“I don’t consider myself to be ‘performative male’ but maybe I’m part of the problem.” The metanarrative of this statement, made by one of the contestants in the Performative Male Competition in San Francisco a few days ago, is enough to send Jean-François Lyotard and his postmodernist friends into a tizzy. Here’s a young man, as far from Alpha as bell hooks (the American author) is from anything capital, incidentally, intentionally carrying a bell hooks book and looking as non-threatening to women as possible. But, he’s participating in a contest that prizes performativeness. So, maybe he’s actually threatening. But, if he’s admitting that he might be the problem, is he really the problem?
This author is almost at her wits’ end at how ridiculously performative everything is today. As a cis-heterosexual woman, she’s also unnerved at the curveball this seemingly fun, self-deprecating, and smart contest has thrown at her. Men are trying to project their softest, most sensitive, and entirely non-threatening selves. Don’t we all want it? Have we not had enough of the angry young men, who aren’t even young sometimes, in our lives? So, why is this a problem? No, not the competition; that’s quite fun.
Women have been dealing with aggressive, insensitive, and in-your-face Alphas since time immemorial and know how to survive them. Yes, despite all their efforts geared towards it, even if subconsciously, men have not been able to annihilate us. We have learned to switch between slaying the monsters and shrinking ourselves to survive. It’s like muscle memory. We have various jugaad solutions — the non-Darwinian posture of sticking our elbows out in public spaces to save our breasts from being grabbed is one. Performative males are lulling us into a false sense of security.
Worse, they are telling us to distrust our instincts.
Bodies have memories; generational ones, too. Bodies have learned to decode other bodies; the semiotics became survival. And now the performative male wants us to shed that instinct so he can discuss Schopenhauer with us in a dimly-lit flat with the right bookshelves and clean toilets. The Cixous-quoting man tells us he “feels” how hard the bleeding days can be for us. We feel safe, and heard, and seen. We want this. But the body knows. We shush it. “Would you rather be with a Heathcliff, or a Mr Rochester, or a Diego Rivera? Do you want a Kabir Singh?” Gasp.
Nothing is a bigger travesty of Judith Butler’s idea of gender as a performance than a man trying to un-man himself. Performative males are gaming the system. They are on the other end of the spectrum from the incels. But we know the incel. We do not know the performative male as well. The man embracing his unloved toddler or teen self and looking to heal it is better than the bully in the bed. Though must that healing process be fetishised? Their healing process is probably giving them a better vocabulary to justify themselves. Men are acting in numerous non-masculine ways, but they are acting nonetheless. Once the bravest, the brashest, the bawdiest landed the person of his amorous interest, and now, sensitive is sexy. Let’s color the plumage and get ready for the mating dance.
This new color is not that of dandyism but of “different”. The performative male thrives on being a different flavour, carefully extracted. He doesn’t represent his class, caste, sex, community, country or any other such collective. He’s just himself, with no archetype. He’s sometimes a man in Pedro Almodóvar’s films who is “frequently defeated by […] emasculation”, according to Suzie MacKenzie. He claims to be okay being mise-en-scene instead of being the main character. He’s not part of the rat race. Isn’t it, paradoxically, another race, only with zero self-awareness on the part of the runners?
A large number of young people are self-reporting as being post-relationship. If men have reformed themselves so much, why is this crisis of loneliness creeping upon us as an apocalypse? Are women never satisfied with anything at all? This does not add up. Maybe choosing to be Beta is becoming an aesthetic choice of today, like once Alpha was. The consequences for women are the same.
Lest this be construed as the author indulging in misandry, let’s end it with this: I love men, but…
Nishtha Gautam is an academician and author. The views expressed are personal
