendered aesthetics signals a quiet conservative turn among Gen Z and younger millennials. It isn’t overt politics but a mood: an affective drift toward the comfort of binaries, the reassurance of type. Economic precarity, algorithmic fatigue and cultural oversaturation have made irony safer than sincerity. The semiotics of “performative” deserve attention. The implication that authenticity exists outside performance, that sincerity is innate while performance is a moral failure, intentionally or unintentionally, enforces a binary that sustains the myth of the “real man.”
The man who posts about skincare or therapy inevitably performs for an audience, but so does the critic who calls him “performative.” The accusation itself is performative, a gesture of social superiority that says, “I see the script you’re performing, but I’m above it.” The internet thrives on this reflex of exposure: unmasking sincerity as artifice before it can embarrass us. Yet every unmasking becomes its own performance, a recursive loop of irony that keeps vulnerability at bay. When every act is suspect, detachment becomes the only safe posture.
The result is a paradoxical moral economy: men are told to be emotionally literate, then mocked when they are too fluent; encouraged to care about aesthetics, then derided for vanity when they do. All the while, “performative” absolves the accuser from introspection. It lets progressives and traditionalists roll their eyes at the same figure, the visibly self-conscious man, and in doing so, it performs the oldest trick in the book: re-masculinizing culture by feminizing self-awareness.
This linguistic sleight of hand exposes something bleak about our cultural progress. We’ve learned not to mock difference outright, only to pathologize its display. A man can be gentle, curious or expressive, as long as he doesn’t announce it. A woman can be ambitious, intellectual or assertive, as long as she does it ironically. The ideal subject is self-aware enough to joke about their own gender, to perform their performance, without disrupting social binaries. The appearance of progress masks a retreat into old scripts, now algorithmically optimized and self-referential.
The word “performative” has become our generation’s polite way of expressing the same old discomfort with deviation. What once was punished as queerness is now called out as performance; what was once shamed as femininity is now mocked as insincerity. The linguistic evolution masks continuity, not rupture. Behind the irony and discourse, we are still measuring authenticity against masculine stoicism and feminine passivity, mistaking performance for deceit rather than recognizing it as the instrument through which identity is made visible.
What the discourse around “performative” exposes is not a crisis of sincerity but a crisis of gender imagination. We have built a culture fluent in irony yet illiterate in ambiguity. The moment a man rehearses tenderness, or a woman displays ambition without condescension, language rushes to contain the disruption; to reclassify it as fake, cringe or “performative.” We cling to the myth that authenticity lies in instinct, not construction, because it preserves the binaries of the “real man” and the “real woman.”
Gender is a rehearsal; to perform is to participate in its making, to consciously shape what has been unconsciously inherited. The anxiety surrounding “performative” masculinity, like the ironic regression of online femininity, does not signal progress, but recoil, a retreat from the ambiguity of the in-between. We are watching a culture that finally began to flirt with fluidity, regress and reassert the old scripts through new language, policing who may embody softness and who must feign it.