Staged

Being an ineligible bachelor does have its downsides; every so often I encounter another wild stereotype of single men that I never knew existed previously, and society tends to expect that every adult is a member of a couple and is structured accordingly, but, for the most part, it's an okay lifestyle. I've had plenty of time to grow accustomed to it, and the couple of times I've left it, returning has felt like sliding into a comfortable bed. It's something that I started during college, when I realized that I wanted nothing to do with the dating scene, and it's given me a level of sympathy for women who have decided that they're ready to call it quits on the whole thing.

Not being actively in the dating pool, however, I wind up watching the whole thing from afar or reading about it on the Internet, and the newest complaint that women have is with the vaguely-named "performative male." I'd never heard of it prior to this evening, when I ran across a small piece in The Week, running down a few articles on the topic. The Vox article I didn't read, because it's behind a paywall, but I read through the rest, and it's a familiar story: women being a combination of fed up and suspicious of the male tendency for fakery when they think that there's a chance for sex on the one hand, and the realization that this is kind of the way it always is and not all women are so dim as to be unable to watch out for themselves on the other.

To be sure, I've never been motivated enough by sex to be willing to perform for it. Once 20-year-old me had gotten it into his head that women weren't really interested, I had plenty of other things to be doing with my time. But I've known a lot of men in the interim who did seem to feel a need to be attuned to What Women Want, or, at least, the kind of guy that the needed to pretend to be in order to get a date. And I understand why women have had more than enough of that pretense, because the outcomes can be way worse than simply going on a date with someone who turns out to be inauthentic. I'd become fed up with the dating scene over much lower stakes.

So I legitimately feel for them; feeling the need to try and figure out if the person that one is out on a date with is actually the person they're presenting themselves as must be stressful. Especially when the perceived consequences of getting it wrong can be severe. But part of me is with Alexander Stoffel on this; I think his understanding that suspecting everyone who doesn't fit a certain mold of cynical deceit simply incentivizes a different form of pretense is more accurate than it's given credit for.

It would be nice if society could do away with the posturing and posing, but that would also require not attaching so much status to the ability to attract a desirable partner. I have no illusions about that coming to pass anytime soon. So "performative males" are simply going to be one in a long string of different categories of men to watch out for. Or just deal with, as the case may be.