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The tote-slinging, matcha-drinking, maybe-reading caricature of the performative<\/a> male<\/a> is alive and well in New York City. As I write this article in the back of a cafe on the Lower East Side, observing the other customers as part of my creative process, it\u2019s clear the men of my hometown share my enthusiasm for books and iced beverages. Still, it\u2019s hard to judge people for reading in public when I also brought my laptop to do work away from home, and it\u2019s hard to accuse them of \u201cperforming\u201d as they actively flip the pages. Performative reading is an internet-born<\/a> concept usually regulated to the online world; posting yourself reading is performance, \u201cactually reading\u201d is not. The combination of both, however, may not be as bad as people make it sound.<\/p>\n We live in an age of dropping literacy rates<\/a> and an increased dependency on generative artificial intelligence<\/a> to both digest and produce written content. Competing against the allure of an immersive online world that offers instant gratification, reading has become a hobby associated with a certain cachet \u2014 even if it is for simple enjoyment and not out of intellectual curiosity. It\u2019s no surprise, then, that the nepo-baby types \u2014 which one imagines as the face of modern \u201cinfluencing\u201d<\/a> \u2014 see the appeal of a pseudo-casual selfie with their latest read. Being a \u201creader\u201d sends a message: \u201cI am cultured, even as the ever-elusive concept of culture becomes swallowed up by social media<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n The paradox, of course, is that the intellectualism they strive for is the antithesis of Instagram carousels and 15-second TikTok videos. Being \u201ccultured\u201d is an amorphous trait meant to arise out of genuine, self-fulfilling interest in the arts. With instantaneous access to products galore, we are encouraged to orient our identities around consumption, but artistic taste is too personal to acquire in this manner. By contrast, social media is, by its very nature, all projection and blunt personal branding, a loose imitation of something meant to look like real life. This is OK. Using the arts to self-aggrandize isn\u2019t even particular to reading; the same tension lives on in museum photo-ops or the reduction of artists like The Smiths<\/a> and Clairo<\/a> into buzzword personality signifiers. But posing with a book still suggests an interiority beyond what the consumer of online content has immediate access to: \u201cNot only do I glamorously lead your ideal life, I also read Russian literature while you use ChatGPT to summarize a five-page paper for class.\u201d<\/p>\n All the same, it\u2019s not the individual influencer\u2019s fault that literacy has become another lofty personality-brand checkbox. Even the average performative man posting himself reading Virginia Woolf isn\u2019t the reason nobody reads classics anymore. We can\u2019t rewind to a pre-social media age. Instead, the next step in the right direction might be to make it clear that these projections of reading aren\u2019t actually performative. Using books as props in the curated theater of social media makes reading seem like playacting for the pretentious and the posers of the online world. If influencers talked about their books instead of just pouting next to them<\/a>, their fans might feel more inclined to see what all the fuss is about. The only problem with performative reading, in short, is that it\u2019s too transparently fake. These performers need to put up a more convincing front if they want to come across as authentically intellectual. With a more sincere show of reading, the performative male influencer might woo more women while influencing others to pick up a book.<\/p>\n