“The Long Tail of the Moment” is a bi-weekly column that examines the cultural zeitgeist—what drives the sudden, violent popularity and massive scale of viral blips/outliers on the erratic graph of popular culture.
The hosts of Yale’s very own performative male contest conducted the almost two-hour long proceedings from atop the Women’s table. This was a largely practical and sensible way of corralling a much-larger-than-expected turnout—swathes of spectators gathered to watch men (and a minority of women) jockeying for a kitted-out performative male franken-Labubu. I’m still going to go ahead and point out that over the course of almost two hours, there was a niggling feeling that in an unintended and unsurprising turn of events, women were being walked over—again. Matcha-sipping men were the butt of the joke, but somehow feminism was still the punchline.
Long before we could have imagined a Labubu unironically attached to a belt loop, men had intuited that they were more likely to get a date if they tailored themselves to appeal to their prospective partners by matching their interests and beliefs—making way for today’s performative men. Simple enough, right? In 2025, posing has become an art: Birkenstocked men wearing baggy, wide-legged jeans walk around carrying Trader Joe’s or MoMA tote bags weighed down with Sylvia Plath and Joan Didion, sipping distinctive grassy drinks. I can’t hear the music playing from their headphones (and all too often, wired earphones), but they’re very happy to drop their favorite Taylor Swift and Fiona Apple recommendations into casual conversation—right after they say that they hate the guy who invented periods! I’m sure a select few do actually enjoy these hobbies, and I’m sure they are very successful with women. No wonder then, that we see a ‘performative man’ at every corner, as every single guy tries his hand at a tried-and-true method to success. These mimetic artists, however, are the only ones asking, ‘what even is a bell jar?’ and the only reason they’re reading Becoming is to become the man of our dreams. In another entirely unsurprising twist, performative men choose to base their personas off of their own assumptions about feminism and womanhood, completely ignoring the taxing alternative of speaking to women and engaging with us as three-dimensional people.
The term ‘performative man’ and its instantaneous global adoption was a method of defense women often have no access to. Calling out a man for being ‘performative’ is somewhat like labeling a woman a ‘pick-me’, or a ‘bimbo’, or even the ‘bombshell’ who rattles off engine specifications while wearing the most impractical pair of shorts available on the market. Of course, our term for men sounds a lot more charitable than the choice words we use for women who vie for men’s validation. Regardless, calling out ‘performative men’ on Tiktok and Instagram lets us, for once, make fun of the stereotypes we are reduced to, and hold those who so confidently cut us down accountable (at least a little). Turning the tables for once, we finally got to say—“oh, you love feminist literature? Name three second-wave feminists.”
Performative male contests snatched that power right back. Suddenly, men were in on the joke, and an armor of irony settled right over their tote-carrying shoulders. Suddenly, we were laughing along with the men competing for the title of ‘most performative,’ while laughing at our own likes and interests. Through performative male contests, men have formed a community of ‘performativity’ while distancing themselves from any would-be sexist connotations of their actions. Bimbos, bombshells and pick-me-girls have never had the privilege to own a derogatory term and subvert it so completely that we could vie to be crowned its queen. Perhaps it’s worth interrogating, then, how competent this kind of “defense” really is for women in the first place, given how easily it is deconstructed by men who play into it. There’s something to be said about the assumptions underlying the idea that this performative pushback is an effective way to reject patriarchy—assumptions that may overstate our power and underestimate the structures we’re still navigating.
On Cross Campus, we saw prospective performative kings proudly pose (ironically, of course) with their idea of feminist literature—Wuthering Heights, anyone? Among the evergreen Woolfs and de Beauvoirs, one man was carrying a copy of We’ll Always have Summer; Jenny Han’s ‘chick-lit’ presence at a performative male contest pushes that faint undertone of sexism to centre-stage among our contestants. Leveraging The Summer I Turned Pretty, a distinctly ‘female’ show, to win a competition where you ironically parade conventional female interests to elicit the most laughs, carries an obvious shade of derision. We all laughed—were we only laughing at the idea of that guy who watched the entire show just to bag a woman, or did we also end up laughing at the idea that anybody but a girl would ever watch that show in the first place? Another participant declared music to be a form of literature and his favorite piece to be none other than “The Man” by Taylor Swift. I laughed here, because it was funny; funny because no man would ever actually say this, and he was (ironically, remember!) joining the most raging feminist social justice warriors with this line.
By handing guys the ability to decide what a performative man looks like, we’ve effectively let them introduce arbitrary divides between ‘feminine’ and ‘masculine’ interests and aesthetics. More often than not, these ‘performative’ interests are just feminine ones, without any nuance. I honestly had a great time at the contest, and I think Yale might be luckier than other places in that A Year of Magical Thinking might actually be many contestants’ favorite book. However, as most of these things end up being, this contest was also one small win for woman, one giant loss for womankind.
