“I spend most of my time in the locally owned, vegan bookstore and coffee shop,” Lina Kern ‘29 claimed at Wednesday’s impromptu Performative Male Manipulator contest, held on Cruz Plaza.
Two people laid out a blanket to watch the contest, followed by an audience of about two dozen students. This type of contest has been circulating on TikTok recently, and the University of Georgia had a similar event held on its campus on Tuesday.
From 6 p.m. to around 6:40 p.m., roughly two dozen people gathered in the fading sunlight as six contestants made their case as to why they fit the archetype of being a performative and manipulative male. In an August article, The New York Times claimed that some dead giveaways for the so-called performative male was their inclination to use tote bags and listen to Clairo through wired headphones. On Cruz, to fit the aesthetic, tote bags were slung on shoulders and wired headphones dutifully plugged in.
Credit for the idea was nonexistent. Nobody in the crowd knew who had posted the initial invitation on Yik Yak, a messaging portal that allows people within a certain geographic area to communicate anonymously, and no group was mentioned on the social media post. Indeed, as it grew closer to the 6 p.m. start time, students stood off to the side of the lawn, waiting to see if the invitation had been a ruse.
But despite the mystery, Jina Atahakhanh ‘25 helped take the lead on how the competition would be run after first arriving only for the show. Slowly, judges were picked out of the crowd and they determined the rules of the contest on the spot. Because “we don’t know who organized this event,” Finn Curry ‘26, who was also merely an observer at first, said, “I ended up as one of the judges.”
Through three rounds, the contestants were asked to explain the intricacies and origins of their outfits, as well as what music they listened to. Thrifted pants and second-hand accessories were the favorites du jour. Baggy jeans’ belt loops often dangled keychains by a carabiner to sell the judges on the authenticity of their performance. The juxtaposition between those ideas, however, seemed to be beside the point of the exercise.
“So, what is a performative male?” one member in the back of the audience wondered aloud. No answer came. Confused looks came from onlookers who had happened to pass by the event and decided to stop by. Even the contestants had trouble hammering down concrete details of their adopted personas, but their explanations all followed similar patterns.
“A performative male manipulator makes himself look really safe to women,” Curry said.
“I’ve just seen the trends online,” Vincent Pandey ‘27 said. “You look up ‘What are the archetypes of what women generally like’ and just try to be a shallow, watered-down version of that, I guess.”
Vincent Pandey ’27 shows off his cassette player in Wednesday’s “performative male contest.” Pandey went on to win the competition, dedicating his first place finish to his mother, grandmother and all women around him.
Jacob Serrano ‘27 was more reluctant to identify the inspiration for his costume, which consisted of a button-down, short-sleeved shirt and a genetics textbook that was his lone prop for the contest. The book, he explained, was written in part because of research conducted by Rosalind Franklin, who played a crucial role in discovering DNA’s structure. To the people he modeled his outfit after, Serrano would only cryptically say, “You know who you are.”
The second part of the competition was a test of the contestant’s dedication to female musicians, with the assumption that the more retro a contestant’s music player was, the more notoriety they received from the judges and audience alike.
At one point, an argument broke out about how, if someone listens to women artists on a platform such as Spotify or Apple Music, they are not supporting women properly. The logic behind contestant Jaehun Park’s rebuttal was that he believed a disproportionate amount of revenue from listeners is given to multibillion-dollar corporations instead of the artists themselves.
The following contestants clarified that they only listen to live shows, underground artists and specifically music on vinyl. When a contestant mentioned listening to Fiona Apple, presumably the top male manipulator artist, the whole crowd cheered.
The judges debated, playing Clairo as background music, and then announced the winners: third place, Park; second place, Kern; and in first place, Pandey. Upon accepting his laurels, Pandey announced that he was dedicating his performance to his mother, grandmother and all the women around him. To finish the evening, an attendee shouted that women were the real winners, eliciting one final roar.
Gabriel Kopp ’26 is double majoring in Journalism and Law and Public Policy at Mercer University. He has written for The Cluster since he started at Mercer, and currently works as Editor-in-Chief. When he isn’t working on a Washington Post crossword, he enjoys going for runs around Macon and reading The New York Times or the AJC while sipping coffee.