Type “Bro culture” into Google and you’ll get a deluge of feminist writers screeching about how terrible bro culture is. “What is ‘bro culture’ and how is it impacting diversity?” asks TMA World, home of “global learning solutions”, whatever the fuck that means. Alexandra Levit, blogging for American Express, says that “Office bros can bring down office morale,” and offers 3 tips to keep that from happening. A 2013 New York Magazine article by Ann Friedman titled How Do You Change a Bro-Dominated Culture? has been canonized into the misandry bible and cited by many of the articles I found, including Wikipedia’s Bro Culture page.
“’Bro’ once meant something specific: a self-absorbed young white guy in board shorts with a taste for cheap beer,” groans Ann as her labia fuse together in penis envy, “but it’s become a shorthand for the sort of privileged ignorance that thrives in groups dominated by wealthy, white, straight men.”
She harps and harangues but never describes why bro-ness is a problem, aside from being a guy thing (I suppose that’s just a given to which my privilege has made me ignorant). The only solution she offers is to cram the office full of more schoolmarms like her who are brave enough to waggle their bony fingers at everyone who makes boob jokes- which she admits didn’t work at Harvard University in this very article.
The fact that Harvard is even doing studies on this disturbs me. The flood of manbashing search results bugs me. The notion that this half-baked opinion piece became a trusted source on major sites pisses me off. Since Ann “Panties-In-A-Bunch” Friedman can’t describe why it’s a problem, let me mansplain to you what bro culture really is and why it’s important.
A young man enters the adult world armed with nothing. His first steps into any field are met with resistance and rejection. Sorry, I already have a boyfriend. Sorry, you don’t have enough experience. Sorry, we’re not hiring right now. Sorry, you don’t fit in. He needs to figure out some way to be useful before anybody pays any attention to him. It’s an uphill battle that starts at adolescence and ends when he’s dead.
He’s completely invisible to girls, while women in authority positions tell him to do better. When he tries to help women, he’s told to step aside. He’s twice as likely to be single (63% of men aged 18-29 are single vs 34% of women the same age, according to Pew Research Center). When he has mental health challenges, he’s told to be more emotionally vulnerable. If he does, he’ll be called privileged and told he has no place to complain. If he doesn’t, he’ll be called insecure. It’s no wonder men are four times more likely to kill themselves than women. He might even go the way of the school shooter- which will just get blamed on incel culture and toxic masculinity, too.
It’s a good thing his friends have his back. Bro culture offers the masculine support network that society clearly refuses. It’s a safe space for dudes to just be dudes. Bad words, lechery, immature jokes and hazing; all the things guys love in one place. It’s a clubhouse where we can bask in our own manliness and let off some steam. It’s a much needed relief from the daily stresses of male life. These men’s clubs form naturally wherever men happen to be with little-to-no conscious goading. The only way to see any of this as a problem is to think that being a man is some kind of sin.
Which is exactly what Friedman thinks. That’s why she vindictively paints bro culture as an oppressive regime which revels in keeping women as slaves. If that article is your introduction to bro culture, you’d assume it’s all guys in suits drinking whiskey on the rocks, smoking cigars, and groping the buttcheeks of every dumb broad within a five mile radius, honk honk! They hold clandestine meetings where they discuss how they’ll pay their female employees less. Then they go home to beat their wives. Urrrgghh, God DAMN those WEALTHY, WHITE, STRAIGHT, MALES!
What’s bro culture really like? It’s funny. Bros love to kick back and amuse each other with funny stories. Each crew has its own strange rituals and inside jokes that you’d never understand unless you where there. These exclusive rites are silly ways to separate us from them and maintain a group identity, however mundane, because that identity is what gives meaning to the endless struggle of life.
A good group of boys will inspire you to go back out into that hostile world, to do something awesome, and come back with new stories to tell and a new degree of excellence to share. The boys keep each other happy and ready for more action. They push each other towards shared goals and away from self-defeating habits. And you want to take that away from them?
If you feel shut out, that’s because you are, but not on purpose. Bros are careful about who who gets into the squad. They tease and rib each other nonstop- as a sort of shit test to make sure you can hang. If you can’t hang when times are good, that means you REALLY can’t hang when times are bad, which makes you useless when the gang needs you most. Again, it isn’t a conscious decision with lots of planning. It happens subconsciously, automatically. Critics of bro culture only see the hazing side of things, they don’t see when a homie goes home and everyone else agrees: “Damn, I love that guy.”
One thing that bros don’t do is oppress women. If girls aren’t in the gang, again, that isn’t on purpose. The subject never even comes up in bro conversation. Maybe among more intellectual bros, and even then as an abstraction, not to make a plan. Bros actually really like girls, and that subject alone is about 75% of our chit-chat. In fact, when women get mad about bros being bros, bros feel bad. We don’t want to hurt your feelings. We just want to have fun.
Bro culture is 50% jokes and games, 30% idle chat, 15% ideas, and 5% motivation. It’s a pressure relief valve for daily stresses and a motivation booster for work to come. I defy you to make a rational case that this is a problem. Breaking up the bros means breaking up their success and happiness, and maybe that’s the point. I’ll bet the women who write these articles have been working in corporate offices for so long that their souls are destroyed. Now they’re jealous of their bro colleagues’ ability to find hours of joy in a six pack and a foosball table.
Ann Friedman was right about one thing in her diatribe: “Bros are pack animals.” To put it in a less dehumanizing way, I leave you with this quote from comic Joey Diaz:
Spud media 