"Apparently these heterosexual men who read Joan Didion, carry tote bags and listen to Clairo are not in fact human beings who enjoy things but performative jerk offs who don't really care about any of that girly stuff and are just trying to impress their feminine opposites. As Vox put it: think Jacob Elordi when he was photographed with three different books on his person, or Paul Mescal publicly admiring Mitski. Reading! Enjoying music by women! Perish the thought."
"Each piece differed slightly in what it defined as the key characteristics of the performative male, but they all shared one detail: he drinks matcha lattes. The stereotype has expanded beyond the white liberal: matcha hails a diverse new generation of milky boy This was unsurprising. For three decades the latte has the favored blog-whistle of the trend piece writer. It signals liberalism, femininity, gayness, pretension, gentrification ideally all of the above so reflexively that its origins as an insult are rarely revisited."
The performative male stereotype frames certain straight men as adopting progressive cultural markers—reading literary women, carrying tote bags, listening to female indie artists—to appear attractive to progressive women. Media examples reduce aesthetic choices to calculated courting strategies and present those tastes as inauthentic performance. The image commonly includes matcha lattes, extending the older 'latte liberal' shorthand that signals liberalism, femininity, pretension, and gentrification. The 'latte liberal' label originated in the late 1990s to name consumerist leftist affectations tied to organic food and niche music. The stereotype compresses diverse personal tastes into gendered signals of authenticity.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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