There’s a scene in the animated series Drawn Together that cuts through the bullshit around masculinity. Captain Hero, desperate to prove his heterosexuality, engages in this exchange with the Terminator, who’s been sent to the past to stop a kids’ TV show from turning the world gay.

Captain Hero: “Hey, bro. What do you think about vagina?”

Terminator: “Dude, I love the vagina.”

CH: “What do you like to do to the vagina?”

T: “What do you think you like to do to the vagina?”

CH: “I think you like to fuck it.”

T:“I’m straight. I totally like to fuck the vagina.”[^1]

It’s ridiculous, but brilliant. Watch the panic underneath. Notice how Captain Hero needs the other guy to tell him what he’s supposed to like, then immediately parrots it back. Women — or rather, “the vagina” — exist only as a concept to be bragged about, proof of straightness performed for another man’s validation.

Flash forward to 2025. The “performative male” has become a recognizable archetype: Labubu plushies dangling from carabiners, tote bags with feminist slogans, a well-worn copy of The Bell Jar, matcha latte in hand. Wired headphones playing Clairo. Tampons, just in case any woman needs one. Universities across North America now hold “Performative Male Contests” where guys compete to most authentically embody this archetype—which is its own beautiful irony.[^2]

These two performances — crude bro culture and enlightened feminist ally — appear opposite. But they’re two versions of the same problem: when masculinity becomes performative, women disappear as people and become props in men’s ongoing theater of gender anxiety.

The research backs this up.

In 2011, doctoral student Kathryn Gallagher and Prof. Dominic Parrott studied 338 heterosexual men, examining how adherence to hegemonic masculine norms relates to hostility toward women.[^3] They found a straight line: men who rigidly adhere to masculine norms — status (needing to win), toughness (never showing weakness), and antifemininity (distancing from anything feminine or gay) — experience “masculine gender role stress” (MGRS).

That stress creates hostility toward women. MGRS “reflects men’s tendency to experience the insecurity, defensiveness, personal weakness, and stressful discontent that may be a central motivation for hostility and aggression toward women.”[^4]

‘Toughness’ showed a direct relationship with hostility. But ‘status’ and ‘antifemininity’ worked through stress: men performing masculinity, stressed out by that performance, directed hostility toward women as a result.

This isn’t about individual bad actors. It’s structural. Hegemonic masculinity — emphasizing male dominance over women and “lesser” men — creates a system where performative masculinity is both compulsory and impossible. You’re always being watched, assessed, at risk of failure. When the performance fails, hostility emerges.

That Drawn Together clip diagnoses the desperate anxiety of the antifemininity norm. The character is so panicked about appearing gay that he performs absurdly exaggerated heterosexuality. The audience isn’t women; it’s another man. Women exist only as a means to prove Captain Hero’s straightness.

Take Dennis Reynolds in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and his D.E.N.N.I.S. System — an acronym for his scripted seduction technique.[^5] The show satirizes how women must be predictable, controllable props for the masculine performance to work. When women don’t follow the script, Dennis explodes. That rage is what the research predicts.

Women aren’t present as people. They’re concepts, systems, objects. The performance is for other men, to establish status and prove antifemininity. Women are the medium through which masculinity is performed, not the audience, and certainly not participants.

Now we have the 2025 performative male. On the surface, progress. The modern SNAG (Sensitive New Age Guy). Dr. Ashley Morgan, a masculinities expert, notes that where performative masculinity used to mean fast cars to impress other men, the contemporary version “looked more inclusive.”[^6] He’s read the feminist literature. He knows the language. He’s visibly rejecting toxic masculinity.

But trend forecaster J’Nae Phillips says it’s an act: “A performative male is less about who someone is than about how they curate and project masculinity in public — usually online. He is someone acutely aware that manhood is being watched, assessed, and consumed, and so he stages it.”[^7]

Watched, assessed, consumed. This is still performance under observation, still masculinity as something requiring constant proof. The stress hasn’t gone away — it’s just taken a different form.

Greg in Succession constantly code-switches between traditional power bro and sensitive ally, never certain which performance will work, using women as validators. That’s MGRS in an expensive suit.

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal takes this to its extreme: scripting and rehearsing authentic human connection. The show becomes a meditation on the impossibility of performed authenticity, masculine-control anxiety rendered as art.

Women now openly satirize this. The “guys who read Sally Rooney” TikTok trend mocks men who’ve learned that Sally Rooney is the new prop.[^8]

Performative Male Contests on college campuses are perhaps the most honest expression. Contestants are judged on how well they can perform inauthenticity. It’s masculinity eating itself.

