UL has officially crowned its own resident ‘Performative Male’ after an impromptu campus competition drew a crowd of nearly 200 students this past Wednesday.
Nineteen participants turned up outside the University of Limerick’s main building, with the crowd circling the Brown Thomas statue between 2pm and 3pm. Contestants flaunted the best of Bershka buys and bestowed only the finest feminist literature, all while Clairo blared out of a Bluetooth speaker.
“A performative male is someone who dresses to the female gaze,” eventual winner Jay O’Luanaigh explained. “He’s someone who thinks he’s written by a woman. It’s essentially about who can be the most insufferable person possible.”
O’Luanaigh arrived prepared. “I have the baggiest jeans I could find, a loose tie, white shirt, brown leather jacket…”
He then gestured down to the many, many trinkets attached to his belt.
“…A Tomodachi Lego figure, a reusable— no, sorry, not reusable— a sustainable tampon made of cardboard, a Labubu, wallet chains, various jewellery, rings, and I have my strawberry mirror as well.”
O’Luanaigh accepted a copy of The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath as his trophy. “I’ve obviously already read this book several times,” he was quick to preface. “But I’ve decided to accept it on behalf of all women in the college.”
The event’s organiser, who prefers to remain anonymous, admitted it all started as a joke.
“We were all in work together bored one day, so I just decided to make this ad on Canva, and then we sent it to UL Confessions, and then Fashion Soc and Lit Soc,” they explained. “We just were like, ‘Let’s make this happen! We’re going to do this next week, even if no one shows up.’”
To their surprise, the turnout was massive.
“We literally thought no one was going to come,” they laughed. “We were about to turn the corner at five to two and we were like, ‘Oh my God, no one’s gonna be here, it’s gonna be so embarrassing, we told everyone about this.’ But there were like 200 people here! I swear to God, I’ve never seen this many people around for anything UL related.”
The contest seems to have drawn inspiration from UCC’s viral competition of the same name that occurred last week, which raked in hundreds of thousands of views on TikTok.
And now Limerick houses its own insufferable icon.
“Great performance by him,” the organiser concluded. “Just a fantastic performative man. Couldn’t have pictured a better boy.”