Enough With the Bros
David Foster Wallace’s famously long novel, Infinite Jest, turned 30 this month, and an old specter came back with the anniversary: the lit bro, annoying and probably sexist, smugly reading a book that you didn’t. “The book has become shorthand for a certain kind of pretentious, performative, male-coded lit bro,” Lit Hub’s Literary History newsletter observed. “It’s no longer cool, and might even be a red flag.” Has there ever been a cleaner distillation of the type? Pretentious: The lit bro thinks he is smart. Performative: The lit bro reads to impress others. Male-coded: The lit bro is not a woman. Red flag: You thought you might want to date him, but you do not.
The lit bro is one in a series of types that have proliferated over the past decade; attaching bro has become a reliable trope, a way to elevate pet peeves to trends. Think of something that annoys you, connect it to masculinity by adding bro, and proceed as though that bro were a category of person. Robinson Meyer produced a seminal early example with “Here Comes the Berniebro,” a funny essay that, like Rage Against the Machine, was tarnished when it became a genre. The tech bro, the gym bro, the film bro—these archetypes have given people a way to complain about innocuous things by imagining people who make those things their whole identity.
Don’t get me wrong: I love to complain about things that might actually be fine, and I love to make up people and then get mad at them. But the bro construction robs us of the pleasure of these activities by keeping us from thinking deeply about why we don’t like innocuous things and imaginary people. It is an obstacle to clarity in hating. I want Instagram posts about why going to the gym is a waste of time, essays about how the tech sector has spent billions to make cities boring, and TikTok videos about Marty Supreme having nine Oscar nominations and three unfinished plots. I want to be intoxicated by negativity in its undiluted form, but instead I get watered-down descriptions of what kind of people like things that the user of bro does not. After more than a decade of bro-ing our resentments into demographics, the time has come to bury the construction, maybe forever.
[Read: Social media broke slang. Now we all speak phone.]
First, the autopsy: Bro has obvious roots in brother, but not every brother is a bro. Brother can mean sibling, or it can be an honorific title for members of fraternal and religious organizations, and it can be used as a term of address—all predate the specific usage of bro that I am talking about here. This usage is strictly for the third person; bros are other people, and they are bad. Can bro in the third person ever be positive? Not yet. There have been no viral posts about charity bros or listening bros.
The bro is someone who conforms to a type to an irritating degree, but he is also similar to his critics in many ways. Consider the lit bro, defined by his zealous advocacy for certain male authors—Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy—whom he condescendingly tries to get women to read. To recognize the significance of this behavior, you have to know those authors and their valence within the charged field of contemporary literature. In other words, you have to be a lit person yourself. Thus the bro suffix enables the narcissism of small differences: The problem is not literature—or movies, or going to the gym, or Bernie Sanders, or working with computers, which plenty of people like—but the guys who like those things and are bros about it.
And they are guys. While the concept of the female bro is tenable in theory, in practice people are talking about men when they talk about bros, because an essential function of bro is to connect a pet peeve to a feminist critique. On the internet, that critique is often reduced to the idea that men are problematic—see manspreading, a concept that introduced a feminist interpretation of a previously gender-neutral annoyance by connecting it to men. Andrea Dworkin they ain’t, but these memes took advantage of the fact that everybody except trad bros agrees the feminist critique is good, and that people generally get the gist of it, even if they haven’t exactly done the reading.
[Read: Why is everyone talking about getting ‘oneshotted’?]
This gap in specifics is where bro comes in. Let’s say that I find craft beer annoying, which I kind of do, even though I have consumed a lot of it. If I say that hazy IPAs should be stopped, you are likely to demand evidence or at least some kind of argument, which I will not be able to supply. But if I say that I am sick of beer bros, and especially if I fortify my position with concrete details—for instance, they wear sunglasses on the flat bills of their caps and, crucially, condescend to women by lecturing them about brewing standards—suddenly I am doing feminism, kind of. The precise connection between beer and the social subordination of women is not clear, but you can feel it, and that is the kind of feeling no right-thinking person wants to argue against.
In this way, the bro construction exploits the vaguely negative connotations attached to masculinity in order to tar something else with the same brush. Masculinity is not bad per se, but it is suspicious. By connecting it to something else suspicious, such as the tech industry—which is not unequivocally bad but is dominated by men, notoriously unpleasant for many women who work in it, and seemingly dedicated to exploding previously stable elements of society for money—we produce the tech bro, who heaps suspicion on suspicion and therefore gives us probable cause. In the process, discussions of exactly what is objectionable about his industry tend to get lost in expressions of distaste for his type.
The tech bro is a huge problem, by the way. Defined as men who work in tech and are not my friends, such bros are everywhere now, wearing black vests with white sneakers and eating and drinking in the same establishments as me, but in more annoying ways. My friends who learned to code or took jobs as project managers are not like that; they have specific, nontech interests and cool T-shirts from when we were in college, and they’re funny, unlike the mass of interchangeable 25-year-olds standing around the falafel place looking at their phones. Were it not for those tech bros, I could probably afford to buy a place in the city, and I definitely would have gotten my falafel faster.
[Read: The collapse of feminism]
Herein lies the essence of the bros: They are all the same, and they are all in it together against the rest of us. This way of thinking leaves “us” undefined—we are not the bros, but the distinguishing conditions are not clear. The ambiguity appeals to the essential paranoid fantasy of the internet, that a mass of similarly behaving others are conspiring against you, and that you are not one of them even though you do a lot of the same things. Social media and the past 10 years of bro-based trend pieces have delivered an exhaustive supply of such people—infuriatingly familiar in their enthusiasm for certain books, movies, sports, foods, cocktails, musicians, political candidates, and the internet itself, but still obstinately and impenetrably other. They are—at the risk of sounding like an existentialism bro—strangers.
Resenting strangers has been a lifelong hobby for me, and I’m not suggesting that anyone give it up. All I am asking is that we think clearly and specifically about why we resent these bros, given their documented tendency to go to the same places and do the same things as us. So much merits our contempt, out there and probably in ourselves, too. The bro distracts us by turning our minds to whom we condemn—when really, the question should be what, and why.