Meet 'performative male': Are men reading books for attention?

Lydia Spencer-Elliott, The Independent

Meet the new performative male, now the current subject of online mockery. He's carrying a Daunt Books tote bag, there's a copy of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney in his back pocket, and he's walking his matcha latte and Birkenstock Boston clogs all the way to a reformer pilates class. Over the past month, this arguably modern evolution of the hipster has been lovingly ridiculed in memes and tweets for allegedly using progressive women's hobbies to lure them into a romance they'll almost certainly regret when his knowledge of fashionable fiction runs out.

This type of young man generally frequents arty areas of London, like Hackney or Dalston. But they roam as far as New York, Seattle and Canada, where a performative male competition took place in Toronto last week to take the modern archetype to its highest of heights. Participants were adorned with film cameras, thrifted shirts, wired headphones.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lily (not real name) has, sadly, fallen foul of such posers on numerous occasions. She says she once clocked a male colleague at her co-working space bringing in a "stack" of books to use as "intellectual set dressing" rather than cracking the spines. Perhaps more troublingly, a guy she dated shiftily placed a book she told him she was reading at a feminist book club (All About Love by bell hooks) on his bed when she went round. "He said he was 're-reading it' but didn't have anything to say about it," she laments.

Maira, 34, is deeply suspicious of men who read in public and thinks she can spot performative males a mile off. Her go-to tells are if they're sitting in a "prominent seat" in a coffee shop and haven't made it through their first chapter. Her examples are borderline cartoonish; one bloke was walking around with a Truman Capote text sticking out of his back pocket to ensure the title was on show. Another was crossing a busy road with his eyes glued to the fifth page of a spanking new novel. "I thought, 'You decided to read this book on this street, on this very pavement,'" says Maira. "We're all crossing the road and you're endangering us all."

I ask Maira if she's ever accepted a date with such a man, as the internet suggests is their goal, and she regrettably admits she has. "One bought me a book on the first date," she sighs. "It was by an Instagram poet, RH Sin; a sweet gesture, but he was rude when I told him I wasn't interested." I look up said poet's work and it reads like an abridged Drake verse: "In the crib because who I want ain't in the streets" is one whole poem.

As horrifying and hilarious as these stories are, there's a twinge in me that thinks perhaps the internet's recent assumption that "men can't read" is a little unfair. For a long time, women couldn't wear football shirts or Pink Floyd merch without being labelled a "fake fan". The performative male accusations are similar in the sense we find it instinctively unfathomable that a straight man could want to read fiction or go to an expensive pilates class on Sunday morning — unless they're angling.

Dating and relationship coach Vicki Pavitt notes that adopting others' interests for attention is effective initially, but people look for authenticity in long-term connections and will sniff out liars over time. "That's why women can find it unsettling when they date men who mirror their tastes in a way that feels performative, be it matcha lattes, feminist books or niche accessories," she says. This suspicion can act as a "protective filter" that helps avoid "investing time and energy in someone who might not be sincere". However, Pavitt notes: "At the same time, if we're too quick to dismiss these gestures as inauthentic, we might miss opportunities for intimacy for people we could be compatible with."

To find out if there's a semblance of sincerity in the rise of men reading in public, I go where no journalist has gone before and speak to the book boys themselves. The first attempt is a bust when a former Hinge date — who permanently had a book in the backside of his jeans — becomes hostile and refuses to take part. "I have to say this hurts my feelings that you think I'm a performative male," he rebuffs when I ask about the topic. Despite my denying the accusation, he sulkily says he doesn't want to be involved regardless. Notably, he still likes an Instagram photo of me looking quite good at the club less than 24 hours later.

I have more luck with 27-year-old Londoner Cam, who says he mostly relies on books to keep his eyes off his phone during his commute to work. "I'm reading Vanity Fair — not the magazine," he hastily distinguishes between the pop culture monthly and William Makepeace Thackeray's 19th-century satire. When I ask him if he ever feels worried or judged that people think he's reading performatively due to the latest whirlwind of vitriol aimed at male readers, it has never even crossed his mind.