What have we done to ourselves as men? The 20-something, privileged white male is perhaps the most reviled and hated species on earth. And for good reason it seems. Alice Hines takes a good hard look at the state of the modern male over at The Awl. The piece is a byproduct of two terrible things happening at one time, the global apocalypse known as SantaCon and the "Ugly Christmas suit," having converged to form this unbreakable mold of a person known as the "Williamsbro."
The type of person involved with these two crimes against humanity are one in the same, Hines says. These are bros who love to dress up and not in the good way. They are the ones hashtagging #TFM on Twitter and Instagram. The guy we once label a "bro," dressed in New Balances, oxfords and khakis, has evolved into this new, advanced form. Hines gets a little philosophical with her explanation:
The Williamsbro’s clothes are weird, but his message is not. The fun of them lies in eliciting reactions from the outside world that don’t trip up conventional power dynamics...When a fraternity throws a Tight-n-bright party and all the guys wear Spandex neon, though, they’re just being funny. If anything, the pseudo-gay clothing only illuminates the hetero-ness of its wearer.
They dress for shock not because it's what they like to do, but because it gets a reaction from people, like us. I mean, how else would you react if you saw a horde of drunk Santas on a Saturday afternoon, puking all over everything without any context? SantaCon is supposedly labeled as this "counterculture" movement and a shot at the commercialization of Christmas, but if anyone in a Santa costume, hammered off their ass on the sidewalk tried to explain that to me, I'd look at them with the same look I usually reserve for doomsday preachers. Full of shit much? You're dressed obnoxiously to draw attention to your even more obnoxious personality. End of story. Hopefully the "Williamsbro" dies a long and painful death. We can only go up from here, people.
[Illustration by Katie Barnwell]
