Why I'd never date a man who carries a tote bag

Telegraph

2 days ago

I spot him immediately, sipping an oat milk matcha outside the West Hollywood Erewhon (a grocery store-cum-church, where people in Spandex genuflect at the altar of $19 'Goddess Smoothies'). He's plugged into something, has a book tucked under his arm, and – it goes without saying – a tote bag slung over his right shoulder. The props will vary, but Performative Male (PM) wouldn't be caught dead without his tote.
If you're not yet familiar with the Performative Male, fear not: he'll be coming to a high street near you any day now. It's only ever a matter of time before anything doing the rounds in the United States – anything deserving of a full page in The New York Times ' Style pages – lands on our shores, and out here in Los Angeles, the summer of 2025 has been defined (and blighted) by two ubiquitous eyesores: Performative Males and Labubus.
Sometimes, God help me, the PM will have a Labubu hanging from his New Yorker tote. Not that he's ever read The New Yorker. Or indeed Joan Didion, even though he'll be walking around with her The Year of Magical Thinking on display. He's probably not listening to anything on his EarPods, he doesn't even like matcha, and his glasses are non-prescription. Because that's the thing about this new social media archetype: everything about him is fraudulent. And maybe that, The New York Times suggests, partly explains his rise? We are, after all, living in a time of peak insincerity.
It would be wrong to say that PM is completely empty, however. Because there is an agenda there, and that is to appeal to progressive women. 'He is,' explains The New York Times, 'in short, the antithesis of the toxic man,' and has 'curated his aesthetic in a way that he thinks might render him more likeable' to a certain type of female.
How successful he has been in that aim is a moot point. Personally, I'd rather eat a hair sandwich than date a man who has deliberately turned himself into 'a walking mood board of on-trend markers for softness, stylishness and a feminist leaning that he may or may not actually possess'.
Certainly, he has become a much-ridiculed meme on TikTok, where women will enjoy posting stealth content of Performative Males out in the wild (and imagining what it's like to date them), and videos tagged with #performativemale have been viewed more than 28 million times. In Seattle and New York, PM competitions have even been held over the summer, with hundreds of people gathering to judge which of the contestants was the best example of the species.
Posers, we used to call them. And if we're in the novelty persona game, I wonder whether we might soon be ready to bring back another oldie but goodie? Masculine Man.