The Secret of the Bro
by Johannah King-Slutzky
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.”
Scrubs popularized the bromance before there was “bromance,” instead calling it “guy love.”
The specifics are fuzzy, but the phatic “bro” definitely got its start among outsiderish slacker sport cultures (skateboarding or surfing). When “bro” was discussed in the late nineties and early aughts as a funny idea, it took refuge in houses of ill repute like Urban Dictionary and The Complete Broisms Dictionary, which is devoted entirely to bro puns and portmanteaux. Besides “bromance,” standouts include “Bilbro Baggins” (“Your bro who’s obsessed with Lord Of The Rings”), “best in bro,” (“Awarded to the bro who gets the one girl in a party full of bros”). It is at home among portmanteaux partly because, as the OED blog avers, it is an “an instantly recognizable consonant cluster…[that] lends itself not only to compounding, as in bro-hug…but also blending…[such] as bro-down (from hoedown).” “Bromance” is thus sometimes traduced as an epigone of the bro, but it’s not; it’s essential to the bro’s formation. According to a 2007 article in The Age, “bromance” was coined by Dave Carnie in skateboarding mag Big Brother some time in the nineties, although I couldn’t find the original article or confirm this through additional secondary sources. “Bromance” may also have been coined by surfers; the magazine Transworld Surf published “The Complete Broisms Dictionary” in 2001 after running a successful column called “Significant Surf Slang” for two years. The bro belongs to a broader project of lampooning masculinity through speech that exceeds “bro”’s specific consonant cluster; in the aughts, we liked to knock masculinity down a peg by combining silly words.
Although bros do actually exist, the bro has always been parodic. The bro’s comedic core makes it especially vulnerable to irony and, eventually, charges of hypocrisy. Perhaps most illustrative of this point is the seminal bro meme, 4Chan’s ASCII “brofist,” a copypasta in the shape of a fist that originated in 2006 to depict two guys fistbumping through the computer screen. According to Encyclopedia Dramatica, the brofist was a response to YouTubers who left ASCII art of a raised middle finger in videos’ comment section. (To make the new ASCII brofist, simply delete the offending digit.) The brofist was eventually popularized on /v/, 4Chan’s videogames sub, where, to quote Encyclopedia Dramatica, “people…say the phrase ‘PUT UP YOUR BROFIST.’ to act like they have a ‘network’ of friends despite them spending 12 hours alone watching 1 person playing a retro game.” The machismo is parodic, ironic, and rooted in outsider status. It is a greeting with a touch of violence made possible by irony.
“Bro,” the social category, finally emerged in the early millennium, perhaps in response to George W. Bush’s dick-swinging foreign and domestic policy and the ensuant atmosphere of American machismo. One of the earliest mainstream uses of this new form of “bro” can be found in a 2000 Los Angeles Times article about George W. Bush, written by a former frat brother, titled “The Bro I Can’t Vote For.” Though unnamed, this bro was popularized by violent franchises like Punk’d (which began airing in 2003) and goofy male-on-male friendships in programs like Scrubs (2001–2010); its nearly decade-long affectionate no-homo gags weren’t formally tagged as a bromance until years later, after the release of Judd Apatow’s Superbad in 2007, which made us realize that the bromance, heralded as a pop culture and IRL phenomenon — we’d been living with it namelessly for years.
Outside the internet, the bro is almost always described in the language of Hollywood. In their article “Jeah! We Mapped Out The 4 Basic Aspects Of Being A ‘Bro’,” NPR’s Code Switch proposes that the four totems of brohood are James Franco (Stoner-ish), Armie Hammer (Preppy), Tim Tebow (Jockish), and Andy Samberg (Dudely). Code Switch’s other examples include Matthew McConaughey, Will Smith, Neil Patrick Harris, Ben Affleck, Channing Tatum, Ashton Kutcher, and Kal Penn. There’s also the “Frat Pack,” whose box office earnings publicists chatted up by selling bros as the latest in a lineage of Hollywood stars following the mega-alluring Rat Pack and Brat Pack, this one bundled together on the basis of their shared bro qualities.
The media theorist Richard Dyer famously calls the cinema star “structured polysemy.” Stars are accumulated discourses which combine often contradictory signs and reconcile contradictions in the public’s collective wisdom. I thought of that often while writing this essay: Many of today’s stars have become successful because they are bros, and the bro is perfectly suited to Hollywood entertainment because he revels in contradictions about the nature of fraternal, platonic, and romantic love. This, for example, is the allure of Will Ferrell, whose characters quickly alternate between violence and dopey affection. His turn as Chaz in Wedding Crashers issues a creepy slacker intensity which he uses to pick up chicks at funerals. When he meets Owen Wilson’s character from the foyer of his mother’s apartment, he stomps in full silhouette down the stairs, whisper-shouting, “What the FUCK do YOU want?” Wilson responds, “I’m John Beckwith, I’m a friend of Jeremy Gray?” and Ferrell quickly shifts gear. “Goddamnit, why didn’t you say so? Come here, brother, give me a hug!” With this news Ferrell’s whole face changes; he’s ecstatic.
