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)