Photo by Niall McDiarmid/Millenium

It’s 2.30pm on a Saturday and a few hundred young women are craning their necks in Soho Square Gardens. It’s a tight squeeze: try and get any closer to what’s going on and you risk cracking a vinyl record in half, or upending a matcha latte onto the grass. Every few seconds someone’s Labubu keyring is whipped off course by a resounding scream. We are here to find London’s most performative male.

The term “performative male” only blew up recently on TikTok, but its referents have probably patrolled student unions since the beginning of time. In the 2010s they were “softboys” and “male feminists”; before that they might have been “dandies,” “fops,” or simply “prats.” They curate their taste in literature, film and music to maximise their proximity to the female experience; they optimise the way they dress to avoid scaring off potential girlfriends. They won’t speak over women, and five times out of ten they won’t cheat on them, either.

The girls who loathe them are trying to flip the script. In the last couple of months, these semi-satirical contests have popped up all over North America. This one is the first to take place in Britain. It is part of an attempt to gather buzz for Sonder, a Zoomer-oriented dating startup. Its frontwoman, Hannah, used to work in consulting. She is now shouting instructions into a tiny pink karaoke microphone, which is connected to an even tinier speaker nestled somewhere in the grass.

None of us can hear her, because every competitor is doing his best to elicit the loudest possible cheer from the crowd. At first glance, the pool of contestants seems to be made up of university-age men, but on closer inspection about a third are actually women in drag. The most successful has drawn on some facial hair and is struggling to keep hold of a ukulele, an empty cup bearing telltale streaks of matcha residue, and Mrs Dalloway. She thrusts an extra copy of Sylvia Plath’s Arielup to the sky.

“It’s annotated!” she screams.

One competitor, who might have betrayed either side in the historic clash between Mods and Rockers, has brought a vinyl copy of Charli XCX’s Brat. Another has precariously balanced Amy Winehouse’s final album between the pages of a Kafka paperback. His Labubu perches, Tutankhamun-style, in a Labubu-shaped tomb, which is attached in turn to the belt loop of his baggy jeans.

“He needs to sing an Amy song,” says the girl next to me, as he brandishes the vinyl at the screaming crowd. “And it can’t be Back to Black.”

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Someone actually has brought his guitar, and runs us through a raucous chorus of Wonderwall; someone else throws sanitary pads into the roaring crowd. “Free Palestine!” gets an enthusiastic cheer.

The first winner of Britain’s first Performative Male Contest is a 27-year-old called Jake, who works in research for the EU and is dressed in the sort of outfit a middle manager might have worn in the 1970s – khaki shirt, long tie, roomy trousers. He shows me his accessories: a vinyl copy of Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die and a disposable camera, which is clipped to one handle of his tote bag.

“Oh my God,” exclaims the girl next to us. “Do you want to take a Polaroid picture?”

Jake assures me he isn’t reallya performative male. This is just his dress sense.

“Unfortunately, there is the stereotype that it’s just performative,” he tells me. “Which I definitely think in some cases it is. But I think people generally just do dress like this. And I think that’s kind of just like the fashion of it. But it’s fun to play into it.”

Matthew, 20, works in IT and has arrived at the park too late to enter the competition. But his performative male getup is the same as everyone else’s: baggy trousers, flannel shirt, wired earphones. Performative men don’t use AirPods. “Nowadays everyone’s doing wireless headphones,” he explains. “So just having something to stand up against the decisions of Apple and Samsung… it’s like a statement.”

Is this how he dresses every day?

“No,” he says. “I usually have the flannel buttoned up.”

He doesn’t think this sort of thing really works on women. “Maybe on five per cent, one per cent. Most of them know you don’t reallycare about Labubus. Maybe if you had carried a Chiikawa…” He tails off. He’s talking about a Japanese cartoon character that looks marginally like a mouse. “Those are cute.”

One woman on the edge of the crowd is more convinced. “It does soften you if you see a man at the coffee shop reading feminist literature,” she says. “It’s a little less intimidating than traditionally masculine men. And you have a bigger difference from alt-right, incel kind of guys… so maybe it’s overcorrection, in a way.” She met her ex-boyfriend before “performative male” was ever coined. But she thinks he must have qualified.

“Lots of books on his shelf he hadn’t read,” she reminisces. “He was saying he wanted to be around more female energy, like, as his New Year’s Resolution.”

“I think the problem with the performative male is that he’s a feminist, but it’s still so male-centric that he’s like – how can I make it about me?” says one entrant, a 22-year-old Stem student at Imperial who prefers to remain anonymous. He’s wearing baggy jeans and a T-shirt that says, “Charmed By Clairo.” His girlfriend has done his nails. He tells me this was her idea. Like Jake, he swears he isn’t like the guys who keep getting put on blast on TikTok. “I got sent this competition by three different people,” he assures me, “because this is just what I dress like.”

To bolster his entry, he’s brought a tote bag with lots of books inside: there’s some Didion, Pride and Prejudice, and a suitably lowbrow-meets-highbrow Fitzcarraldo Edition. He assures me he really does like Joan Didion. Almost everyone at the contest has made some jibe at the performative male’s literary taste, but I’m told this folk canon is barely accurate. Today’s twentysomething literary man prefers reading about women through the eyes of Dosteovsky, Pynchon, Foster-Wallace and Roth.

Cinema is a different story. Jay, 17, tells me her sixth-form film class is stuffed with performative males. They see themselves as a step up from “male manipulators,” another TikTok-coined stereotype roughly equivalent to the Tarantino-loving “film bros” of the 2010s.

“They all bash on the Godfatherbecause they think it’s too masculine, too alpha,” she says. “They despise The Joker.”

What do they like instead?

“They love *The Big Lebowski.*I don’t know why. La La Landis the main one.”

“We’re seeing a lot of things,” says Shaniqua, 23, who is still hanging around in the park after the end of the contest. “A lot of things.”

Her friend, Kazina, lives in Croydon. “They don’t really care about feminism,” she says of the men in her locale. “This is my first time being surrounded by so many guys like this.”

“I’m seeing a lot of cigarettes. I’m seeing a lot of man buns… I feel like half of them really aren’t performing either… they definitely read, like, bell hooks or something like that,” Shaniqua tells me. “And they say, ‘I’m sorry you’re going through that, you know? I’m sorry you have a period.’”

They both think it’s working on the other women here.

“The guy who was playing acoustic guitar,” says Kazina, “had, like, a gang of women around him. I was like, what kind of mating call is this?”

“Right now,” her friend attests, “we all know it’s a joke. But if we were in a university setting, they would definitely get the girls.”

“Depending on which uni.”

“Bristol, or… what’s the art school? UAL.”

“Half the guys here are probably from UAL.”

I ask what the rest of us need to know about performative males.

“Guys are not as dumb as you think they are,” Kazina warns. “They know what you like. They know who you’re reading. They know who you’re listening to, they know what kind of outfits you want them to wear – and if they want to, they can just make themselves into the men you want them to be.”

“So beware.”

“Beware.”

[Further reading: Taylor Swift is totally in control]

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Topics in this article : Gender