This isn’t new. I went to Wheaton College in Massachusetts in the early ‘90s after it had just gone co-ed, wrapping up a century as an all-women’s college. The ratio was five to one, women to men, with an emphasis on being “differently coeducational” — recognizing how women lead, working with upperclass women as mentors, basically not being a male chauvinist pig. I saw early incarnations there, guys who’d learned exactly which tokens to deploy. I recall the Gentleman Callers, the male acapella group, performing “Sensitive New Age Guy” by Christine Lavin (1990). There’s a line — “Who cares about women’s orgasms?” — played for laughs with awkward silence. Even then, we knew the performance was a performance. We just didn’t have the language to diagnose why it was a problem.

I may have been guilty in those days of being a performative male myself. But here’s the complicated part: I suspect that acting the part, faking it until I made it, may have actually turned me into a decent human being who likes women. Which raises a question: is performance always a problem, or can it sometimes be the bridge? More on that later.

Both versions of masculine performance are fundamentally about what men can get from women, but also — maybe primarily — about proving something to other men.

This is what hegemonic masculinity actually means: not just male dominance over women, but establishing hierarchy among men. As R.W. Connell argues, hegemonic masculinity establishes “the dominance of men over women and other, less powerful men.”[^12] The performance is bidirectional — proving yourself to women while establishing position among men.

Performative Male Contests illustrate this perfectly. Women judge, but so do men. Winners gain masculine status — crowned the most performative, which becomes its own dominance. Even satirizing performative masculinity, men compete for recognition and status.

This explains the stress. Men aren’t just managing women’s responses — they’re managing other men’s assessments. The antifemininity norm isn’t just about distancing from women; it’s about avoiding subordination in the male hierarchy. Being seen as feminine or gay means relegation to the bottom. That’s why “Dude, I love the vagina” is so panicked.

For the traditional bro, sex with women is the currency of male status. For the contemporary performative male, enlightened sensitivity is currency, because it could lead to sex with women. Both are exchanged in an economy of masculine hierarchy. Women remain the medium through which men establish position.

Kristen Roupenious’s “Cat Person” became a phenomenon because it named something women recognized.[^10] Robert performs as the considerate, quirky guy. When Margot extracts herself, his performance collapses and hostility floods out: “Whore.”

Here’s the transactional logic: Robert performed consideration. He was nice. He put in the tokens for which the woman-machine is supposed to dispense sex. When Margot reveals herself as a person with agency rather than a vending machine, Robert experiences it as violation. He put in his good-guy tokens. Where’s his reward?

Both bros and performative males share a fundamentally transactional view. The bro is honest — he’ll tell you he’s owed sex for drinks. The performative male has learned this sounds bad, so he developed a more sophisticated token system: reading the right books, saying the right things about feminism, carrying tampons, performing emotional availability. Same logic. Insert enough good-guy tokens, receive sex. When the transaction doesn’t complete, both respond with hostility — just expressed differently.

Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman ups the stakes.[^11] Jerry, the “good one,” has the most sophisticated token system. Years of good-guy tokens — the loyal friend, the nice guy, the one who wasn’t actively participating in the assault. He believes this ledger should protect him. When it doesn’t, when Cassie reveals she’s kept a different ledger, his mask drops. The transaction he thought he’d completed was void from the start.

You don’t need to actually like women to use them as currency in the masculine status economy. In fact, liking women as people — recognizing their full humanity, autonomy, right to be unpredictable — would interfere with the performance.

If women are vending machines dispensing sex and affection in response to correct tokens, they can’t also be full people with complex desires and unpredictable responses. The transactional framework requires predictability — insert good-guy tokens, receive sex. But humans aren’t predictable. They have bad days. They change their minds. They’re attracted to some people and not others for reasons having nothing to do with tokens deposited.

Whether you’re inserting crude bro tokens (drinks, compliments) or sophisticated progressive tokens (Sally Rooney, tampons, correct pronouns), you’re operating on the assumption that correct inputs yield predictable outputs. You’re treating women as machines rather than people.

The traditional bro needs women conquerable to prove himself to other men. The contemporary performative male needs women to validate his enlightened status, but that validation is tallied in masculine competition with other men. He can’t afford for women to reject the performance, because that means losing status in the hierarchy of who’s most evolved. When a woman rejects you, you’re experiencing a status threat in the male hierarchy. Especially when other men witness your failure.[^9]

The most depressing implication: men may not like women as people because genuinely liking women as people would require abandoning the performance that establishes status among men. For many men, that status — that position in the masculine hierarchy — feels more essential than any individual relationship.

