Soooo Performative!

If you spend time interviewing young women as I do, you will find that there is a subtle, but drastic shift that has occurred in the way that they speak. Perhaps it's akin to the infusion of the Valley Girl inflections and jargon that happened in the 80s and absolutely infected Gen X in how they communicated, but there is something just as real--albeit I haven't seen a name for it yet (has anyone?). I didn't have a term for it, but when I explained it to my 22 year-old, he immediately said, "They're very performative, aren't they?".

From the mouths of babes....

He nailed it (and maybe they all know this in the 22 year-old circle, but even though it seems to be the norm, my son couldn't stand it either). The word is decidedly "performative". I just had a conversation with a young woman coming out of college and I felt like she was going to throw up jazz hands or start clapping me out of the interview at any moment--why are the young women so animated????

I thought well, maybe it's because she thinks it's an audition and not an interview. I've seen this in public speaking classes I've taught, too, where the female has a difficult time in making the distinction between acting and speaking. However, then I saw her coaching and it was the same way. Then I observed her talking to her own peer-group and wasn't the same way---in fact, it was MORE performative.

This deeply worries me. Is this okay and just a Valley Girl 2.0 scenario, or is everyone actually acting for one another the way in which they think they should act? Considering I think that I border on a little hyper and frenzied in my own speech and fire off thoughts extremely quickly and when speaking to women older than me who speak much more slowly and calmly, am always aware that I am not matching their communication patterns, I wonder at this Gen Z crowd of young women. Are they even aware of how they sound?

For years, I would give back to my alma mater of business school to coach young women at interviews. It's been about 8 years since I've done this and back then, the biggest thing we needed to do was get the ladies to stop making every statement end with an upswing of inflection which made it always sound like a question. Now that I'm facing this next group of young women, I am a little perplexed at where to even begin with their speech because it is not just how they speak, I fear that it is actually how they are thinking!

While my Tiger Teacher in me is ready to put together a class to try and rewire them in some regards (or at least expand their wiring is probably a better way to do it as I'm not one to try to go back in time), the Mama Bear in me is already cringing at the possibility that this overly performative young woman is going to show up on the arm of one of my sons and I will have to listen to this on an ongoing basis!

My concern is this: does the performance ever stop and when it does, what happens to the woman? I am observing the young woman performing for me and I'm outside of myself watching myself from her viewpoint where I am not performing for her. What's her response? She becomes more animated, more effusive, more over-the-top in trying to please and appease. No wonder the next thing she tells me is that she has anxiety and exhaustion!

Performance is exhausting! Performance is not meant to be the standard rate of energy expenditure! Performance is when you are dialed in fully with full concentration and focus maximizing your output on all levels--physically, spiritually, psychologically--on an end point. Perhaps the reason that our young women are so exhausted is that they weren't told this very fact! They are performing all the time!

This makes sense for why we are now teaching everyone the benefits of sleep, everything is self-care, and being hyper-aware! We are absolutely seeing the output now in two generations of the effects of social media and COVID. I see in our young men the inability to connect and in our young women the desire to connect on overdrive. I've seen this my entire motherhood--as we poured more into our daughters to be boss bitches and constantly pushed toxic masculinity to our sons, we really disrupted something...and I pray not for good.

Each group is now floundering to find their way to something that makes sense--a new normal if you will. Having said that, it's not going to be pretty. As this young woman pivoted in the middle of the interview about business to then ask me all about what my same-age-as-her son thinks about dating, she did two things at once: 1) she didn't see any lines between these two conversations (because I think she thinks we're all friends now and the "be kind" dominant groupthink would prevent me from saying anything "mean") and 2) she really wanted to know because she didn't know. How did Mama Bear Tiger Teacher respond? I ripped the Band-Aid and gave her the truth. While her energy and passions for so many things is remarkable, she would likely overwhelm and exhaust my even-keel son who has achieved mastery over his own energy and craves solitude to re-energize. While it could just be him, there is a LOT of literature that outlines how men and women are decidedly different--in most ways and that it would behoove her to study this as the young men have been forced to study women. I asked a simple question, "have you spent any time studying the differences of men?". I followed this up by saying that when I found out I was going to have a boy, I spent the rest of my motherhood (and still do) in studying boys and men because I was hyper-aware from the get-go that this creature was so not the same as me.

Her response (and note, she wasn't performative now--in fact, she looked quite deflated because this was a new thought and something where she didn't have ultra-confidence--it was new territory and the response was not pre-outlined how to act) was this, "No, I have never been told to do this."

No lie. Not, "I have never thought about this before", or "that is an interesting idea", but "No, I have never been told to do this." Now, Mama Bear said, "I would highly recommend doing this and learn how men listen and communicate while taking a break from telling your own female friends everything in a play-by-play scenario whereby they only reinforce and bolster your own feelings. Each person needs three types of space in a relationship: personal/inner space to think, the shared space with the partner, and the exterior space when you're communicating with others while in a relationship with the partner. These spaces are sacred and if you want to have a long-term relationship, these are what you need to master because the majority of life is not the performance, it's the rehearsal and practice time."

Put the effort into practice and the perfomance will come on its own.