"Young women are constantly warned of the dangers of the manosphere.... The cult of 'toxic masculinity' is now so overcooked as to be limp..."

"... and meaningless, and, crucially, it entirely misses one key thing: feminine men can be just as 'toxic' as bodybuilders. It is Gen Z’s shallow sexual politics, which privilege 'looking' progressive over deeply felt values, that have landed us here. If the feminisation of culture has succeeded, it is because posing as effete gains men access to the women they want to sleep with. Cultural capital has deserted roided-up meatheads and landed in the lap of the moustachioed, mulletted lothario who professes to be a harmless feminist and who wields just enough knowledge about Judith Butler to talk a blushing sociology major into bed.... When visibly masculine men are maligned as potential abusers, women choose the wolf in vintage clothing. But this is all based on false assumptions: performative matcha is one more way that ill-intentioned loverboys can game our sexual politics’ daft stereotypes, joining tried-and-tested tactics like professing to be left-wing, painting one’s nails and listening to Phoebe Bridgers. You are just as likely to be shagged and bagged by a matcha drinker as a craft beer enthusiast, or indeed, a plain old lager fan...."

Writes Poppy Sowerby, quoted in "Ladies, if you see a man with a matcha latte — run/Male poseurs have abandoned macho and embraced matcha. Is it just another ploy to seduce women?" (London Times).

I haven't used my "performative (the word)" tag in a while. Here's the post where I created it, back in 2022 about a NYT piece titled, "Should Biden Run in 2024? Democratic Whispers of ‘No’ Start to Rise." I said:

I should make a tag for "performative." It's a buzz word these days, I believe, and I'd like to keep track of it. 

Did it come from gender studies? The most notable appearance of "performative" in my archive was a quote from the famous hoax "The Conceptual Penis as a Social Construct": "The penis vis-à-vis maleness is an incoherent construct. We argue that the conceptual penis is better understood not as an anatomical organ but as a gender-performative, highly fluid social construct."

And from the field of racial studies, there's this, quoted from a NYT op-ed about Rachel Dolezal (the white woman who identified as black): "But Ms. Dolezal’s view of herself — however confused, or incongruent with society’s — reveals an essential truth about race: It is a fiction, a social construct based in culture and not biology. It must be 'made' from what people believe and do. Race is performative."

And I quoted this, about an "anti-racism" mural in Madison: "[The artist] said her intent is to show the nature of performative allyship and the manner in which white savior complex permeates Madison."

We talked about the word a few days ago, in connection with a Georgetown professor who'd tweeted that the defenders of Brett Kavanaugh "deserve miserable deaths." She called her tweeting "performative."

I got some push back in the comments saying that the word "performative" should be restricted to the "How To Do Things With Words" philosophical meaning — speech that performs an act. Indeed, that is the only meaning of the word in the OED. 

But the vogue usage of "performative" that I'm seeing in the media these days isn't that. "How To Do Things With Words" was required reading in my first semester of college. That was 1969. These days,  more than half a century later, young people are picking up different ways of thinking and talking in college, and performativeness is something different. 

If people these days are finding the word "performative" useful, it suggests that they also believe in a more authentic and substantive aspect of life that is deeper and more important than the things we do for show — the theater of politics and society. I hope so! 

But it is also possible that people are coming to feel that there is nothing inside, that it's all performative, that everything is fluid. That's not a new idea, that we are empty and soulless — that Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more.