According to recent descriptions, the bro is a straight white man who is between fifteen and thirty-five years old, “an adult male whose social life revolves around collegiate homosocial bonding,” or simply a guy who says “bro.” He is “boisterous and uncouth” and “the worst guy ever.” He wears a backwards baseball cap, a light blue oxford or femsports team shirt, cargo shorts, mandals or boat shoes, and region-specific accessories like knit caps in LA or puffer vests in the Colorado. He drinks beer. Most of these articles focus on signifiers of the bro because their authors haven’t seized on the essential truth of brodom: A bro is just a man who primarily hangs out with other men and lacks consistent taste. The absence of taste is crucial: It’s not just that he wears cargo pants, it’s that he has the audacity to mix oxfords with athletic gear.
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.
“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
Ironically, the bro’s inconsistency—which is not limited to his wardrobe—is also the source of his lasting appeal. The bromance casts the bro’s contradictions in the clearest light: Although “bromance” co-evolved with the bro and is its autochoric carrier mechanism, in many ways, the bromance is the bro’s total contradiction. Bromance is loving, giving, nonviolent, and un-self-serious. But there are many bro subtypes whose basis is violence, real and metaphorical. This is precisely what makes the bro so compelling: Just as the bro mixes his cargo pants with his oxford shirt, he mixes violence with affability, self-absorption with giving, and hypermasculinity with masculinity. Now that the bro is the subject of a full backlash, these inconsistencies translate as hypocrisy.“Bro” has appeared in texts as an abbreviation of “brother” for hundreds of years, but until the twentieth century, it referred to the biological family or clergy. And, before it referred generically to “man” or “fellow,” from the turn of the twentieth century until the nineteen seventies, “brother” meant “black man.” Sometimes in this context, it was truncated to “bro.” For example, in the year of the American bicentennial, rock critic Lester Bangs wrote, “If we the (presumably) white jass-buffs couldn’t get with it maybe it was only meant for the bros.” White men co-opted and whitewashed the definition of “bro” as “male friend” around the same time, borrowing from black power and mid-century Hawaiian surfer lingo, where “brah” was a common form of address. Well into the nineties, “bro” was a frattily lambent denotation for “male bud” and hadn’t suppurated into the para-meathead we associate it with today. To document this, the O.E.D. blog cites the teleplay for 1992’s Encino Man, whose stage directions toss off (now, it seems, gormlessly) that “Stoney and Hank have been bros since grammar school.” (...)
Although “bromance” is an invention of the last decade, male/male couples are common to Hollywood cinema. Scholars have traced the bromance back to comedy duos like Laurel and Hardy, cowboy movies, and the buddy films of the seventies through nineties. Many are violent. In a critical essay on the pre-millennial buddy film, Cynthia Fuchs argues that in cinema, male/male friendships absolve male friends of all transgressions, including murder, sexual assault, and rape. These transgressions can extend from the moral (e.g. sexual assault) to the aesthetic (e.g. poor hygiene or thin politesse in general). But when it comes to the bro, we might read Fuch’s equation in the other direction: Moral and aesthetic transgressions (perhaps best summarized as distastefulness) excuse the male/male friendship. Thus, poor taste excuses male/male friendships from being too gay. Again, this applies to both moral and aesthetic dimensions of taste. Two bros who gaslight women to sleep with them are totally not gay, even though they love each other. And aesthetically, it is bros’ bad taste—a preference for spending Sundays on a lawn couch with sweatpants and “the champagne of beers” that proves bros are straight.
The bro was not at his worst in 2014. Perhaps critics have seized on the bro as douchebag du jour because—correctly sensing the bro’s many contradictions—the bro is a hypocrite. Take this bro philippic in Vice, for example:
The only way to be a real man is to be a real man as ferociously as humanly possible. He goes all-in; he gets shredded and ripped and defines his life by aggression and competitions. He buys the hamburgers that comes with two other hamburgers and a chicken cutlet on top of it. Why? Because it’s three hamburgers with a chicken cutlet on top of it.But the bro didn’t “become” toxic. Ironically, our awareness of his toxicity seems to be inversely proportional to his actual behavior. In the early aughts, he seemed fun when he was at his most violent, in Jackass style pranks and frat-bro foreign policy. Now, our bros are more like Andy Samberg than Ashton Kutcher—they’re not violent, they just think with the right wrapping paper, their dicks make a good birthday present. (Then again, maybe this signals only a shift in violence from the physical to sexual.) The hipster has replaced the bro as the dominant lampoonable masculinity; Bush is out, Obama is in. (...)
In the bro, masculinity powers up, achieves hypermasculinity, and in so doing circles back around to its own idea of femininity: The bro is a hypocrite because he claims to be a real man, but really, he’s a woman. Like a woman, the bro is characterized by excess and peacocking. He consumes and consumes: beer, Muscle Milk, and so many burgers he’s using more meat as hamburger buns. It’s so much he’s bursting at the seams, “pulsing like the mercury on a cartoon thermometer…ready to explode through the glass.” And he’s a little dumb. Like the effeminate metrosexual, he gets ripped without survivalist purpose, delighting in his body even if it’s not a machine for war or chopping wood. Like a woman (and totally unlike the bromance, which is a revelation of true love, often against the odds) the bro is inauthentic. “It seems impossible for a human being to care this much about recreation, to care this much about celebrating something so tiny, so contrived,” writes Vice. Hypocrisy, flanked by infantilism and unacknowledged privilege, is the number one critique of the bro.
by Johannah King-Slutzky, The Awl | Read more:
Image: Manuel Paul
