Behind the Performative Male: Lily Allen’s West End Girl and the Psychology of The Performative Male
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Women Are Exhausted. Men Are Overwhelmed. The Emotional Recession of Masculinity Is Reshaping Modern Love—And Lily Allen’s West End Girl Reveals Why, and What It Will Take to Repair Our Relationships.
The Performative Male, Lily Allen’s West End Girl, and the Emotional Recession of Modern Masculinity
By Danielle Roxborough, LMFT | Love Is A Verb Counseling
Introduction
A silent relational rupture is widening across heterosexual partnerships today. Women feel it as exhaustion. Men feel it as internal collapse. Therapists witness it everywhere—inside communication breakdowns, mismatched emotional capacities, and repeated cycles of conflict and repair avoidance.
Lily Allen’s West End Girl gives voice to this moment with startling clarity.
Vice’s viral profile of the “performative male” and Vogue’s cultural critique that it is now “embarrassing to have a boyfriend” are not isolated provocations. They reflect an emerging truth: We are in a relational era where men’s inherited emotional conditioning no longer matches the level of intimacy, presence, or action women expect or require.
This isn’t about blaming men. It’s about understanding the evolutionary lag between women’s emotional development and men’s emotional upbringing.
The Cultural Shift in Masculinity
In recent years, we’ve observed a cultural shift in how masculinity is performed, defended, and weaponized. The Vice article on “The Performative Male” describes a generation of men who outwardly adopt progressive language, emotional intelligence, or feminist aesthetics—yet inwardly maintain the same distorted power dynamics as their predecessors.
These men are:
Image-driven
Validation-hungry
Threatened by female success
Terrified of emotional accountability
And often, as Vice puts it, “incel-adjacent in psychology, even if not in identity.”
Meanwhile, Vogue openly declared in a viral piece that it's now officially “embarrassing to have a boyfriend,” reflecting a collective socio-emotional fatigue among women who are exhausted by intimacy with partners who cannot meet them relationally, emotionally, or developmentally.
Lily Allen’s album West End Girls channels this moment. Through lyrics, storytelling, and social commentary, her work mirrors what I see daily in my therapy office: women outperforming, outgrowing, and out-healing men who are collapsing under their own fragile, outdated scripts of power, but are desiring for their partners to grow with them.
Lily Allen’s album lays this tension bare, illustrating the collapse between who a man believes himself to be and what emotional intimacy actually demands of him. Through the lens of attachment theory, gender history, and couples therapy, we can finally understand why so many modern relationships feel strained—and how to repair them.
The Performative Male: A Psychological Profile
The term “performative male,” made cultural by Vice, deserves accuracy and nuance. The Performative Male is a man who performs emotional intelligence without having internalized emotional capacity—not out of deception, but out of conditioning.
He is a man who:
Speaks the language of vulnerability yet avoids its discomfort
Intellectualizes emotions he cannot process somatically
Champions women conceptually but feels threatened privately
Desires intimacy but fears the exposure required
Prioritizes optics of sensitivity over emotional follow-through
Psychologically, this is emotional incongruence: the gap between aspiration and ability, between identity and skill, between the man he wants to be and the boy he was taught to remain.
The Internal Incel Psychology of the Performative Male
Vice argues that the performative male shares psychological DNA with incels:
Sense of entitlement
Externalized blame
Viewing women as sources of validation
Rage when confronted with female autonomy
Ego collapse when women succeed
In therapy terms, this looks like:
Defensiveness when confronted
Stonewalling during emotional bids
Minimization of a partner’s accomplishments
Resentment when not praised enough
Sabotage of connection when insecure
This is not “incel behavior” in a literal sense—but in an emotional one. It is the insecurity of a man who fears irrelevance.
This archetype emerges socially because men were raised for performance. Women were raised for connection. Intimacy now requires skills men historically were not allowed to learn, or experienced shame while trying to express.
Lily Allen’s West End Girl: A Mirror of the Modern Male Psyche
While Lily Allen’s album is not about diagnosing real people, its themes symbolically capture the emotional climate of many heterosexual relationships today. Throughout West End Girls, Allen sings about:
Feeling unseen by a partner who performs sensitivity but cannot access it
The loneliness that comes from being “loved” by someone preoccupied with image
The subtle erosion of self that occurs when a partner’s ego cannot tolerate your success
The emotional claustrophobia of being partnered with someone who needs you small
These themes resonate with many of my clients—especially high-achieving, emotionally attuned women partnered with men who collapse when faced with their partner’s autonomy, success, or inner strength. Allen has publicly spoken on podcasts and interviews about the emotional toll of certain relational dynamics. While she does not name her husband as abusive or harmful, her art explores archetypes of men who struggle with their partner's empowerment. The album becomes a cultural Rorschach test: Women hear their own relationships in her lyrics. Because we are living through a seismic gender shift.
