By: Jonah Lazar, SFU Student

The night of September 4 saw dozens of Gen Zers adorned with tote bags, carrying vinyls and books, wired earphones, Labubu keychains, and menstrual products, gathered at Fortune Sound Club in Chinatown. Hosted by IN-D-DANCE for free, these were the competitors for the grand title of Vancouver’s Most Performative Man. Along with winning the hearts of all who spectated the competition, the winner was also presented with a matcha kit, a copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath, and, of course, a Clairo vinyl.

If you don’t know what all of this means, you probably don’t spend a lot of time online. Esther Tóthóva, organizer and club promoter at Fortune Sound, told The Peak she drew inspiration for this competition from the growing internet culture surrounding the performative man meme. “We have been seeing the trend all over and wanted to find a way to bring it to Vancouver, and do it our way,” she said. 

The performative man represents a new archetype recognized in society, especially among Gen Z and those acquainted with their online spaces. Like the hipster trend of the early 2010s, where men in plaid shirts, man buns, fedoras, and suspenders crowded local craft breweries, the identity label is a reaction to a wave of men seemingly straying from gendered expectations of traditional masculinity. 

As Guinevere Unterbrink, one of the organizers of New York’s performative man contest, put it: “It’s men who are trying to cater to what they think women who are feminist like.” This is a criticism that is frequently made of performative men, as many people believe their superficial interest in feminism actually does nothing more than alienate themselves from the women who they are so keen to impress. Their over-eagerness to be perceived as sensitive and trustworthy often comes across as aggressively insincere. 

Almost as soon as the term emerged in the cultural zeitgeist, it became a trend to poke fun at it, especially in a self-deprecating way, by dressing up as a performative man in public and creating tutorials to help others maximize their “performativity.” This eventually evolved into the first wave of performative man contests, which took place at the start of August, mainly in public places like city parks, with the first one believed to have taken place in Seattle. Similar events have been popping up globally into the start of September, with cities such as New York, San Francisco, Berlin and Jakarta having their own iterations. 

“The turnout honestly exceeded our expectations [ . . . ] the fact that ours drew a crowd into a music venue on a Thursday was very special,” Tóthóva described the night at Fortune. “Quite a few women competed for the title, which made the night feel way more expansive and culturally relevant (because who knows these men better than the women who tried to date them, ha!)”

Similarly, on September 20, the sapphic dating/friendship app Cherry FLFM hosted a “performative lesbian contest” at Sunset Beach, and UBC students hosted their own iteration of the performative man contest. Clearly, performative identity seems to resonate in many communities.

Irony and sarcasm have been a hallmark of our generation’s humour and ways of relating to each other. This trend often represents the confusing tension between serious critique and a fun ironic meme that has everyone hopping on the bandwagon. But if identity is performance anyways, is downplaying men reading feminist literature and embracing sensitivity counterproductive? Or perhaps these contests are a way of popularizing these aspects through a trend, while being aware of the ones who take it too far and appropriate feminism for personal gain?

While the performative man contests have only been around for a couple months, the trend of young people meeting up for ironic, appearance-based contests has a history that began last October. 

Lookalike contests took the internet by storm last fall. These were originally popularised by a Timothée Chalamet lookalike competition in New York last October, before sweeping around the globe with contests popping up in Ireland, Brazil, England, and, of course, most major cities in the USA, according to Vulture. These pop-up contests often had hundreds of spectators and competitors, even attracting the attention of some of the subjects of the lookalike competitions themselves.

These two trends have highlighted an interesting phenomenon which is becoming more commonplace among our generation — a grassroots mission to create and establish third places where young people can find a sense of belonging and form community. 

Since the start of COVID-19, third places — which are areas like cafés, public squares, parks, and more — have been consistently shut down, with online forms of connection, such as social media, seeing large gains in both usage and popularity among young people. Social theorist Dr. Sarah Stein Lubrano writes in her 2025 essay, The Perils of Social Atrophy, “Public green spaces are being shut down around the world. In the UK, a pub closes each day; music venues are similarly dwindling [ . . . ] clubs and associations are [also] at a low point.”

Isolation from one another has been more and more prominent among young people for the last few years. For example, in 2023, the American Psychological Association reported that young people spend a massive 45% more time on their own than people of the same age did in 2010, which is a strong indicator of our dwindling social lives.

It can be hard to look beyond the rather harrowing statistics of our generation’s physical and social isolation from one another. However, it also means online cultures have become so intricately developed and solidified in the lives of so many young people that memes are beginning to swell beyond the confines of the internet and build physical community around them. 

This brings about an interesting new development in the way that Gen Zers socialise and form community — a splicing of online, ironic meme culture with a genuine interest in feeling a sense of belonging within a physical community. Perhaps our generation’s days of solitude and isolation are finding ways to fade, ushering in a new wave of genuine attempts to build community and sociality, masqueraded behind our familiar veil of irony. 

While it does seem as though the performative man contest trend is beginning to crest the wave of internet popularity, it seems as though this sort of event — whether it be lookalikes contests or personifications of internet memes — are here to stay.