Article about how to meet more men:
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 ( A ll About Love by bell hooks) on his bed when she went round. “He said he was ‘re-reading it’ but didn’t have anything to say about it
” she laments. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. Advertisement. Maira
34
is deeply suspicious of men who read in public and thinks she can spot performative males a mile off. Her go-to tells are if they’re sitting in a “prominent seat” in a coffee shop and haven’t made it through their first chapter. Her examples are borderline cartoonish
one bloke was walking around with a Truman Capote text sticking out of his back pocket to ensure the title was on show. Another was crossing a busy road with his eyes glued to the fifth page of a spanking new novel. “I thought
‘You decided to read this book on this street
on this very pavement
’” says Maira. “We’re all crossing the road and you’re endangering us all.” I ask Maira if she’s ever accepted a date with such a man
as the internet suggests is their goal
and she regrettably admits she has. “One bought me a book on the first date
” she sighs. “It was by an Instagram poet
RH Sin
a sweet gesture
but he was rude when I told him I wasn’t interested.” I look up said poet’s work and it reads like an abridged Drake verse: “In the crib because who I want ain’t in the streets” is one whole poem. As horrifying and hilarious as these stories are
there’s a twinge in me that thinks perhaps the internet’s recent assumption that “men can’t read” is a little unfair. For a long time
women couldn’t wear football shirts or Pink Floyd merch without being labelled a “fake fan” or a “pick me girl”. The performative male accusations are similar in the sense we find it instinctively unfathomable that a straight man could want to read fiction or go to an expensive pilates class on Sunday morning – unless they’re angling for a shag.
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FAQ
