Bros and hos (Part 2)

Read Part 1

It's New Year's Eve. In the parts of the world that have not yet already arrived in 2010, people are preparing for one of the biggest party nights of the year. A lot of alcohol will be consumed tonight, and a lot of hangover remedies will be employed tomorrow.

But for bros, tonight may not be much different than any other Thursday night. Cause bros f'in love to get f'd up! And they don't wait until the weekend to do it! One thing that might be different tonight is the location. Bros will be willing to spend some extra bucks to gain access to an environment with increased odds of slaying a slam piece (I can't believe I wrote that).

Bros will roll deep into a party, bar or club event (many already drunk from their pre-game), scout the crowd for the hottest girls, chat them up just long enough to gauge their chances, and be in the right place when the countdown ends. Some bros will have to fall on a grenade (settle for an ugly and/or fat chick so their bro can hook up with the hottie). A few bros won't get lucky at all, but will still have an awesome night because, hey, they're with their bros!

But the primary objective is to score. And that's where the hos come in.

In my day (I am allowed to use that phrase because I'm hitting 50 in 2010, God willing) I loved to party too. I didn't go to college, but I went to a lot of college parties. I once fell off an Amtrack train after pre-gaming it alone, because I had to work while the rest of my group drove from Chicago to East Lansing. It was an epic night. I think it was the night I met my future (and I mean way in the future) husband, so I kinda wish I remembered more of it.

What seems to be different from my party days and what I've learned about the bro culture of today is that I pretty much always partied with a group of people I trusted. We were friends with a lot in common, and we hung out together whenever we could, even if it wasn't a party. All these years later we're still friends, and we still sometimes drink to excess. The only negative consequence of this (besides the hangover) is hearing the same old stories for the hundredth time.*

Anyway, the bros of my day seemed to respect women a lot more. And maybe that's because more women in my day respected themselves enough to avoid being known as a slut or a whore. Today that seems to be a designation with little shame attached, if not a badge of honor. I'll explore that further in Part 3.

*I just thought of another negative consequence...digital photography. I live in fear of finding a picture of me on the internet from a canoe trip in 2008. Damn pre-mixed mojitos!

(continued)

Bros and hos

I recently set out to learn something about a facet of popular culture for which I was almost clueless. It all started innocently enough, with me thinking that two young people I know might want to meet each other. Not that I have any qualifications as a match-maker, but you never know who might hit it off.

The girl I know quite well. The guy - I know one facet of his life (his profession) pretty well, and he seems nice enough. The people he works with all speak very highly of him. So I show said girl a picture of said guy, and am surprised by her reaction. Yeah, he's good looking...but he might be a "bro".

When she tried to explain to me what she meant, it didn't seem to fit what I knew about said guy. But again I don't really know him outside of our professional relationship. So I wanted to learn more. A few words typed into a search engine, and I've got a ton of information for my research.

With billions of pages on the Internet, there are sites dedicated to everything you can think of (and even more to things most people would never think of). And there are plenty of bro sites with awesome stories of all things bro. They even have their own language, epitomized in this essay from The Onion (language warning).

These sites were a lot of fun to read. Assuming that most of what I read was super-exaggerated for comic effect, it seemed like bros are basically a modern version of the Deltas from Animal House.

So I was all set to do a funny take on the bro thing. I was even going to write about doing "field research" by observing the behavior of bros in their natural habitats (said girl offered to be my guide). But then my online research took me to places that weren't so funny.

What if many of those stories I read weren't exaggerated after all?

(continued)