Why Masculinity Feels Fake

When people say modern men feel fake, or that they’re “performative”, it usually sounds like a complaint about authenticity. As if there’s a real version of a man buried somewhere under the tote bags and iced matcha waiting to be rediscovered. But the idea of a “real” man is precisely the problem. To call masculinity fake isn’t to insult it, but to recognise that what we call masculinity is already a fantasy, a kind of scaffolding that covers something unbearable underneath. In psychoanalytic terms, it’s called a, fantasmatic frame. A structure that makes reality livable by giving shape to what would otherwise be an impossible contradiction. Like Halloween, it lets us play with danger while pretending we’re in control.

For example, think about the story many of us are told about how we came into the world. As children, some of us are told that a stork delivers babies. Nobody really knows how this works exactly; it’s absurd, but illuminating. At some point we realise that our parents must have copulated, but the story spares us from confronting the traumatic fact of sexuality too soon. We reorganise it into a story we can live with. The stork becomes a fantasy that papers over what’s too real to face directly. Masculinity functions in much the same way. It isn’t a denial of sex or power or vulnerability. It’s a way of making the chaos of desire coherent, turning something raw and unsettling into a story about what men are supposed to be.

Lacan argued that there is no such thing as a sexual relationship, meaning that biology alone doesn’t explain how men and women relate. Nature has to be supplemented by a fantasy. Masculinity and femininity are ideological categories that fill the gap where nature falls short. They are stories that teach us how to desire and be desirable as well as how to keep functioning. The conservative view insists that these categories are natural and eternal, that men and women are distinct by design. But this insistence is itself cultural. It’s a defence against the terror of losing the coordinates that make one’s identity possible. To challenge those categories feels like an attack not just on an idea, but on the self that depends on it.

This is why masculinity feels like it’s in crisis. Not because men are being feminised or left behind, but because the fantasy that once made being a man make sense no longer holds. When the stories that sustain identity begin to crumble, people grasp at anything that feels solid. The new discourse about the “performative male” online is really a symptom of that breakdown. When a man is mocked for enjoying something coded as feminine, it’s not his tote bag that threatens people; it’s what it reveals about the fragility of the fantasy. If masculinity has always been a performance, then there is no backstage to retreat to.

Conservatism offers a simple fix. It tells men that the problem is feminisation and that the solution is to return to tradition. Reassert the fantasy, tighten the script, restore the head of the household. The left, meanwhile, often fails to provide any symbolic alternative, preferring to ridicule the very idea of masculinity rather than reconstruct it. And so men find themselves suspended between irony and despair. Too self-aware to fully believe in the old myths, but too lost to live without them.

Žižek once said that men have to believe in masculinity because women don’t believe in femininity. Women, he argues, know that femininity is overdetermined by masculine desire, and that what is called “feminine” is often simply what props up the male ego. That insight can be seen as dangerous, because it exposes masculinity as dependent on belief rather than essence. If masculinity is a story men tell themselves to make sense of their relationship to desire, then woman is the figure who can puncture that story. This is why she’s both idealised and feared. She’s the point where the fantasy can unravel.

The irony is that men are often the biggest victims of this structure. To be a man means to uphold an ideal that you secretly suspect isn’t real, but which you can’t afford to abandon either. Any deviation is punished by other men, who see in your deviation the threat of their own collapse. So men police each other, accusing one another of being fake, theatrical or performative. As the evidence piles up that masculinity was a costume all along, they start to mock the others outfit. The tragedy is that this costume is what gives them permission to exist in the first place.

When people say there’s a crisis of masculinity, what they really mean is that the symbolic order that once sustained men has lost its credibility. The old scripts no longer work, but no new ones have taken their place. The answer isn’t to double down on the old fantasy, nor to discard it altogether, but to recognise it for what it is: a necessary fiction that can be rewritten. Masculinity is not a timeless truth but a story we keep telling. And like all stories, it can evolve.

To critique masculinity, then, is not to attack men. It’s to give them a way out. The goal isn’t to feminise men or erase difference but to allow new possibilities for what manhood could mean. Maybe being a man no longer needs to be about domination or stoicism or fear of softness. Maybe it can include tenderness, curiosity and care. If masculinity is fake, that’s not a reason to despair. It’s a reason to imagine. Because what’s fake can be changed, rewritten and lived out differently.

Perhaps that’s the task for men today. Not to prove that masculinity is real, but to stop mistaking the performance for the man.