Why This Is Happening Now: A Sociological Breakdown
Women Have Evolved. Men, in Many Cases, Have Not.
Over the last 40 years:
Women have surpassed men in education
Women control more wealth than ever
Women initiate 70% of divorces
Women are more therapy-literate, introspective, and relationally fluent
Women have built stronger community networks and emotional resilience
Men, however, have been socialized into:
Emotional dependence on female partners
Lack of male friendship depth
Shame around vulnerability
Identity overinvestment in career or status
Fragile ego structures tied to dominance
This creates a gendered emotional mismatch that shows up exactly as Vice describes: Men perform emotional fluency but cannot embody it. This is what many women hear in West End Girls—a landscape of emotional labor, unmet needs, and invisible burdens.
I realize I've already blogged about this topic, but I wanted to explore it in deeper context of this widespread growing issue: performative men, compensating by dressing the part, different skins, attractive costumes, yet hiding underlying emotional attunement-deficiency.
Allen uses autobiographical tension to illuminate the experience of loving a man who cannot meet emotional expectations—even if he believes he is trying.
In the title track, she sings:
“That’s when your demeanour started to change / You said that I’d have to audition, I said ‘You’re deranged’ / And I thought that that was quite strange.”
A seemingly small moment—yet clinically profound.
She succeeds. He shifts. The energy in the relationship recalibrates around his insecurity. It is not cruelty. It is a fragile identity destabilized by her rise.
Later, she adds:
“I think you’re sinking, you’re protecting a lie… You love all the power.”
This “lie” is often the lie of performance: that he is okay, secure, unthreatened, emotionally capable.
Allen tells the story inside millions of relationships today: the woman grows, the man retreats, and the relational space becomes heavy with unspoken fear. Moreover, the patriarchal institution of marriage fails when the female has the opportunity to grow and expand into the spotlight, which men are traditionally centralized in. In these lyrics, the lie he is protecting is his reputation and the other woman's perception of who he is. The ultimate performance, and as Lily Allen puts it, "we don't want the other woman to think you'd cheat on your wife..."
This album is a Zeitgeist for modern marriage issues, with the center stage being the performative male. It reflects the (lack of) depth of connection that can be offered, and the lack of needs being met from empty promises and fancy masks. It's another form of peacocking, except that these days, all you get are the feathers; they aren't fronting for an active, available partner.
Classically, men have been praised for looking the part, acting the part, and briefly supporting the part, but not embodying or sustaining or actually feeling the part. This is the incongruence between the facade and internal emptiness that women are becoming increasingly disenchanted with.
Women’s Oppression and Men’s Privilege: How History Created This Emotional Mismatch
To understand current relational dynamics, we must acknowledge the historical terrain that shaped them.
For centuries, men were granted structural privilege—social, financial, political, and sexual authority. Women were assigned emotional, domestic, reproductive, and relational labor.
Privilege gives freedom. Oppression gives skill.
Men were not required to develop emotional literacy; women needed it to survive. This shaped two different nervous systems:
Women were trained to:
Anticipate emotional shifts
Regulate conflict
Maintain harmony
Empathize deeply
Carry relational responsibility
Make themselves small for safety
Accommodate male fragility
Men were trained to:
Suppress vulnerability
Equate emotion with weakness
Rely on female emotional labor
Derive identity from dominance or competence
Remain stoic
Avoid introspection
Today, women have been unlearning these roles for two generations. They've also had to take on all the roles of domestic labor and workplace requirements.
Men are being asked to unlearn theirs for the first time—but also to learn emotional availability, or basically, a whole new language that comes with the aliveness and awareness of embodiment.
The emotional skill gap is not moral—it is historical.
Power Dynamics in Modern Relationships: A Couples Therapist’s Perspective
As women gain independence—financially, emotionally, and socially—many men experience this as:
Loss of control
Loss of identity
Loss of purpose
A threat to their masculinity
This triggers negative sentiment override, where men project insecurity onto their partner (“you’re judging me,” “you think you’re better,” “you’re too emotional,” etc.) and engage in:
Gaslighting
Withdrawal
Passive sabotage
Hyper-criticism
Affairs as ego-regulation
Dismissiveness
In therapy rooms, I see:
Women asking for connection
Men shutting down
Women asking for repair
Men deflecting into logistics
Women expressing hurt
Men hearing “criticism” instead of vulnerability
This is the fault line of modern heterosexual relationships.
