Words: Carmen Farrell (she/her)
People are not surprised when a subversive woman has read The Second Sex, but a man with a mullet and a taste for Simone de Beauvoir is sure to get some heads turning.
‘Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.’ – Oscar Wilde.
The term “female gaze” has been floating around mainstream discourse for around two years now, but what does it really mean for a man to be constructed from an omniscient female perspective? Why are straight men now seeking to replicate the characteristics of women, particularly queer women? In 2025, the “performative male” is practically a household name, from people using it as a party theme to it featuring in global competitions. We laugh when men battle it out for who has the most hours spent listening to Clairo, but this rise in “male performativity” has moulded this jest into something bigger, scarier, and more thought-provoking.
Of course, constructing a performance in order to be desired is not necessarily a crime. However, when that performance undermines female forms, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth. The infamous term “male gaze” was first coined in Laura Mulvey’s 1993 feminist film essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Mulvey argued that, as a result of the subconscious dominance of the patriarchy in mainstream cinema, viewers can take pleasure in looking at the “passive female” as the “active male”.
Mulvey argued that the literature does not focus on how the female body is represented. Thus, she introduced the idea of “phallocentrism”, where the male sexual organ becomes the centre of society, and women signify castration. Women become objects of voyeuristic spectacle in order to evade subjugation. Cinema allows this theory to be completely deconstructed and observed in its fullness by highlighting the female form and directing the audience to observe it in a sexual and degrading manner. Women are then placed on a pedestal to be simultaneously sexual and chaste, with no control over how they are perceived. The same is done to queer women, even though they have no desire for straight men, because, unsurprisingly, men still view them as sexual objects. In response to this, queer women have their own culture that decentres the straight man, creating spaces where their forms are the focus.
So, why is it that straight men now subvert the “male gaze” and assume the traits of “passive females”? Is this a switch from “phallocentrism”? Now that you have pondered for a second or two, I am going to say that it is not. Although the ideologies, hobbies, and passions that he, the “performative male”, displays are traditionally associated with queer female characteristics, the fact that it is a man who is interested in these cultures makes it revolutionary. People are not surprised when a subversive woman has read The Second Sex, but a man with a mullet and a taste for Simone de Beauvoir is sure to get some heads turning. I can easily name a few friends who would fall into that trap. However, as Judith Butler argues in Gender Trouble, all gender is a performance. Funnily enough, women are no longer finding the traditional male gender performance desirable. As a result, men have started to intertwine themselves with the female sphere of performance. Queer women see right through this as they have always been performing in a similar way to attract women, but their act is potentially more polished and authentic.
So, can men really be to blame when all of it is a facade in the first place? I think the real issue lies in the way men treat queerness as something disposable – a culture they can exploit for their own gain, extracting what they see as trendy, yet simultaneously exercising the privileges they have as straight men. This can be as simple as a queer book in their back pocket as a cry for female attention. If they desire to be more involved, they create fake personas in hopes of securing romantic relationships. This results in women believing that whoever they are engaging with has the same authentic interests, viewpoints, and cultural ideologies. Women then subscribe to relationships that are destined to fail as they are built upon falsehoods.
The very system these men created has subsequently failed to serve them. Now, for men to attract a partner, they must replace their own masculinity with femininity. This can be observed in multiple states, from carefully curated music tastes to facades of believing in women’s rights and feminist theory. However, any displacement of the male sexual organ from the centre of society is a step in the right direction. Lesbians across the world urge anyone who interacts with “performative men” to stay safe and vigilant.
