Occasionally on Saturday mornings, I grab my tote bag and wander down to my local independent coffee shop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, to order an iced latte and sit outside and read. This seemingly normal activity supposedly marks me out as one of the latest talking points in the online culture war: “the performative male.”
The performative male is a new term for straight men who inauthentically engage in activities as a means of gaining clout on social media, coming across as progressive, or piquing the interest of members of the opposite sex that they take a fancy to.
