Bro Identity and Its Implications for Young Adult Masculinity

Bro Hard or Bro Home: Bro Identity and its Implications for Young Adult Masculinity A THESIS Presented to The Faculty of the Department of Sociology The Colorado College In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Bachelor of Arts in Sociology By Emily R. Crouter Spring 2012 Acknowledgements To begin, I would like to thank Sandi Wong for the incredible guidance and support she provided to me throughout the thesis process. Thank you for taking so much time to talk to me about my project and listen to my excitements and anxieties throughout the two blocks. I would like to give a big thanks to my parents, Tod and Jan Crouter, for supporting me throughout the research and writing process, despite their confusion about the topic. To the participants, thank you very much for giving me so much time out of your busy schedules to talk about bro culture with me. Without you I would not have the sometimes hilarious and other times poignant content and anecdotes with which to fill the following pages. I would like to thank my housemates and friends Anna Serra, David Pellett, Erika Leon, Katherine Kelley, and Meghann Maurer for their support and comic relief throughout the thesis process. Lastly, I would like to thank the library and sociology department for their continuous support not only during my thesis research, but also in my four years at Colorado College. Table of Contents Introduction………………………………………………………………………………...1 Literature Review…………………………………………………………………………..2 Gender……………………………………………………………………………...2 Structural Functionalist Perspective…………………………………….…3 Feminist and Queer Theory………………………………………………..3 Gender: What We Do……………………………………………………...4 Masculinity……………………………………..………………………………….5 Hegemonic Masculinity…………………………………………………,..6 Complicit Masculinity…………………………………………………….6 Marginalized Masculinity………………………………………………....7 Subordinated Masculinity…………………………………………………7 Masculinity in College……………………………………..……………………...8 Drinking……………………………………..…………………………….8 Hooking Up……………………………………..………………………..10 Sports……………………………………..……………………………...11 Exploring the Bro……………………………………..………………….13 Methodology……………………………………..…………………………………….…16 Analysis……………………………………..………………………………………….…18 Bro Culture as Young Adult Hegemonic Masculinity………………………....…19 Race……………………………………………………………………. 19 Class……………………………………………………………………....20 Sexual Orientation………………………………………………………..22 Headed to Wall Street…………………………………………………….23 Athletic Prowess…………………………………………………….……25 The Bonds of Brotherhood………………………………………………….…….27 Bros and Booze……………………………………………………….…..27 Women…………………………………………………………………...30 Bonding Over Sports……………………………………………………..33 Loyalty Priority System…………………………………………………………..36 Sometimes I Can’t Keep Up……………………………………………………..38 Conformity……………………………………………………………………….39 Bros Since Birth, or At Least High School……………………………...39 Unhealthy Ideals…………………………………………………………41 Emotional and Intellectual Suppression……………………………………....….43 No Emotions Allowed………………………………………………...…43 Deeper Conversations……………………………………………………44 Stereotypes and Stigmas…………………………………………………………45 There’s More to Bros than Meets the Eye……………………………….45 Bros and Women Revisited……………………………………………...47 Conclusion…………………………………………………………………………….….49 References……………………………………..…………………………………………53 Appendix……………………………………..…………………………………………..56 Interview Guide……………………………………..………………………...…56 Consent Form……………………………………..……………………………..58 Facesheet……………………………………..…………………………………………..59 Abstract The term “bro” is an emerging label within young adult masculinity that also encompasses what is known as “bro culture.” Athletic, hard partying, and womanizing are the stereotypical characteristics that have come to describe today’s bro. This study explores the bro identity, its pressures, contradictions, and issues, along with the culture’s place in contemporary masculinity. I conducted interviews with ten young men on my own college campus whom their peers perceived to be bros. Their narratives suggest that bro culture is today’s version of young adult hegemonic masculinity. The participants’ views on what they deemed to be problematic within bro culture points to ways in which bros in a liberal arts college setting are more likely to hold progressive views about women and homosexuality. The men thus described bros and their views in diverse terms that simultaneously adhered to hegemonic masculinity while challenging its presumed uniformity. INTRODUCTION ’Cause I’m a lax bro, eh yo I flow in my Polo, With Natty from a Solo yo, no homo I’m a lax bro; I shred threads on the reg All the hos should beg, so bitch pump my keg ’Cause I’m a lax bro. Beer, women, homophobia, and sports. These “Midd Kid” lyrics may be creative Middlebury students’ satirical jab at the bro identity, but the themes ring true for