Published in the September 2014 issue

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.

The contempt for male friendship is a cultural failure on an epic scale.

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.

PLUS: ALL THE BROS...

But who needs research to understand the difference? Look at the women around you—your mother, your sister, your wife, or your girlfriend. How many people can they call when they have a bad day? Now, how about you? Masculine maturity is a lonely thing to possess. Maturity and despair go together for men. The splendid isolation of masculinity has emerged from so much iconography—the cowboy, the astronaut, the gangster—that almost every hero in the past fifty years has been a figure of loneliness. Current pop culture is even more extreme: It doesn't just celebrate the lonely man; it also despises men in groups. And this isolation isn't just a historical anomaly; it also runs counter to male biology. Men, every bit as much as women, are social creatures who live in a permanent state of interdependence and who require connection for basic happiness. "Men come into the world with this empathic, relational need, and they get treated as if they don't have it," Way says. Disconnection has costs. In periods of vulnerability, the male suicide rate spikes. During the recession, the suicide rate for men grew at four times the rate for women. Divorced men kill themselves nearly 2.5 times as often as married men. (There's no difference in the rates between divorced and married women.) Men over eighty-five kill themselves thirteen times as often as women.

The contempt for male friendship is a cultural failure on an epic scale. Without friendship, life simply isn't worth much. Friendship is essential not just for a personal sense of well-being but also for society in general. In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle prized it more than justice: "When men are friends, they have no need of justice, while when they are just they need friendship as well, and the truest form of justice is thought to be a friendly quality."

The sophistication of adult-male friendship is essential to being a fully formed person. You need your friendships the way you need vitamin C in your blood and your bones. The current contempt cannot last, because the lesson for men is obvious: Keep your bros. Just don't call them that.

A LITTLE ETYMOLOGY

No less an authority than the publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary traced the history of the word. Although it originated in the 1970s as a word that signified an African-American, it since has become a term almost exclusively applicable to white men. The lexicographers identify one of its stranger properties: "a certain element of metonymy: By being the sort of person who says 'bro,' a person becomes a bro." Ultimately,the word is fluid and much like the word hipster:It has become embroiled in its own opposition, at least among people who care about what bro might or might not mean. The lexicographers kind of gave up. The word has "a level of nuance that a conventional dictionary entry is ill-suited to describe: The semantic boundaries are subjective and in constant flux."

Stephen Marche Stephen Marche is a novelist who writes a monthly column for Esquire magazine about culture.

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