Performative Male Competitions

A much younger friend of mine told me about a social media phenomena called "Performative Male Competitions," which unfortunately I called "men's performative competitions" throughout the podcast. Apparently these are competitions held unbeknownst to the participants in which the most "performative" male wins. The joke of these events is that men are clandestinely filmed as they are transparently performing what they imagine would be impressive to women, such as adopting feminist positions that they don't really understand or staging "quirky" character traits such as visibly reading books that are clearly not of interest to them. This sounded exactly like what my Generation X would have called "trying too hard," but fortunately we didn't have social media competitions to ruin people's lives, but I'm sure that we would have gleeful done so if the technology had been available. These performances reminded me of Judith Butler's concept of "performativity" that got her into so much trouble in "Gender Trouble," and that she has continued to have to explain ever since.

Baddass vibes mixed by James Reeves of Midnight Radio: jamesreeves.co

Elements of Armando: Land of Confusion decelerated and run through the midnight echo chamber.

Trying Too Hard