Here’s where I complicate my ruminations on performance. I attended Wheaton at a five-to-one female-to-male ratio, in an environment explicitly “differently coeducational.” I might have been guilty of being a performative male myself. But I suspect that acting the part, faking it until I made it, may have actually helped me become a good person.

So maybe the question isn’t whether performance is always bad. Maybe it’s about what happens next. Does the performance remain a calculated strategy for status and sex, or does it become a bridge to something more genuine? Is there a difference between a man still counting good-guy tokens and tallying what he’s owed, versus a man who performed long enough that the performance dissolved into actual respect and empathy?

I don’t have a clean answer. What I know: if performance is going to be a bridge rather than a trap, it can’t be performed for an outcome. You can’t perform sensitivity as a strategy to get laid and expect it to transform you into someone who sees women as people. The transaction itself prevents the transformation.

The alternative isn’t a better performance. It’s sitting with the discomfort of not knowing if you’re “doing it right.” It’s accepting that there’s no correct way to prove your masculinity because maybe masculinity doesn’t need constant proof. It’s engaging with women not as audiences or validators but as people — which includes accepting when they’re not interested, when they’re having their own shit going on, when they find you annoying or wrong or unattractive.

Women’s approval is not the goal. Mutual recognition is. That’s not something you can perform your way into. You can’t rehearse it, script it, or accessorize your way there.

But maybe you can stumble toward it by performing in an environment that doesn’t reward the performance with what toxic masculinity promises: sexual conquest as status currency, dominance over other men, protection from vulnerability. Maybe where the performance explicitly isn’t supposed to get you those things, it might slowly become something else.

But that transformation requires giving up the ledger. Accepting that tokens put in — crude or enlightened — don’t entitle you to anything. Recognizing when women see through the performance and being willing to let them call it out. Eventually, forgetting you’re performing at all.

Reducing MGRS requires actually challenging hegemonic masculinity, not performing a more palatable version. That means examining why masculine status feels like something requiring constant establishment through dominance and competition. It means asking why antifemininity is so central that the mere suggestion of femininity or gayness creates panic — because it threatens your position among men. It means questioning toughness.

And it means confronting that masculine competition uses women as the medium of exchange. As long as men primarily perform for each other, using women as currency in status competitions, women will be treated as props. The bro and the sensitive guy aren’t really different — they’re just competing in different masculine markets, but women are the commodity traded in both.

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Connell, R.W. Masculinities. 2nd ed. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Created by Rob McElhenney. FX, 2005–present.

Gallagher, Kathryn E., and Dominic J. Parrott. “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes Toward Women? The Influence of Hegemonic Male Role Norms and Masculine Gender Role Stress.” Violence Against Women 17, no. 5 (2011): 568-583.

“Guys Who Read Sally Rooney.” TikTok trend. 2024-2025.

“Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons: The ‘Performative Male’ Attracts Attention.” The Guardian, August 22, 2025.

“Wooldoor Sockbat’s Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!” Drawn Together, season 3, episode 2, Comedy Central, October 12, 2006.

Promising Young Woman. Directed by Emerald Fennell. Focus Features, 2020.

The Rehearsal. Created by Nathan Fielder. HBO, 2022–present.

Roupenian, Kristen. “Cat Person.” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

Succession. Created by Jesse Armstrong. HBO, 2018–2023.

“Wooldoor Sockbat’s Giggle-Wiggle Funny Tickle Non-Traditional Progressive Multicultural Roundtable!” Drawn Together, season 3, episode 2, Comedy Central, October 12, 2006.

“Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons: The ‘Performative Male’ Attracts Attention,” The Guardian, August 22, 2025.

Kathryn E. Gallagher and Dominic J. Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes Toward Women? The Influence of Hegemonic Male Role Norms and Masculine Gender Role Stress,” Violence Against Women 17, no. 5 (2011): 568-583.

Gallagher and Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes,” 570.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, created by Rob McElhenney, FX, 2005–present.

Ashley Morgan, quoted in “Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons,” The Guardian.

J’Nae Phillips, quoted in “Labubus, The Bell Jar and Tampons,” The Guardian.

“Guys Who Read Sally Rooney,” TikTok trend, 2024-2025.

R.W. Connell, Masculinities, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 77.

Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017.

Promising Young Woman, directed by Emerald Fennell, Focus Features, 2020.

Gallagher and Parrott, “What Accounts for Men’s Hostile Attitudes,” 572.