The Performative Brown Student: How a Satirical Social Media Trend Highlights a Certain Kind of Toxicity on Campus

If you’ve scrolled through Instagram reels or TikTok in the past few months, chances are you’ve seen the trend: creators mock the performative male, the guy who insists on explaining Nietzsche at parties, dons Labubu keychains as a staple accessory, and “inconspicuously” peruses feminist literature while sipping matcha and listening to underground artists with wired headphones. The satire is sharp, funny, and has taken social media by storm. Some creators have even taken to organizing performative contests, where individuals lean heavily into the performative tropes in a lighthearted and humorous competition. 

Being a student at Brown, I have consumed an abundance of these satirical social posts with amusement, but I also felt they hit incredibly close to home. I felt that many of these mocked behaviors, while drastically exaggerated to highlight their lucridity, echoed similar mannerisms and their accompanying pretension and toxicity sometimes found within the Brown community. 

At a school where intellectual freedom and self-expression are prized, it’s no surprise that a certain kind of “performance” emerges. Brown’s campus, course offerings, and admissions foster an environment of incredibly interesting and intellectual individuals and subsequent cultural embrace of the niche, the underground, and the lesser known. We exist on a campus where future engineers can fall in love with courses on Egyptology and economists can dive into contemporary fiction, creating an education system where individuals leave with a diverse and well-rounded accumulation of knowledge and skillsets. 

The Toxic Culture of the Performative Male Expectation

But at times, I’ve found that this culture can be taken to an extreme and lead to social environments oozing with social pressures to seem interesting and unique in ways that lead students to feel ashamed of their hobbies, tastes, and self-presentation. I’ve had numerous interactions where I’ve felt embarrassed or self-conscious about my interests and enjoyments and how they appeared to some of the student body. I felt pressured to defend myself over things like the clothes I like or activities I participate in — things that should be trivial and unimportant. I’ve had conversations with peers surprised that I would enjoy certain artists or have certain interests in a way that felt like they had discounted me as an uninteresting or basic person due to how I outwardly present myself.  And I’ve had discussions with other students with similar experiences. 

What makes  the performative male trope interesting isn’t just the humor—it’s how it calls out toxicity cloaked as charm and passion. Existing in a way where niche tastes give way to pretension perpetuates an environment that silences or diminishes others’ interests should they fall more into the mainstream. This creates small but real fractures in our campus culture and an undercurrent of pressure to meet the expectations of an interesting Brunonian.Of course, satire only works if it exaggerates a truth. The point isn’t to demonize genuine passions and interests, but to laugh at the ways they can highlight an ego that can exist on campus. By recognizing the performative male and accompanying behaviors, Brown’s student body can embrace all interests and passions, both mainstream and niche, to become a more accepting and close community.

• Brown University
• college
• contest
• feminist
• labubu
• performative male