The Death of the 'Bro': Why We Need to Stop Categorizing Our Pet Peeves

What makes someone insufferable? Is it what they read, or how they read it?

David Foster Wallace's famously long novel, Infinite Jest, turned 30 this month, and with the anniversary came an old specter: the lit bro. "The book has become shorthand for a certain kind of pretentious, performative, male-coded lit bro," observed Lit Hub's Literary History newsletter. "It's no longer cool, and might even be a red flag."

The description is surgical in its precision: Pretentious (thinks he's smart), performative (reads to impress), male-coded (not a woman), red flag (you thought you might date him, but don't). It's the perfect distillation of a type that's become ubiquitous in our cultural discourse.

The Bro Industrial Complex

The lit bro joins a crowded field of archetypes that have proliferated over the past decade. Tech bro, gym bro, film bro, Bernie bro—attaching "bro" has become our most reliable cultural shorthand, a way to elevate pet peeves into demographic trends. The formula is simple: find something that annoys you, connect it to masculinity by adding "bro," and proceed as though you've identified a meaningful category of person.

Robinson Meyer produced the template with "Here Comes the Berniebro" in 2016, a sharp essay that, like many cultural critiques, lost its edge when it became a genre. Now we have an endless parade of bros, each representing not just individual behavior but entire industries, hobbies, and cultural movements.

But here's what the bro construction actually robs us of: the pleasure of pure, undiluted negativity. Instead of Instagram posts about why going to the gym wastes time, essays about how tech has spent billions making cities boring, or TikTok videos dissecting why Marty Supreme doesn't deserve nine Oscar nominations, we get watered-down descriptions of "the kind of people" who like things we don't.

The Narcissism of Small Differences

Consider the mechanics of the lit bro critique. These men zealously advocate for certain male authors—Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy—whom they condescendingly try to get women to read. But to recognize the significance of this behavior, you have to know those authors and their position within contemporary literature's charged field. In other words, you have to be a lit person yourself.

This is where the bro suffix enables what we might call the narcissism of small differences. The problem isn't literature—or movies, or fitness, or Bernie Sanders, or working with computers—but the guys who like those things and are "bros" about it. It's a way of maintaining cultural proximity while asserting moral distance.

And they are guys. While the concept of the female bro is theoretically possible, in practice people talk about men when they talk about bros. That's because connecting pet peeves to feminist critique has become one of bro's essential functions.

The Feminist Shortcut

Take manspreading—a concept that introduced feminist interpretation to a previously gender-neutral annoyance by connecting it to men. These cultural memes exploit a gap in specifics. Everyone agrees feminist critique is generally good, and people get the gist even without doing the reading.

This gap is where "bro" comes in handy. Say I find craft beer annoying (which I kind of do). If I declare that hazy IPAs should be stopped, you'll demand evidence or argument, which I can't supply. But if I complain about "beer bros"—especially if I add concrete details about sunglasses on flat-brimmed caps and condescending lectures about brewing standards—suddenly I'm doing feminism, kind of.

The precise connection between beer and women's social subordination isn't clear, but you can feel it. And that feeling becomes unassailable because no right-thinking person wants to argue against feminism, even its vague, meme-ified version.

The Tech Bro Problem

The tech bro represents the construction's most successful deployment. Defined as men who work in tech and aren't my friends, such bros are everywhere now—wearing black vests with white sneakers, eating and drinking in my establishments but in more annoying ways. My friends who learned to code or became project managers aren't like that; they have specific, non-tech interests and cool T-shirts from college, and they're funny, unlike the mass of interchangeable 25-year-olds standing around the falafel place looking at their phones.

Were it not for those tech bros, I could probably afford to buy a place in the city, and I definitely would have gotten my falafel faster. The tech bro perfectly combines suspicion of masculinity with suspicion of an industry that's genuinely problematic—dominated by men, notoriously unpleasant for many women, seemingly dedicated to exploding stable social elements for profit.

But in the process of creating this archetype, discussions of what's actually objectionable about the tech industry get lost in expressions of distaste for a certain type of person.

The Paranoid Fantasy

Here lies the essence of all bros: They're all the same, and they're all in it together against the rest of us. This thinking leaves "us" conveniently undefined—we're not the bros, but the distinguishing conditions remain unclear. The ambiguity appeals to the internet's essential paranoid fantasy: that masses of similarly behaving others conspire against you, and that you're not one of them despite doing many of the same things.

Social media and a decade of bro-based trend pieces have delivered an exhaustive supply of such people—infuriatingly familiar in their enthusiasm for certain books, movies, sports, foods, cocktails, musicians, political candidates, and the internet itself, but still obstinately and impenetrably other.

They are, at the risk of sounding like an existentialism bro, strangers.