What do you think when you encounter words like man-bag, man-bun, man-flu, guyliner, manscaping, or man-chips?
Maybe you think, "What is this malarkey, have I forgotten how to read English?"
Or perhaps you instead (rightly) think, "Wow, each of these words is really reinforcing the fact that masculinity is incredibly fragile."
So now a new word has been brought into this world that, again, confirms this fragility - this time centred on the increased popularity of rosé drinking amongst some (gasp) men.
The word (or portMANteau if you will) they have come up with is the incredibly ingenious 'brosé', a combination of 'bro' and rosé.
This word has been invented because there is seemingly no way that a bro can merely enjoy a refreshing glass of rosé on a hot summer’s day with some other bros, hanging about doing bro stuff.
After all, rosé tends to be pink in colour, and can you imagine the embarrassment of a man being caught holding a pink drink without somehow distancing himself from it? His man-face would become flushed with shame, and the hue of his blushing man-cheeks would match the rosé in his shaking and mortified man-hand, embarrassing him even further.
No, in this society we have created, if a man wants to consume or use a product that is perceived as being 'feminine' or at least traditionally 'for women', he must first affix to it some kind of masculine word in order to show his distaste for anything effeminate. He can’t just shove a donut into his manth (man mouth); he must shove a bronut into his manth. If his lips are dry, presumably from doing something manly like kissing a pile of dirt, he can’t just use chapstick – he has to use dudestick.
The idea of being traditionally (stereotypically) masculine means having to leave these so-called 'feminine' products at the door. And in this case, that door obviously leads into a mancave, or translated to English, a room where a man hangs out with things he likes. If some of those things he likes or needs require him to adopt undesirable characteristics (read, feminine characteristics), he must automatically attach the word 'man' or 'bro' to the beginning of its name in order to remain secure about his identity. In this way, masculinity needs constant soothing that it is masculine enough.
Some men require constant reassurance that they do indeed live up to this imagined ideal of what masculinity is, and the maintenance of this ideal requires rejecting anything that could take away from that. The ideal requires distaste for femininity, because the worst thing a man can do is to act like a woman. It also leads to homophobia, and a rejection of the perceived femininity of some men.
And so we are left with brosé.
In a perfect world, the embarrassment of being a heterosexual man who is so concerned with appearing masculine that he would sincerely use a term like brosé should far outweigh any embarrassment there could be about seeming 'feminine'. Being worried about the latter speaks much more to how fragile your masculinity is than the former. Even more fundamentally though, the idea that there are divergent 'feminine' and 'masculine' qualities or interests has become out-dated.
The fact that any alcohol at all is gendered is ludicrous. For that matter, so is the intentional gendering of any expendable consumer product to target either men or women to the exclusion of all others. Buying products that support gender roles and strengthen the underpinning idea of gender norms at all is a good habit to get out of. The world will still keep spinning if we just have toothpaste, instead of toothpaste for men. Nothing will explode if you buy pink clothes for your baby boy, except the ideas that, one, somehow pink is for girls, and two, that there is something inherently wrong with being a girl.
So bros get a brandle (bro-handle) on yourselves and have the bronfidence (bro-confidence) in yourself to pour a nice cool refreshing glass of rosé down your man-hole this summer.
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