The Over-Functioning, Emotionally Lonely Woman
This is the woman Lily Allen gives voice to across her album: not needy, but burdened.
Clinically, she is:
Emotionally literate
Hyper-focused, even perfectionistic
Relationally fluent
The “glue” of the relationship
The regulator, mediator, communicator, homemaker
The partner who anticipates problems and repairs them
And yet she is profoundly lonely—she feels unseen, unheard, and misunderstood. Allen articulates this with painful precision in Beg for Me:
“I feel embarrassed. I feel ashamed. You’re so indifferent and that’s insane. Where’s all your empathy for all my pain?”
Women in the therapy room echo the same themes:
“I feel like I’m raising him.”
"He won't take accountability."
“I do the emotional work for both of us.”
“I’m the adult in the relationship.”
“I’m exhausted from holding the relationship alone, and the familial structure.”
This is not gender drama. This is emotional labor inequality. It's also the inability for traditional roles to sustain themselves without metamorphosis and growth from the party that has been traditionally taught to have a narrow focus and congruent narrow action.
This isn't also about blame; it's about understanding. We can't have understanding and coming together without understanding perspective—especially the men's perspective and experience.
What Women Are Feeling — And Why Vogue’s Article Went Viral
Vogue’s line about it being “embarrassing to have a boyfriend” captured something taboo but true: Women are tired of shrinking, over-functioning, and managing fragile egos.
They are tired of:
Raising grown men
Competing with their partner's insecurities
Being punished for success
Being criticized for having needs
Doing emotional labor alone
The performative male leaves women emotionally lonely—even when not technically alone.
The Male Experience: Overwhelmed, Underprepared, and Ashamed
Men are not indifferent. They are internally emotionally repressed. They are unprepared.
When given a safe therapeutic space, they say things like:
“What's the point? I never do it right anyways.”
“I don’t know how to support her; may as well not try.”
“I feel attacked and criticized.”
“She doesn't appreciate what I am doing.”
"I just want to rest when I come home from work, not hear about how I'm not showing up for her."
“I love her, but I feel like I’m always failing.”
These are not excuses—they are unprocessed attachment wounds.
Men were not trained for emotional endurance. They were trained for emotional suppression.
Just think about the traditional messages that men have had to survive with in society: "boys don't cry," "the only safe emotion is anger," "your one job is to provide for the family." Now that women can survive and provide, men feel displaced and ashamed. They're imploding or trying on a different cloak, but actual emotional growth is challenging. Re-wiring is challenging, and rewards aren't as dopamine-inducing as AI is.
Lily Allen’s album captures the painful moment where a man’s emotional bandwidth collapses under relational expectation—not because he lacks love, but because he lacks tools and authentic self-reflection. If the only way to escape the feelings of insecurity is to try on costumes and deflect with acting, then that's what perpetuates throughout the lifespan, versus facing the mirror head-on and understanding the underlying problems.
Attachment Theory: The Real Blueprint Behind Modern Relationship Breakdown
Avoidant Attachment (common in men socialized toward stoicism):
Shuts down under emotional intensity
Uses logic to deflect vulnerability
Perceives partner’s needs as pressure
Equates accountability with shame
Withdraws to regain regulation
Disorganized Attachment (common in childhood abuse/neglect, etc.):
Alternates between closeness and distance
Experiences shame quickly
Becomes inconsistent under stress
Cannot create relational predictability
Women interpret these patterns as rejection. Men experience them as survival.
The mismatch is not personal—it’s developmental. If connection was intermittent or inconsistent, then how do you connect? If connection was based on being a certain way only, then how can you show up as yourself?
These are the real issues that men are being faced with today. If women want connection and intimacy, then they will also have to invite the infant out who has never been mirrored in the way that women have mirrored each other. Many times, this underdeveloped boy-child cannot hold up a relationship. He demands to be taken care of because that's what babies and children need, and this is the other hard truth of modern relationships. These unintegrated parts, the boy-child exile still holds the shame. He still feels neglected; he still feels abandoned, and he still has a teen protector that feels angry and resentful about that abandonment.
Women can integrate these parts of themselves easier because they allow these parts to be seen to other women and to be mirrored back. The oxytocin and other "attachment" hormones heal these wounds.
But men have never been taught or allowed to show themselves to each other or to integrate these inner parts.
Power, Ego, and the Identity Collapse of Modern Men
Allen writes:
“You love all the power… where's all your empathy for, for all my pain...”
Historically, male identity was tethered to:
Being needed
Being stronger
Being the provider
Being the boss
Being centered in the relationship
But modern women are:
Self-sufficient
Financially independent
Emotionally fluent
Socially connected
Psychologically informed
For many men, this triggers profound disorientation:
If she doesn’t need me, what makes me matter?
