What is the bro code? It’s a sound: loud frat boys bragging about their sexual conquests. A smell: cheap cologne, maybe Axe deodorant, hiding body odour. It’s a physical sensation: hands on your chest, shoving you. Asking you if you want to go. Asking if you want to go right now.
But all that posturing, all those signifiers, isn’t what’s especially toxic about bro code culture. It’s bro-ey, yes, and cringe, but it’s not codified. Women can act like bros too, and bros, regardless of gender, can be ultimately harmless. So often, bro culture is just empty swagger for a young man still trying to figure himself out, as young men have always had to. What’s harmful about bro culture is the hardening of these attributes into an idea, an ethos that’s distributed along strict lines—and enforced. What’s toxic about the bro code is the shared understanding that any and all masculine behaviour is worth valorizing while any and all feminine behaviour is worth denigrating. That male speech deserves repeating and all female speech deserves shouting over.
