How to Save Men from Performative Masculinity

Grifters are preying on lost young men—here's how to show them a better path

Performative masculinity dominates the internet and cable news because it’s not doing anything useful. It sits around and streams all day. It’s all talk.

The strongest men I know may deadlift 500 pounds, throw a discus hundreds of feet, or run ultramarathons. Yet their true strength lies in their honesty, caring, and integrity. The men I know who want to be strong and tough—but who are not—are loud, defensive, arrogant, and mean.

Recent events show we remain in a cultural moment where young men are feeling lonely, lost, and lacking purpose. They gravitate toward tribalism, extremism, or get lost in dark corners of the internet.

Media outlets love to talk about the crisis. The rightfully highlight showing declining educational and work attainment, increasing loneliness, and rising political polarization. But what they miss is the solution. It’s not a “Joe Rogan of the left.” It’s not to pretend there are no differences between men and women. The solution is to call out performative masculinity for what it is—a massive grift—and replace it with the real thing.

At the extremes of performative, internet masculinity you find people like Andrew Tate, who draws in young men with promises of riches, women, and superiority over minorities. Slightly less extreme are the alpha bros who suggest real men are dominant, take what they want, and overpower others. These people love to have big, overpriced conferences.

At the other end of the spectrum you have those who call anything related to traditional ideas of manhood “toxic.” Or a new breed of leftist streamers—a different message but still hollow, the sole goal being to capture attention.

It’s easy to dismiss this as an overblown part of the culture war. But it points to something deeper: Whenever you see a bunch of shallow influencers herding around a topic, it’s because there’s an audience to exploit.

That audience is lost young men who are longing for a purpose and path. That purpose and path can be performative nonsense, or it can be substance and usefulness. Whichever one wins out will have an enormous impact on the health of young men and the health of society.

Performative masculinity is chest-thumping, loud, arrogant, brash, makes fun of the weak, objectifies women, is deceitful, and chaotic. Genuine masculinity is humble, quiet, confident, kind, protects the weak, useful, respects women, honest, and calm.

Let’s Talk About Biological Realities

On average men (especially young men) have more testosterone than women. People think testosterone is all about sex drive and physical agression, but more than anything, testosterone is associated with a strong drive for status. Understanding this is key to understanding the crisis of modern masculinity.

There are two main routes to status:

1. You can gain it through competence and respect.

2. You can gain it through rote power and domination.

If men don’t feel they have avenues for the former, they all too easily default to the latter. It explains the rise of the manosphere and perpetually online grifters.

Performative masculinity is about converting anxiety and loneliness into anger and tribal loyalty. It’s about turning a young man’s real feeling of being lost into a superficial feeling of being dominant, even if that dominance comes from bullying, trolling, and demeaning people.

Better Alternatives

We need better alternatives—paths that provide young men with quality ways to meet their foundational psychological drives. We need to model what it means to be a good human for half of the population that has higher testosterone than the other half.

Instead of harping on grievances, crushing your enemies, and becoming a high-T lion—or whatever other pseudoscientific garbage is on the internet—we need to create mental models for masculinity that include the following traits:

• Being a good friend, father, husband, brother.

• Having integrity and honor.

• Caring about others.

• Pursuing meaningful work in diverse fields.

• Striving for intrinsic excellence.

• Showing up consistently.

• Being a protector of the weak.

• Showcasing your physicality in competitive pursuits (if you are so inclined), and doing so within the rules of those pursuits.

Too many young men are being fed the junk food variety of masculinity. They are being forced to choose between the dead-beat dad or the the magic bullet, dominate others, get rich quick variety. Clearly, we’re not doing a good enough job championing a healthier version, one that ultimately leads to more success.

So many of the influencers in the manosphere are losers who don’t have anything going on in their real lives, which is precisely why they spend all day streaming on Twitch. Instead of telling the men consuming their content that they need to get offline, do something useful, and build a life, they tell them the opposite: that everyone is out to get you, that the world is against you, that “I’ve got the answer” and you need to stay here tuning into my content to get it. The masculinity streamer’s entire business model is predicated on turning men who come across his content into zombies who watch it all day.

If there’s any battle, it’s of a performative masculinity that benefits nobody except the grifters who are peddling it versus a more genuine and authentic masculinity that benefits everyone, men and women alike.

It is absolutely crucial to win this battle. It will take many role models stepping up. It will take a massive reversal where we celebrate real men, leading real lives, doing real things, in the real world.

Good Men

It’s not that there aren’t incredible men. There are millions of incredible men.

The challenge is that they are too busy living their lives and being useful to sit around and prey on young people’s fears all day.

They are coaching youth sports.
They are volunteering in their community.
They are playing with their children.
They are mentoring at local gyms.
They are starting small businesses.
They are supporting their wives.

We need to elevate this kind of man. We all need paths to pursue personal excellence. We need to call out the bullshit and grift and show men a model they can aspire toward and how they should act to get there.

It’s true at all levels of society: teachers, coaches, pastors, athletes, musicians, people in prominent places of leadership.

Everyone has a part to play. I’m doing my best. Please do yours.