On Masculinity: Bros before hoes

I’ve always thought the expression “bros before hoes” had a strange ring to it. Isn’t being a “bro” first and foremost about getting with as many girls as possible? If so, is the bros before hoes philosophy coextensive with this aim, or is it speaking something else about what it means to be a man today?

With respect to the former, privileging one’s “bros” over one’s “hoes” is not necessarily at odds with traditional male heterosexuality. French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (no, not the same guy who invented the jeans) argued that culture itself “is not established between a man and a woman, but between groups of men.” That is to say that heterosexuality is not defined as a relationship between a man and a woman, as we might tend to assume, but primarily as a relation between men “in which the woman figures only as one of the objects in the exchange, not as one of the partners.”

Levi-Strauss was thinking specifically about structures of kinship in “primitive” societies, for example, in the way that a father will marry off his daughter in order to seal a social alliance with the men of another family. Of course, these customs don’t really exist in the modern world (at least not explicitly, or very rarely), but it is interesting to notice how the term “bro” (short for “brother”) echoes Levi-Strauss’ kinship model. In a more general, sublimated sense, it is not difficult to see how the idea of heterosexuality as an exchange between “bros” continues to resonate with and inform male sexual fantasy today.

Understood through the lens of Levi-Strauss, the relatively new, contemporary expression, “bros before hoes,” is actually one of the oldest stories in the book, entirely coextensive with a man’s traditional objective of bagging as many females as possible. In fact, bros before hoes augments heterosexuality in a way, not only because it figures women as mere objects for enjoyment, but because it imagines privileged access to a surplus of said objects: “Women come and go, and there are so many of them available to me, that it’s not necessary to focus attention on any one of them.”

Feminists (as well as just a lot of angry girlfriends) have derided the phrase for its apparent figuration of all women as “hoes.” It could be said that bros before hoes was never intended as a general philosophy, but operates within a narrower range of experience. The statement warns men away only from particular kinds of women (deemed to be “hoes”) and promotes fidelity, not with men in general (an idea that might have a more homosexual connotation), but with one’s own cohort, with one’s “bros.”

I’m not sure this explanation is plausible, however, since bros before hoes fantasmatically constructs a larger imaginary of all men as comrades-in-arms, as brothers, with women standing in opposition to their fraternity. Bros before hoes can be applied, for example, to a man’s wife or girlfriend (who would not otherwise be described as a “ho,” at least not without some fists being thrown) as a call for a man to spend some general “guy time” doing “guy things.” If bros before hoes participates in a misogynistic characterization of women, it also is put in the service of creating and elaborating male-shared space.

The term “hoes” does not figure women so much as objects of exchange as promiscuous and unreliable creatures, with their own subjectivity and their own interests. By contrast, it figures men less as patriarchal fathers or owners and more as brothers who are faithful to each other as family or kin. Women are not degraded in this formulation as much as they are cast in their own separate realm of experience. This is what is “new” about bros before hoes, the way that it imagines fraternal bonds between men without the aegis (or the alibi) of heterosexuality. Rather than establishing homosocial bonds between men on the basis of the exchange of women, it creates these bonds purely on the foundation of common male sentiment.

It is in this regard that bros before hoes takes on its specificity in the present historical moment. While Levi-Strauss’ structures of kinship always contained a homosocial element, this male bonding was covered over by the image of heterosexual propriety, the “property” of women. But what traditional heterosexuality disavows as the threat of becoming “too much” in the privileging of relations between men, bros before hoes speaks forthrightly. It is an unabashed and unqualified celebration of male homoeroticism.

Paradoxically, we continue to fret about the “feminizing” influence of culture on men (which is partly where the bros before hoes call comes from), even as we live in perhaps one of the most gender specific and gender segregated societies in recent memory. Women too have their own version of bros before hoes. We should realize that bros before hoes is less a misogynistic commentary on women than it is a statement that excludes women altogether, simply because it is not addressed to them. Bros before hoes is part of the contemporary project to imagine new relations between and among men in the complete absence of the auspices of heterosexuality.

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