A woman needing less is misinterpreted as a man being less.
This is the psychological epicenter of the performative male collapse.
When we look at the research, via Gottman, we can see that zero-sum relationships actually kill men. (If you read Fight Right by John and Julie Gottman, PhD, you can understand more about this.) Zero-sum relationships are those in which one's gain is the other's loss, and so their emotional bank account is zero. There's no growth, no influence, no attunement—just competition for space and constant threat. When I say it kills men, it's because it is a toxic dynamic, especially for men who typically don't have consistent friendships or outside relationships.
Quality therapy and relational therapy focused on psychoanalysis, attachment, trauma, CBT/DBT, Gottman, and Emotion-Focused can be massive game changers for men growing their relationships with themselves and their partners, but also their relationship to life, and their relationship to their own perspectives, and their power and control in terms of their actions.
How Couples Can Practice Areas of Growth and Gottman Scripts That Bridge the Emotional Skill Gap
Research-Backed Tools
Normalize vulnerability for men
Based on EFT and attachment research, men must learn to name:
- Fear
- Shame
- Loneliness
- Insecurity
Instead of masking with anger, logic, or performance.
Build emotional literacy
Use Gottman’s tools:
- Emotion labeling
- Fondness & admiration
- Turning toward bids
- Repair attempts
Restructure power dynamics
Help couples identify power imbalances in:
- Decision-making
- Emotional labor
- Sexual dynamics
- Parenting
- Career prioritization
Engage in accountability practices
Accountability ≠ shame. It is the cornerstone of secure attachment.
Teach masculine relational regulation skills
Men benefit from learning:
- Co-regulation
- Slowing down
- Staying connected during conflict
- Repair rituals
- Self-soothing without avoidance
Because men have been taught to fear vulnerability and to protect the ego at all costs, structured communication becomes life-saving.
Gottman Scripts for Couples:
✔️ Softened Start-Up (Gottman)
Instead of escalating:
“Why don’t you ever listen to me?”
Try:
“I’m feeling disconnected and I need closeness. Can we talk?”
✔️ Emotional Naming
A skill men rarely learned:
“I feel overwhelmed.”
“I feel ashamed.”
“I’m scared you think I’m failing.”
“I feel sad, but I don’t know how to say it.”
✔️ Curiosity Statements
“What did you need in that moment?”
“Can you help me understand how that felt for you?”
✔️ Accountability Script
“I hear how I impacted you. Thank you for telling me. I want to do better.”
✔️ Repair Attempt
“I think we’re getting off track—I love you and I want to understand.”
The Gottman Institute calls repair attempts the strongest predictor of long-term relationship success.
Avoidantly attached partners fear repair because they equate accountability with failure. These scripts create safety.
These are tools to utilize for the stuckness of conflict and shifting the dynamic of the relationship. They work well for two partners that understand that relationships are work and are long-term investments. In terms of what modern relationships require to be successful, it's for men to put less effort into their performance and more effort into personal growth, authenticity, growing a relationship to life, and to become at peace within themselves in order to be emotionally available partners. It's also going to require patience, reassurance, support, and understanding from their female partners. It's going to take women stepping back from being the martyr or mother role and gently and kindly holding up the relational mirror.
Conclusion: West End Girl Is Not a Man-Hating Album—It’s a Transitional One
Lily Allen did not create a cultural indictment. She created a relational x-ray. She captured:
Women’s exhaustion,
Men’s overwhelm,
The performative male collapse,
The emotional skill gap created by history,
And the shifting power dynamics rearranging modern intimacy.
Vice named the pattern. Vogue named the fatigue. Allen named the feeling.
But therapy shows the truth beneath all of it:
Men are not deficient. They are emotionally underprepared. Women are not demanding too much. They are finally demanding equity.
We are not in a crisis of love. We are in a crisis of emotional development.
And relationships will heal not through performance, but through presence—not through ego, but through vulnerability—not through inherited gender roles, but through learned emotional skill.
This threshold is not the end of intimacy. It is the beginning of its evolution.
Finally, West End Girls is not simply music—it’s a cultural artifact of a world where women are naming truths that were previously taboo. The “performative male” is not a villain—but a product of a system that failed him emotionally, developmentally, and relationally. And yet:
He is still responsible for healing.
Women cannot carry the load alone. Relationships cannot thrive on performance. Modern love cannot survive fragile masculinity.
But with the right therapeutic support, couples can rewrite these dynamics—not through blame, but through truth, accountability, and genuine secure attachment.
Love Is A Verb.
