The struggles of one manic amazonian dream grrrl to stop living on froot loops and start acting like a grown up already.
Monday, June 4, 2012
Bromigo, Brochacho, Bromosexual
It's a bingo sheet of stereotypes, tokens, and tropes!
TV Tropes have ruined my life. Learning
about gender, race, sexuality, and deviance has ruined the television,
advertising, and movie world for me forever. I can’t watch anything without a
Bechdel test, and a weird shadow passes over my husband’s face every time he
picks up on privilege. I’m slowly ruining TV for him, too. Tropes are the step
beyond a stereotype, the familiar personality traits and types that flesh out
characters into believable people. We expect a certain kind of behavior from
certain kinds of characters, though that’s not something we tend to consciously
realize. It’s the way we see a male character and a female character in the
same situations, potentially with the same reaction, but the response is
gendered. It’s not that it is always offensive, or always right or wrong, it’s
just one more way we categorize people and find the ways in which we relate to
one another. For my gendered trope, I chose to check out what some might refer
to as: “The Bro Code”.
I myself not being a bro, am of course
fascinated by the "mysteries" of the bro code, all harkening back to the
original first commandment, ie: “Bros before Hoes.” I appreciated Amy Poehler’s
comeback of “Uteruses before Dude-eruses,” but it doesn’t quite have the same
flow. Still, if you look at the rules for bros and masculinity, you already see the
heteronormativity. Men are bros and pimps, and women are hoes and bitches, which you
know if you’ve read “Misogyny in Rap
Music: A Content Analysis
of Prevalence and Meaning” or if you’ve ever listened to one of the
roughly 22% of rap and hip hop songs containing misogynistic lyrics. Men put
down women to gain approval from their peers, and attempt to fall into the
highest spot in the social orders we place ourselves in. Bros before hoes
manages to convey this message using only three words.
Also, you've got to say "no homo", because having feelings it totally gay.
The Bro Code is a simple formula, a
real man puts his friends over his woman, and that code transcends racial
lines, though not sexuality. One might think that homosexual men would be
exalted for following The Bro Code a step beyond what the straight men are
doing, but that’s where the “No homo” part of the code comes in. Ironically,
Neil Patrick Harris, an openly gay man, in his role as the womanizing Barney
Stinson, coined “The Bro Code” on How I Met Your Mother. His character is
typically dismissed by the show’s protagonist, Ted, as he searches for a woman
to “complete” his dream, ignoring the code and the usual "caliber" of women Barney targets. Watching the Barney Stinson character, a good looking,
high power, blonde-haired-blue-eyed, straight, white man in an expensive suit,
constantly assuring his friends of his sexual prowess, we aren’t surprised when
we find out he has issues with his mother. No one is surprised when he gets his karma. It makes sense to us that he had his heart broken by a
woman, who left him for another man she deemed to be more powerful. It adds depth to his character beyond a
bro, making him relatable, and even at some times likeable for the audience.
Websters would define their relationship as a "bromance"
In the last year, Community has
been a popular, yet under-watched program revolving around an eclectic,
unlikely group of adult friends in a community college setting. Two characters,
Abed and Troy, have what is referred to as a “weird little relationship”. We
watch in one episode as Troy dumps a woman for calling Abed weird, sticking to
the code, but because of the close friendship these two heterosexual men have,
they are teased. In order to make sure the characters are not seen as gay, we
also see the character, Troy, lying to a woman about having been molested as a
child in order to get a date with a woman. “Misogyny in Rap Music: A Content Analysis of Prevalence and Meaning” points to the
ideal that we have gone beyond demanding that a man be sexual with a woman to
secure his place as a man; he must also trick and ultimately humiliate her in
his conquest, to ensure she is not empowered by her sexuality and experiences.
I'm not sayin' he's a gold digger, bro...
Kanye West is my guilty pleasure as a public figure. I love his twitter. His arrogance and vanity
have almost surpassed that of Sean “Diddy” Combs, and that was a feat I’d once
thought impossible. Dreams do come true! However, listening to his lyrics and
watching his videos, it’s not hard to see he’s following the bro code, too. He won't call a woman a gold digger, he's just going to make a video of sexy women dancing around him as he describes all the reasons everyone else is saying she's a gold digger. “Fuck bitches, get money” is Lil Wayne’s NIV version of the original rule. It’s pathetic; there's already such a small number of role models in the media for the
black community, white bro marketers have streamline role models for black
youth into misogynists with AmEx black cards. When asked about why there aren’t
more positive lyrics, artists of all genres have uniformly responded that
labels aren’t looking for empowerment and equality, they’re following the “fuck
bitches, get money” model too. The reason Uteruses before Dude-eruses really
doesn’t work is that in the rare instances women are in power, they are always
battling the bro code, and until the power is equalized and our society re-vamped, that won’t change. In
the hit movie Crash, Ludacris’s
character Anthony makes an ironic statement (ironic because Ludacris is a grammy-winning rapper, known for flowery, poetic songs like “Move, Bitch”) calling hip-hop music “the music
of the oppressor” in a conversation with a fellow car-jacker.
“See,
back in the day we had smart, articulate black men. Like Huey Newton, Bobby
Seale, Eldridge Cleaver, Fred Hampton... These brothers were speaking out, and
people were listening! Then the FBI said, “No, we can’t have that. Let’s give
the niggers this music by a bunch of mumbling idiots, and sooner or later, they’ll
all copy it, and nobody will be able to understand a fucking word they say.”" (Crash, 2004).
Couldn’t
we apply that same logic to the misogyny of lyrics across the board?
Remember this gem of equality?
Featuring timeless classics like: A Lapdance is So Much Better When the Stripper is Crying. I wish I were kidding.
It’s
racist and unfair to claim that hip hop culture is the only culture
perpetuating misogyny and violence through music and film, even if the lyrics show a higher rate of
misogynistic language; when straight white bros hold the majority of the power
in the consumer market, shouldn’t we be holding them responsible for the way tv
and music perpetuate their code, before we rush to blame the systematically opressed?
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