Photo by Makenna Wozniak | The Crow’s Nest
By Julia Birdsall
“All my females, all my nonbinary friends out there, just know we love you so much and there is a performative man waiting to be your best friend,” said Jake Mahoney, second year business law major and winner of the Asian American and Pacific Islander Association’s (AAPIA) Sept. 2 Performative Person Contest.
This contest is part of a trend that has taken the internet by storm. What started as a meme about the growing number of performative men at college campuses has led to an influx of competitions like the Performative Person Contest at universities across the country. A notable example occurred at the University of Florida (UF) on Sept. 1.
Tongta Vachara, the president of AAPIA, told The Crow’s Nest that she wanted to draw attention to her organization by utilizing the current popularity of performative men. Her bid was successful and a large crowd showed up to watch the contest unfold.
Mahoney was one of 13 competitors armed with iced matcha, feminist literature, Clairo records and a store window’s worth of labubus.
His outfit was that of a stereotypical performative man: loose clothing, a tote bag and wired earbuds.
It took more than that to secure first place though. Mahoney also cited interests typically considered to be feminine, such as journaling, listening to pop music and reading romance books.
Photo by Makenna Wozniak | The Crow’s Nest
“What makes a performative man is not just the matcha he drinks, not just Clairo and Lana Del Rey he listens to, but it’s more so the way he goes about life and the way that he approaches others, and not only approaches others, but the way he approaches females,” said Mahoney.
Despite its popularity, the term performative man doesn’t have a positive connotation.
“The term ‘performative’ is… kind of like superficial feminism, a superficial style, just to draw that initial attention from [women],” Vachara said.
A group of students attending the contest told The Crow’s Nest that a performative man is someone who creates a personality and aesthetic based on feminist ideas and what they assume women want, but doesn’t truly support women’s rights or care about them at all outside of seeking pleasure.
While the term performative man is relatively new, the concept has been around for a long time.
Photo by Makenna Wozniak | The Crow’s Nest
To exemplify this, Frank Biafora, a sociology professor at the University of South Florida, told The Crow’s Nest about a fictional character known as Don Juan.
According to Biafora, Don Juan became famous after he was portrayed in a play called “The Trickster of Seville and the Stone Guest.” His most notable characteristic was the way he adopted qualities that women of his era liked so that he could seduce them.
Today, to call someone a Don Juan would be akin to calling them a womanizer. The idea is the same with performative men.
A possible explanation for why men approach women this way can be found in Erving Goffman’s theory of Dramaturgy, Biafora said.
Dramaturgy proposes that life is a stage and people put on performances based on who they believe their audience to be.
Audience analysis is a normal aspect of every interaction. People must do this to determine how to conduct themselves in different settings and among different crowds.
Performative men do this by assessing their audience—women—and molding themselves into what they think a woman’s ideal type is in order to win their affection.
Performance of self is not inherently problematic, but it can be when it is used to manipulate women.
“[Performative men] are people who genuinely do capitalize off of women’s vulnerabilities…because they believe that if they could fit [women’s] stereotype of the term ‘written by a woman,’ then that means they could pretty much take advantage of as many women as possible,” said Versailles Vazquez, a sophomore biology major and one of the competitors in the Performative Person Contest.
This behavior could potentially foster skepticism and mistrust in women who desire relationships with men, as they cannot be entirely sure if his interests are genuine. In this way, it could also have detrimental effects on men’s mental health if they are consistently rejected on the chance that their personality could be a performance.
Most interviewees told The Crow’s Nest that they believe there are a growing number of performative men on USF St. Petersburg’s campus, as well as college campuses all over the world.
Events like AAPIA’s Performative Man Contest have acted as a humorous way to spread awareness about what performative men are and the negative impacts that their performance can have on the women they interact with, as well as their own health.
“A lot of people are just performative men, and I think that they’d be better off if they were just themselves,” Vazquez said.
