I ought to know better than to read Pandagon; the best writer on the site by a wide margin is Amanda Marcotte, but she's also in some ways the most disturbing member of that cohort - a thoughtful person who works hard, and knows she's working hard, to rationalize and aestheticize her overpowering hate and disgust. She says some absolutely stupid things, but then so does everyone; the problem with Amanda's writing is that the stupid or hateful or (to be more precise) blandly misandrist ('man-hating') things she says (when she says them) are couched in bog-standard 'progressive' rhetoric of a particular young white bourgeois feminist variety, shot through with just enough co-opted punk style to appeal to the cool kids.
The rest of the writers are histrionic and boring (and old hand Jesse Taylor has unexpectedly supplanted Pam Spaulding as the site's resident screeching harpy). Well what can you do. [Update: Well yes, some qualities I hold as dealbreakers w/r/t Pandagon I tolerate in writers like Andrew Sullivan. And I should note that the Pandagonians are in most issues 'allies' of mine, at least in theory (or Theory, if you like), so why carry on like this? I plead insanity on the former case and shrug at the latter. Sullivan, for his part, seems good-hearted for the most part - though to be frank I think he's a racist misogynist asshole and a world-class hypocrite. I'm not sure why I continue to read his site, nor those of his fellow poli-bloggers like Yglesias and Klein, with whom I've got so many problems. My hate is complex, today isn't the day to think it through. Someday will be, I promise.]
In any case:
People like Laura Sessions Stepp who scold young women and tell them to manipulate the guys with their sexuality in order to make everyone more mature are doing young women a great disservice. Young women have enough on their plates---Kimmel does take time to mention how young women feel this intense pressure to be effortlessly perfect, just for starters. They have to grow themselves up, and people like Stepp would have them take on the responsibility to grow young men up, too. Which is fucked up on 14 different levels. To name a few: Good luck even getting a guy to submit to being your maturation project. Love, especially early love, shouldn’t be this horrible and thankless job. He’ll resist you, which means endless amounts of tears for you and hostility from his male friends about how he’s pussy-whipped. He’ll probably cheat on you and dump you. It’s unfair to have to take care of your own development and a man’s, especially when he’s not going to give much back in return.
Now, Amanda's talking about young men in particular here; on the other hand, she's a young woman (just a couple years older than me if I remember correctly), so let's call a spade a spade: this is how she sees men. This is what she thinks is the basic nature of male/female relationships. And to be clear, this is not merely her description of a free-floating patriarchy that keeps all people down, nor a diagnosis of the unfortunate abuse of most men by emotionally closeted misogynist alpha males desperate to pathologize all non-macho masculinities: this is everyone, in Amanda's world. She uses the language of victimization to talk about men who don't fit the frat boy stereotype, but she happily slides into general condemnation when she gets going (and she gets going fast). And notice that she criticizes Sessions Stepp's tactics but not her feeling, which is that young men women's help to grow into reasonable human beings, while (it is implied) that relation does not go the other way. Plus Amanda seems happy to do what Sessions Stepp is describing, if only it didn't take so much work. Which is a gross fucking attitude even outside of this dubious argumentative context, even outside of this specific instance.
That said, it's worth reading her whole post, which is about 'hookup' culture (which should be pluralized). It's these sentences that stopped me short:
I suspect a lot of young women also know that they're basically biding their time until guys their age grow up a little and lose some of their allegiance to the "bros before hos" mentality and become acceptable boyfriends who can exhibit care about you as a human being. Until then, why waste your time? And hell, even after guys start growing up, there’s often plenty of times when you’re single and it seems every guy you meet has "issues" with grown women, and it's self-punishing to hold out for the good one to come along when that could means months or years of waiting.
Again, this is a perverse way of seeing the world, though not a surprising one: it basically removes from women's shoulders every scrap of responsibility for the state of dating relationships, implying that because women allegedly 'mature faster' than men that men are inferior beings, certainly inadequate.[*] But that's common perversity. So what. I'm interested, rather, in the classic line, 'bros before hos.'
When I was in college, my housemates used to use this line all the time. I lived at a fraternity, of sorts; culturally, the only thing it had in common with typical fraternities was its all-male membership, and even that was negotiable.[**] Still, you'd hear 'bros before hos' all the time. 98% of the time it was said in jest, or as half-ironic affirmation of the worth of a brother ('Don't worry boss, you might be single but you've got us'), in which case 'bros after hos' might have been a more precise formulation. It was also a way of needling one another: 'What, you don't want to hang out with us? Because you're gonna go have sex or something?' Which was both a reasonable claim (c'mon, you can have sex any goddamn time) and a misrepresentation. While my housemates did tend to display some resentment toward the women who 'stole' their brothers away - I was quite often guilty of this, shamefully - ours was a committed, consciously welcoming community; our aspiration was equality of treatment in all things, one of the few rules actually enforced in the house, and extending our love and affection to everyone who entered the community was the one task we all worked hard at for four straight years.
In other words, the phrase was never spoken nor taken at face value. (How many such slogans are?)
