Frat Bros

https://substack.com/inbox/post/170143749

I was hanging out with some friends this past weekend and one way or another, I ended up meeting a guy that one had been on a date with earlier that night. This guy was immediately uncomfortable to be around, at first because he just seemed to be a little uncomfortable himself, but pretty soon after meeting him I realized it was something more and not just that, something I’d been running into and dealing with my whole life. He was just kind of “fratty.”

When people say this, there’s kind of an understood, implicit meaning that no one can quite define outside of pointing out common behaviors of frat bros – that they like sports, drinking beer, and generally hang out with people just like them. However, those things describe a lot of people, many of whom are not necessarily, or even close to being, frat bros – a lot of, say, construction workers might also fit this description. While one could maybe make the argument that a lot of ‘fratty’ people tend to share other, perhaps more subtle things in common (such as the overuse of extreme hyperbole in conjunction with certain voice inflections), I’d argue it’s not these kinds of behaviors you can observe at a distance that describe frat bros. It’s more of the way that frat bros make you feel when you talk to them, and I think it’s this feeling that make them generally unliked.

Certain conversations can carry with them a power dynamic that dictate the terms of the conversation. The power relationship is usually set outside of the conversation itself. For instance: la boss asking his underling what they did the past weekend probably won’t end up with the underling giving a true response of degenerate activities, personal conflict or familial turmoil, but rather something within the acceptable terms of the conversation, like “going on a hike.” Different power dynamics set different boundaries, and more authentic conversations tend to come out when the balance of power is equal. However, frat bros tend to create a power dynamic from within the conversation itself. When talking to frat bros, this idea that anything (people, places, ideas) that’s not recognizable to them is weird. Some people, for instance, immigrants, might respond to unfamiliar topics with a sense of strange wonder – that’s not what I’m talking about. Frat bros, through a mixture of odd frowns, looks of disdain, and changes in tones of voice, distinctly give the impression they won’t respond “well” to anything they’re not familiar with, and not in a culturally unfamiliar way, more in a way that signals they’re the gatekeepers of appropriate conversation topics, not you. This makes it so that they set the terms of the exchange and that you are always catering to them, to make what isn’t familiar seem familiar. In many cases frat bros are members of the dominant culture (i.e. white male Americans) and so people kind of go along with catering to them either through muscle memory or because they’ve internalized the way things are in America so deeply – the frat bro thus never experiences any sort of actual consequences, or if faced with evidence to the contrary, specifically that their life experiences are not the norm, simply ignores it.

The enforcement of the terms of the conversation on the part of the frat bro doesn’t have to be reactive, either. I once witnessed a frat bro vehemently express disbelief that a group of Asian software engineers did not know what a “30 rack” in a conversation about college parties. Indicating that someone should know something they don’t know is another common tactic of making people generally feel uncomfortable in a conversation in a way that also signals superiority.

If you find yourself, as I was, standing next to a frat bro with absolutely nothing to talk about, you’ve got a couple of options. You can learn just enough about frat bro activities (fantasy football, for example) to have a somewhat superficial but power-balanced conversation, especially if you can work in some fact that the frat bro didn’t know about before (i.e. “Did you know that Julian Edelman played quarterback in college?”). This was the approach I actually took in the situation I was in. If you don’t want to do that but you do want to have an interesting conversation, you can admit that you’re a “weirdo” in what amounts to an attempt to correct the balance of power by being openly vulnerable, which is something that frat bros are probably not used to seeing. If you truly want to salt the earth, you can look them in the eyes, sigh, and walk away, but you never know when that might come back to haunt you. Finally, you can continue to be a conversational serf, but I can’t really recommend this approach as it will just lead to more essays like this in the future.