Yesterday, while our wife was cleaning the house, we were thinking in our armchairs about the new social figure we read about in the newspapers. The performative male.
Who is? Well, it’s that man who behaves the way the feminist woman thinks he wants him to. That is, alternative, fluid and sensitive to women’s problems. Such as expressing deep desperation for menstrual pain or indignation at catcalling. A dog’s life in short. Curious how some men find fulfillment by denying the best of their sex.
Anyway. The performative male wears eye pencil, uses hideous canvas bags, loves vintage cardigans, watches Fagnani programmes, listens to Olly and on TikTok follows Edoardo Prati, the influencer who lent the wig to the one who was trying to replace his mother to collect her pension.
If it weren’t for the fact that he wears Birkenstocks and reads the Murgia, we too would like to be a performative male. The trouble is that now progressive women, in reality the most traditionalists, say that performative males behave like this only out of interest: they pretend to embrace the feminist cause to appear better in the eyes of women and get them into bed more easily.
Filthy manipulators and misogynists, in short.
And so in the end the old sexist, macho and slightly toxic male (in the sense of “fact”) is better than the new performative, effeminate and feminist male. And she doesn’t even have to wear nail polish.