But the one positive meaning 'bros before hos' had, its mock-dismissive language aside ('bro,' like the later 'dudebro,' was as much a slander in our house as 'ho,' though 'ho' was never ever used in isolation that I can recall), was that it reaffirmed our commitment to one another. Unless you're wearing a ring of some kind - of the wedding or (argh) promise varieties - you likely have only informal commitments to reassure you of your place in your Special Somebody's life. But we had actually taken oaths to one another (regarding trust and friendship and acceptance rather than loyalty, though our national organization's oaths contained some of that stuff), and crazy as that sort of thing sounds to many people, the oaths (like wedding vows) served as markers of faith, rituals with the power not only to mark time and space but to transform relationships.
My first college girlfriend split with me during sophomore year; we'd dated since between semesters as freshmen. I couldn't understand why we were breaking up - or rather, I wouldn't let myself believe what I perceived were her reasons for splitting (boredom, frustration, etc.). The fact is, I'd come home to my crazy housemates and they'd take care of me, which granted me the security, the 'safe space'(!) I needed to deal with my confusion and sadness (and anger). It took me a long time to accept that it was for the best. And in the intervening nearly-a-decade (Christicles!) I've learned a lot about relationships, much of it from my housemates themselves.
But that's fanciful. The imaginative material is this: our words of stylized, ritual affirmation had power. And in a country and a culture where men are for various reasons constrained in their ability to express their thoughts and emotions verbally - indeed, in any form but the physical - we found ourselves co-opting the language of the frat boys we despised (our biggest common bigotry) in order to express a complex truth about ourselves and our shared life.
I know Amanda's using 'bros before hos' as a synecdoche here for the genuinely misogynist culture(s) found in many 'first-world' fraternities and macho-male organizations, but as usual she's eliding certain crucial differences between such groups, and as usual she's ignoring the fact that (like religious beliefs that are ridiculous on face - the Ascension, the Annunciation, reincarnation - but symbolize emotional truths) the language of men's cultures is always shot through with the same complexity as the (sure, let's grant this) women's cultures formed in reaction to male aggression or control or circumscription. It's a common move in academia and its popular bastard discourses to valorize woundedness or defensiveness while criticizing identical behaviour in allegedly dominant groups, but we shouldn't roll over for it, even when the people perpetrating such double standards do so for 'progressive' reasons, or (orthogonally) with a good heart.
So to sum up: 'bros before hos' doesn't actually mean 'it's better to hang out with the guys than with bitches,' nor does it simply reduce to 'women don't understand us, dude.' Nor is the 'attitude' it purportedly signifies as simple as immature dismissiveness and avoidance. And while it's nice to have a simple explanation for or response to everything in pocket - for instance that old chestnut, 'I blame the patriarchy' - the cultural prejudices of both men and women are twinned with biological predilections of both men and women which in complex, unpredictable, and sometimes mutually beneficial (and often mutually disastrous) ways determine the roles of men and women as they grow, adapt, intertwine, and slowly devour one another. Which is maybe only to say that we can hate or even love features of the world without hating or loving the people who seem to embody or display them, and we'd be well-served asking how the people who display them feel about the whole thing - and whether the allowances you make for people shaped and coloured like you, you should consider extending to the Other Half.
Though maybe I was saying something else, or more. Honestly, I'm better at maintaining speed than depth. You may know that by now. If you're disinclined to be charitable toward the above, I hope you'll take it with a grain of salt. Amanda's readers have got the shaker and they're using it up at a goodly clip. Ask politely.
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[*] I should note that, as Amanda has literally made it her job to let people know how she feels about male/female relationships, at extraordinary length, it's possible that her sense of 'every guy [having] "issues" with grown women' might have less to do with spirit-crushing patriarchy and the emotional crippling of the American male than with Amanda Marcotte. And believe me, this isn't the bog-standard misogynist 'Oh another uppity feminist bitch' reaction so commonly seen among reactionaries; I'm guessing Amanda would be a more effective advocate for her political views and (broadly) her sex were she less self-involved, less resentful. And a more effective advocate would a wonderful thing. Alas.
[**] There are a handful of progressive-minded living groups at MIT, to go with the usual assortment of alpha jocks, midlist jocks, overcompensatory subjocks, whitebread nerds, and the batch of nice Jewish boys at AEPi. My fraternity was doggedly nerdy, somewhere in the middle of the MIT pack in terms of social skills but near the top in terms of open-hearted extroversion; we were zealous about our house culture, which was built (I kid you not) on four rules: 'No hazing. No homophobia. No misogyny. No one shall force his or her lifestyle on anyone else in the house.' 35 people on top of one another can be frustrating and tiring, and my brothers' lives were more densely interconnected than is typical for college kids, in part because of the absence of freshman/upperclassmen competition or alienation (because of the no-hazing rule). But when the house worked, when we acted in concert and allowed love and trust to guide us - in other words, when we lived in faith with one another - I believe we had something truly unique among living groups anywhere. In particular, the aggressive and even abrasive boys-at-play, nothing-is-sacred quality of house culture balanced out the retiring awkward-touchy-feely tendencies many of us had: for instance, at house meetings we'd end with 'Gossip and Slander,' in which we went around the room gleefully outing one another's secrets and peccadilloes, especially the shameful or tawdrily sexual ones, under the belief that almost nothing is worth keeping from family. (In truth we would respect serious secrets and blood-family concerns, of course.) This only sounds invasive; truth be told, it was the best part of house meetings, other than the drinking game, which had only one rule ('Every time someone says something stupid you take a shot'). It was a short game.