When I was a child, my father got me a plastic Oscar award that read “Best Child” when he came back from Los Angeles. At the time, I believed it must have cost him an exorbitant amount. I later learned they’re sold at every souvenir shop in the city. I used to polish its fake golden head and place it on my bedside table. I would put on a red dress, stand in front of the mirror, hold my Oscar and stare myself dead in the eye. “I would like to thank my mother,” I would enunciate, “and God.”
Throughout 2021, aged 18, I was homebound in Rapunzelesque fashion due to a semi-forced gap year, banished from what should’ve been a busy period of homesick blues and freshman debauchery. Instead, I spent a long stretch of depression days doing Chloe Ting workouts, watching anime, and flipping between Minecraft and The Sims 4, sometimes in tandem, which caused my long-suffering laptop to kill herself.
The blow-up led to a state of technology-induced guilt which I had never experienced before. I thought deeply about the fact that I was eighteen and lonely and wasting my life on iPhone and K-pop. I felt Frankensteinian, a blob creature pieced together by bits and bobs of consumption, with no interesting traits or habits.
I woke up one day and decided to start reading. I hadn’t read properly since IB English, which was enforced, so maybe I hadn’t read for true personal pleasure since I was a child. Back then I would close my eyes and daydream of being born again in Geronimo Stilton land where everybody was a chic detective. A place where it didn’t matter at all that you were a mouse. What happened to that?
I decided that day to become someone who read. I don’t know what spurred it. An argument with my older brother where I left feeling stupid? A snide comment from an overachieving friend? A girl on TikTok who wore maroon and called herself
“dark academia-core?”
Nietzsche writes in On the Genealogy of Morals that “there is no ‘being’ behind doing, acting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction imposed on the doing — the doing itself is everything.” Like Lucy Dacus said on the Las Culturistas podcast, “sometimes you have to wear the costume before it becomes the clothes.”
All performance is to some extent superficial, whether it be the performance of an actor weeping rehearsed dialogue in costume and makeup, or the performance of womanhood, weeping rehearsed dialogue in costume and makeup.
If my hobby of reading began at the first moment of hand touching book, from an urge to perform, it is no different from the hobbies of a person who plays guitar, runs marathons or studies bugs. Together we are performing reader, musician, athlete and bug-studier. If nothing else, for an audience of our own egos.
A word I have come to hate due to its overuse, alongside “pretentious” and “tummy problems” is “performative.” You don’t have to be hyper-online to know what I’m talking about. Last year, the concept left the internet and entered the real world through ‘performative male’ contests where men of various shapes and sizes came donning Shakespeare Company tote bags, wielding a Joan Didion book in one hand and a Fiona Apple CD in the other, sipping lavender matches and discussing the “female struggle.”
I began to think seriously about this type of guy, whose goal is to perform the perfect male for girls who share those interests. I certainly saw icons of him around campus, holding film cameras and tripping over his baggy jeans, but was he real? Or was he a TikTokified transmutation of the ‘manipulative male’ idea, an urban myth made up by people who don’t read, and can’t fathom earnestly doing so in public?
Think of the inverse: the Red Bull-drinking, sweatpant-wearing dude, with a single airpod in his ear whose form of public reading is scrolling r/DankMemes on the morning commute. He doesn’t listen to female musicians and thinks accessorizing is for women. Is he less performative? Is he not grinding the gears of learned machismo, consciously or not?
Or is this the natural state of ‘male’, and everything else is a performance meant to woo the opposite sex?
(As a side note, who exactly are these girls getting into bed with any man who has choppy bangs, carries tote bags and listens to Clairo? What are they thinking? And what do they do when they have a class in the ‘performative male’ mecca, Buchanan B?)
What we’re experiencing with performative males, or people who seem to be trying too hard, is cringe, a feeling studied by Dr. J. Logan Smilges, an associate professor in the English language and literature department at UBC, with whom I spoke about cringe culture and how it holds us back.
“[Cringing] offers this wonderful kind of syllogism,” they said. Essentially, cringing allows us to displace negative feelings away from ourselves by recoiling at the behaviour of another. Cringing can feel like evidence of being superior, and often that can be a just feeling. But it also creates a self-inflicted prison of our own judgment.
Smilges worries about young people who entrench themselves so deeply in “cynicism and fear of being wrong” that they turn everything into a joke. “Everything has to have a knife's edge to it, otherwise you might be revealed as genuine, and that genuineness carries vulnerability, which carries risk.”
Certainly there is truth to the idea of ‘performative males’, but when you stop to think about what exactly is so cringey about a guy who wears a single earring and paints his nails, you start to wonder if everybody hasn’t looped around to just being misogynistic again.
“We're not just cringing at these men,” Smilges said. “We're cringing at women. We're cringing at queer people from whom they have adopted, or appropriated, these characteristics.”
Of course there’s bad eggs who are willing to fake every aspect of themselves to manipulate women into getting sex, who learn how to finger the bass just to look cool, who only ever do things to get things — but they’re dicks who would’ve been dicks even without the single dangly earring, and they shouldn’t get to ruin reading on public transportation for all of us.
I have done things in performance: I have smiled pearly white at corporate luncheons, dyed my hair orange, thinned my brows and discovered the music I love in performance. I don’t regret momentary inauthenticity, especially when it comes from an earnest desire to better myself.
Smilges helped put this feeling of inauthenticity into perspective: “Everything we're doing is always a little bit superficial, because we're always, hopefully, trying new things, which incurs that kind of risk and vulnerability and earnestness.”
Say life’s a performance and the world's a stage, that nothing’s real, that I’m an amalgamation of people’s opinions of me, of my mom and dad’s taste, of my brother’s teasing and my best friend’s humour. Say performance is the first step toward actuality. I began performing adulthood a few years ago when I was suddenly alone in a new country across the world from home. But now, here I am — at home.