The bromance is not the first movie genre to profit by knotted discourse about affection. In his study of screwball romantic comedies, Frank Krutnik argues that the Hollywood rom-com is an extended response to two basic dilemmas: First, that romance is an intense personal experience, yet follows convention; and second, that marriage is highly conventional and usually unpleasant, but still widely desired. To resolve these contradictions, the romantic comedy uses a variety of techniques to paint the central couple as extraordinary and insular. These techniques can range from the comically unhappy foil-couple to the push for nonsensical playfulness (baby talk) or whimsy in a female lead.
In romantic comedies, the bro-y love interest’s capriciousness takes the form of puerility and sudden defections to violence. The bro-ish romantic comedy’s most piquant star is Adam Sandler. Sandler is chiefly thought of as a star of romantic comedies, but with his recourse to yelling, gross-out food preferences, and baggy t-shirts, he qualifies as a bro in almost every way. (His one non-bro quality is that he usually eschews structured rituals of male bonding, like sports.) Sandler’s particular brand of eccentricity is his infantilism: He’s playful, makes up rhymes, and poorly controls his emotions. His sweetness quickly becomes anger when frustrated. After he is ditched by his first girlfriend, Sandler’s Happy Gilmore shouts through the intercom, “Beat it! I hate you,” only to flip to “I’m sorry baby, I just yell sometimes ’cause I get scared.”
Aaron Taylor suggests that it is Sandler’s childish qualities that make him such a polarizing and attractive figure. “[R]omance provides him with a forum in which his childish exuberance and imagination has restorative potential for both himself and his partner,” writes Taylor. When love does strike, the bro’s otherwise callow qualities now reassure us (and his female lover) of the bro’s purity of heart. Indeed, many of love’s most troubling qualities arise from its infantilism. Love, like childhood, makes us anarchic, emotional, amoral. How can love be narcissistic and selfless? Mature and regressive? Angry and sweet? In the romantic comedy, the bro synthesizes these opposites. This is another way the bro comedy belongs to the heritage of the romantic comedy: in both genres love is confirmed by sudden conventional but illogical shifts in affection. Among bros and romantic comedies, hate becomes love almost by fiat.
But these qualities also call forth vitriol. “If it can be agreed that Sandler is essentially an overgrown child,” writes Taylor, “then the intensity of the critical responses that he generates…is symptomatic of the discursive intensities surrounding early twenty-first-century bourgeois constructions of childhood. As an object of reverence, the child continues to signify a number of privileged values: receptivity, curiosity, purity, sincerity, futurity. Simultaneously, however, the child is also associatively encoded with qualities that are reviled by middle-class imperatives and politesse: antisociality, vulgarity, emotionality, amorality, anarchy.”
In its way, male infantilism frustrates expectations of bourgeois love. How can Seth Rogen be a loving partner and patriarch when he’s enraptured by bongs the color of neon snot? And yet we’ve made romantic comedies about man-children hundreds of times. That’s because the man-child, an umbrella term that subsumes the bro, is in line with the romantic comedy’s ideologically reconciliatory project.
The bro mixes anger with love not only through capriciousness, but also in a sustained mixing of homophobia and male/male love. As many have remarked, the bro is a paroxysm of homophobia that emerged historically in an era of broader gay-acceptance. In her article “More than Buddies: Wedding Crashers and the Bromance of Comedy as (Re)Marriage Equality,” Maria San Filippo argues that Wedding Crashers belongs to the tradition of “the comedy of remarriage,” a subgenre of Code-era romantic comedies originally described by the philosopher Stanley Cavell. In Wedding Crashers,the figurative remarriage between the two male leads is so explicit that when the two hetero couples marry, the camera lingers on Wilson and Vaughn at the exclusion of the wives-to-be: It’s Wilson, not the bride, who marches down the aisle to come face-to-face with Vaughn, take his hand, and reaffirm his commitment. But in the DVD commentaries, Vaughn is careful to explain, “It’s a real guy thing too where it’s like that’s enough, you don’t have to talk about it a lot.”
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.
It’s the tension between the bro as guilelessly affable and the bro as violent that makes him appealing, particularly in Hollywood rom coms, whose characters have always run on capriciousness. But the bro’s homoeroticism (which critics, myself included, love to redeem as serious and worthy of study) distracts from the fact that “bro” is comedic and parodic — thus his appearance in funny online dictionaries, animal comedies, and ironic memes. To his critics, these inconsistencies morph into a critique of hypocrisy. To his fans, the same traits may be his source of unconscious appeal.
Photo by Manuel Paul