To exist on social media is to engage in performance art. Mouthing to your favourite song? That’s lip-syncing. Sharing a story about your day? That’s narrative storytelling. Posting a photo dump on Instagram? That’s curating. Engaging with popular “skits” on TikTok? That’s miming. The internet has made performing parts of ourselves, and our lives, not only socially acceptable but encouraged and rewarded through clicks, views and comments. Why, then, are we still surprised to turn away from our screens and see others engaged in the performance?

The word “performative” has been thrown around in 2025, mostly to describe the “performative male”. The archetype of a performative male is a tote-bag-carrying, matcha-drinking, All About Love-reading man who curates his behaviours to attract women, using more “feminine” interests to lure them into a false sense of security. Appearing to look “not like other guys” while simultaneously acting exactly like other guys is an unfortunately common occurrence in heterosexual dating. Online, the idea of performative men took on a life of its own – there are performative male final boss starter packs, videos of men “performatively” reading and even performative male lookalike contests. 

But it goes beyond men. There are now (apparently) “performative” reposters, weird girls, interests, hobbies, accessories and even makeup. Everything from someone’s music taste and Letterboxd films to nipple piercings and having a full bush is under the microscope for not being reflective of someone’s “true spirit”. This is largely a result of the homogenisation of consumer culture. “Because a lot of our dominant social platforms, like TikTok and Instagram, also double as e-commerce spaces, we’re now seeing pretty significant shifts in consumer behaviour, whether it’s weird girl shoe haul videos or cool guy gift guide infographics,” says Dr Jess Rauchberg, assistant professor at Seton Hall University.

To understand how everything and everyone became “performative”, let us first track the emergence of the performative man. Dr Rauchberg says the performative male trend was a splintering of last year’s celebrity look-alike contests. Most of these look-alike contests centred around male celebrities, like Timothee Chalamet. As these contests grew in popularity and were replicated, they sparked a larger conversation around how masculinity is enacted. She calls performative men the “Gen Z hipsters”, sipping matcha lattes and reading dog-eared feminist paperbacks instead of falling into the violent confines of the manosphere. “When the only media representations you see either fault you (men are bad!) or push you into warped misogyny, the performative male is an ironic, playful response that pushes back at weaponised misogyny in media,” she says.

Being accused of performativity has, of course, existed long before the internet. Partaking in polite, adult society had always been somewhat of a performance. As Christine Tran, assistant professor at the Alberta University of the Arts, puts it: “For centuries, it has been women who were the default fakes: fake gamer girls, ‘pick me’ girls and the myriads of women we accuse of just liking things for ‘male attention’.” The fact that men can now be called performative could be considered what Tran calls “a revenge micro-fantasy”.

For centuries, it has been women who were the default fakes: fake gamer girls, ‘pick me’ girls and the myriads of women we accuse of just liking things for ‘male attention’

“The performative male reflects very present anxieties about the entanglement of gender and ‘authentication’ at the forefront of the war on free gender expression,” continues Tran. “It is a safe, comedic space to fool with the idea of how we all ‘perform’ our gender.” It was Judith Butler who famously described gender as “a performance” – though, as trans writer Asa Seresin warns, that doesn’t mean that it’s fake. “In Gender Trouble, Butler emphasises that gender is iterative, meaning it is something you construct every day through repetition,” says Seresin. “Being constructed does not mean it’s fake – it’s real, it gradually accrues reality over time.”

To Seresin, the performative male is a reinscription of gender essentialism. “Performative reading is one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever heard; we are in a literacy crisis; anyone reading anything at all feels like a miracle, and the idea that men fake liking women writers in order to sleep with women is extremely insulting to everyone involved,” says Seresin. “My entire reading life has been shaped by tracking down my crushes’ favourite books, borrowing books from people I’m sleeping with and taking recommendations from people I admire.” The reality is, it’s fun to share and enjoy things that are popular.

There’s a popular expression across social media right now: “Imagine hating me and I’m just [insert activity here]”. It speaks to a growing tendency to picture someone watching us – judging, envying, or obsessing – as we go about and document our everyday lives. But there’s something unsettling about this impulse. The poster is imagining someone else imagining them – when, in reality, no one thinks about us more than we do ourselves. “I think we have all internalised an imagined audience of fans and haters while forgetting that we are not celebrities,” says Seresin. “When people are policing each other for not being authentic, it’s really about projection; we feel aware that our sense of self has been crafted by corporate consumerism, so we accuse other people of it.”

Still, the paranoia isn’t entirely baseless. The urge to watch others – whether for defence or entertainment – is a direct consequence of living under surveillance. “Gen Z was born when panopticons – that Foucauldian prison structure where you don’t even need a guard because prisoners watch each other – are especially taken for granted,” says Tran. They add that “performance” has become a survival tactic in a very precarious digital economy, where we are all being watched and scrutinised by everyone, from brands to potential bosses. “Surveillance that is specific to social media is always a reflection of these larger structures that have told young people, ‘You are the capital to be watched, so you may as well make fun and funds from it,’” they say. This helps explain why people feel entitled to film strangers on the subway for content, or to set up tripods in public gyms. 

Another offline precursor to the performification of everything, says tech and culture journalist Taylor Lorenz, is when people would simply call each other “posers”. “When I was a kid, people would say you are a poser if you bought a CD but didn’t really listen to it,” she says. “I think there will always be attempts to gatekeep taste, so the idea of a performative male won’t go away, but we’ve reached its peak and are leaving him behind in 2025.” But a seemingly inescapable surveillance culture, brought by the trickling down of influencer culture, will linger. So too will the algorithmically fuelled obsession to put ourselves and others into neatly defined content categories. 

“The incentive structure of the internet is to feed tropes that sort into algorithmic boxes, so when people say they want authenticity, they want it within these specific bounds,” says Lorenz. “We are looking around at the world as almost a stage; everyone has a personal brand to uphold, and everyone is using each other for social clout and attention, as well.” It’s only once we accept the performer within ourselves – they who throw the first “performative” stone – that we can truly sit back and enjoy the show.