On TikTok and Instagram, a familiar set of images keeps surfacing: a boy sipping matcha, earbuds dangling from an old pair of wired headphones, a tote bag slung casually over his shoulder. He might be reading a book on feminism in public, or posing with a full drink he’ll never finish. To a growing number of teens, this is the new face of a “performative man.”
High school newspapers from California to Michigan are picking up on the phenomenon, pointing out that these carefully curated behaviors often have less to do with genuine interests and more to do with impressing girls, in particular, winning the approval of strangers online.
At Saratoga High School in California, Bill Huang, himself a boy, frames the trend as the latest stop in a revolving door of male stereotypes. He remembers the days of “sigma” and “alpha” male culture — domineering, muscular, emotionally repressed — and sees today’s matcha-drinking, tote-bag-carrying persona as the inverse, but no more authentic.
“What’s the point of posting yourself as someone you’re not, just to grab the attention of strangers?” he asks, warning his peers that the likes and validation they get are for a façade, not their real selves.
A thousand miles away in Frisco, Texas, at Liberty High School, Lily Brock offers a more sympathetic but no less critical take. She admits everyone is performative to a degree. “It’s basically the default thing for the entire human species to want to be liked,” she writes. But she then argues that some boys go so far that they lose their own identities.
What bothers her most, she says, is the suspicion the stereotype now creates: When she sees a guy drinking matcha or carrying a tote bag, she has to wonder, does he really like it, or is it just an act? “It makes people afraid to enjoy these things out of fear of being made fun of,” she observes.
In Ann Arbor, Michigan, Salem Dinh situates the conversation within a broader cultural context. With feminism gaining mainstream traction in recent years, she sees more boys outwardly supporting equality, a shift she welcomes, at least when it’s sincere.
But the “performative man” trend, she argues, reveals a darker side: men adopting feminist rhetoric or interests not as allies, but as suitors. “The idea of men only contributing to female liberation to try to make themselves more appealing to women is a statement I never thought I would say,” she writes. To her, this hollows out the movement, reducing girls’ value to whether or not they date men who claim to “get it.”
The three student essays form a cross-country chorus, telling us that teens notice the way performance culture shapes how young men present themselves online and how authenticity itself gets policed. Whether it’s alpha-male posturing or matcha-and-tote-bag irony, the deeper concern is the same: when trends dictate identity, the self gets lost in the performance.
“Feminism is drinking a matcha latte in the morning with some avocado toast on the side,” Salem muses from Ann Arbor, “and then maybe a whole bag of chips because who cares about what I eat.” Her point is not about the drink or the music, but about living without apology. And it’s a reminder, echoed in different ways from Saratoga to Frisco to Ann Arbor and beyond, that being genuine online and off matters more than any aesthetic ever could.
