Let's read between the lies

Men are being mocked online for ‘performatively reading’ as a form of literary seduction. Lydia Spencer-Elliott tries to find out if blokes are really wielding books in order to get laid

- By Lydia Spencer-Elliott

Meet the new performative male, now the current subject of online mockery. He's carrying a Daunt Books tote bag, there's a copy of Intermezzo by Sally Rooney in his back pocket, and he's walking his matcha latte and Birkenstock Boston clogs all the way to a reformer pilates class. Over the past month, this arguably modern evolution of the hipster has been lovingly ridiculed in memes and tweets for allegedly using progressive women's hobbies to lure them into a romance they'll almost certainly regret when his knowledge of fashionable fiction runs out.

This type of young man generally frequents arty areas of London, like Hackney or Dalston. But they roam as far as New York, Seattle and Canada, where a performative male competition took place in Toronto last week to take the modern archetype to its highest of heights. Participants were adorned with film cameras, thrifted shirts, wired headphones, and copies of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir. “I just get so mad when I think about period cramps,” one of them raged in ironic tribute to the faux-feminists around every corner.

Twenty-nine-year-old Lily* has, sadly, fallen foul of such posers on numerous occasions. She says she once clocked a male colleague at her co-working space bringing in a “stack” of books to use as “intellectual set dressing” rather than cracking the spines. Perhaps more troublingly, a guy she dated shiftily placed a book she told him she was reading at a feminist book club (All About Love by bell hooks) on his bed when she went round. “He said he was ‘rereading it’ but didn't have anything to say about it,” she laments.