those familiar with the term “bro.” Bro may be a relatively new term, one that college kids explain to their parents while home on winter break, but bro is really just a stereotype or classification of young men, similar to jock, nerd, or punk. Although the definition of bro has not been widely explored compared to older slang terms used to place people within a social group, bros have begun to more clearly define themselves. Time Magazine Online featured bro culture in an article about “icing,” a game in which a player hides a Smirnoff Ice, a sugary malt beverage, and waits for a friend to stumble upon it. When the friend discovers the Ice, he/she must get down on one knee and chug the entire contents of the much agreed upon disgusting drink. The only way the friend might deflect the Ice is if he or she is carrying a concealed Ice on their person. In which case, he or she would present the attacker with the “block” and the original “Icer” would have to get down on one knee and consume both bottles. Time Magazine’s coverage of icing also discusses bro culture. Upper-middle class with disposable income, these young men, according to Time writer Ella Quittner, are really nothing new, as we have seen them in films such as Animal House, The Hangover, and I Love You, Man. “Frat boys, in other words,” she says. But bros are not confined to fraternity houses, though they are notorious for hanging around there. Urban Dictionary, Crouter 1 a website where users offer their own definitions of pop-culture references, defines bros as Obnoxious partying males who are often seen at college parties. When they aren’t making an ass of themselves they usually just stand around holding a red plastic cup waiting for something exciting to happen so they can scream something that demonstrates how much they enjoy partying. Nearly everyone in a fraternity is a bro but there are also many bros who are not in a fraternity… Other websites are specifically dedicated to the consumption and enjoyment of bro culture including Brobible.com, Broslikethissite.com, and Statusbro.com, which was started and is headed by a Colorado College alumnus. One is hard pressed to step onto a college campus nowadays and not hear bro being thrown around. “Hey bro, what are you doing tonight?” or “He is way too bro-y for her.” Bro culture, with its drinking, sports, and womanizing might appear to be innocent, juvenile fun, but theories and research on masculinity suggest that bros deserve a hard look. Their innocent fun might conceal larger implications for adolescent and young-adult masculinity. I conducted research on bros on my own campus, whose anecdotes and opinions revealed to me the nuances within bro culture and how each of them manage the varying degrees of bro identity along with the aspects of bro culture that they find to be distasteful or problematic. LITERATURE REVIEW Gender To properly consider the bro, we must place him within the scope of masculinity and the even wider topic of gender. Since gender is a misunderstood word, often confused with sex, sociologists are careful to distinguish the two, positing that sex is a biological designation based simply upon body parts and functions while gender is a socially constructed phenomenon describing the social ideas of masculinity and Crouter 2 femininity. These categories are quite powerful and inform how people genuinely feel about gender. Structural Functionalist Perspective Sociologists from the structural functionalist tradition tend to understand gender in terms of its function in society. For example, Talcott Parsons (1954) discusses the roles of the housewife and career man as the highest status roles for a woman and man, respectively. These sex roles, Parsons argued, are a fundamental component of the structure of the family and more broadly, of the structure of society as a whole. The feminine role is to achieve status (marriage) and then it becomes “a matter of living up to expectations and finding satisfying interests and activities” (Parsons 1954:98). The masculine role, on the other hand, is characterized by “achievement, responsibility, and authority” (Parsons 1954:99). When individuals deviate from their assigned roles, “strain” occurs, which is considered dysfunctional for society. Feminist and Queer Theory Parsons and theories of structural functionalism are often criticized for assuming that if something exists in society, it must be functional. Since the 1950s feminist and queer theorists have critiqued the functionalist perspective and proposed alternative theories of gender construction. Nancy Chodorow (1974) provides a feminist psychoanalytic framework arguing that gender is a learned process, through which a child appropriately identifies with either the mother or father. She argues

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