[LINK] "On the Abuse of 'Bro'"

[rfmcdonald]

Stephen Marche's blog post at Esquire makes me think. (Among other things, it puts me in mind of the truism that men also need feminism to succeed, in order to free them of the norms of patriarchy.)

The use of the word bro is reaching epidemic levels. Now, after The Fast and the Furious and How I Met Your Mother and Breaking Bad, if a show contains more than one male character, they will, at some point, call each other by that name. Online, where cliché is rechristened meme, bro is a natural epithet: "Come at me, bro," or "Don't tase me, bro." Among writers who are trying to be funny, the word has morphed into a series of fused words—comic portmanteaus (portmanbros, if you insist) that have launched a full-on brocabulary: brogrammers, for young male computer programmers; brostep, a white-male version of dubstep; and curlbros, for bros who spend too much time on their biceps. Subject to intense semantic distortion and fluctuation, the word bro is slippery, but one feature of its use and abuse remains constant: the underlying contempt for male friendship it implies.

That contempt is everywhere. The friendships between women in popular culture are the source and choicest fruit of their maturity. At the end of Frances Ha, Frances glimpses her old friend across a crowded room. "Who are you making eyes at?" somebody asks. "That's Sophie. She's my best friend." Theirs was the film's true love story all along. Insofar as a television show is about women, it's about the meaningfulness of friendship—Sex and the City, Girls, Broad City, etc. For men, it's just the opposite. Male friendship on any given sitcom, or in any given Judd Apatow movie, is a retreat into thoughtlessness, crudity. The Big Lebowski hilariously painted male friendship as an extended and colossal fuckup. The Hangover movies turned it into a series of epic degradations. But the standard buddy movie of the moment, a movie like 22 Jump Street, is defined by a single word: dumb. That's why the greatest buddy movie of them all is Dumb and Dumber (although it may well be surpassed by its sequel this fall, Dumb and Dumber To). Men get together onscreen to be idiots with one another. To mature as a female person is to mature into female friendships. To mature as a male person is to mature out of male friendships.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the culture that has given rise to the word bro is a culture in which male friendship is in crisis. American men are more likely not only to be lonely but also to deny their loneliness.For twenty-five years, Niobe Way, professor of applied psychology at New York University and the author of 2011's Deep Secrets: Boys' Friendships and the Crisis of Connection, has peered into the chasm under boys and young men and found that emptiness to be at the heart of what we call the "boy crisis." "We have all these boys, with so much to give, so much love, so much for them to offer the world," she says. For Way, the transition from boyhood into manhood is a transition into isolation. Becoming a man means leaving behind your family and your friends and striking out on your own, and therefore growing up means shedding connections. Way's research shows that the male suicide rate correlates precisely with the loss of friendships. At age nine, the suicide rates are the same for girls and boys. Between ten and fourteen, boys are twice as likely to kill themselves. Between fifteen and nineteen, they are four times as likely. From twenty to twenty-four, five times.