Broligarchies and manterruptions
On masculine blends
One of the topics that garners the most discussion among students in my gender and language class is the topic on interruption, especially the term manterruptions. The women in the class1 bring stories of feeling silenced interruptions perpetrated by men. Many insist that this happens and it is absolutely gender based. They make these claims despite little rigorous data that shows a gender difference in interruption.2
Another popular topic is mansplaining, a term that relates to the purported tendency of (some) men to explain a topic to a woman, even when the woman has more expertise than the man (or at least not any less). In elaborating this topic, we read a fascinating academic paper (open access!) about how women ‘weaponize’ the term in interactions to deligitimize what a masculine debate opponent claims. The term allows a woman to challenge the man’s expertise on a topic, raise up her own expertise, and kind of call him a sexist all at the same time.
The word that really sparked this post, though (and my early nomination for the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year) is broligarchy. Broligarchy has been around since at least 2009, perhaps a little longer, but it has risen to prominence as the Tesla owner has risen to power through the 47th President. Dave Wilton over at wordorgins.org has a good dive into its history up to last summer. His definition is useful: “a broligarchy is small group of men who control a situation or political power structure. It differs from an ordinary oligarchy in that a broligarchy carries with it a connotation of toxic masculinity.”
When linguists notice a pattern like this, we wonder if something is up in the linguasphere3. With words like broligarchy, there’s a pattern of where these masculine address terms are use as prefixes contributing a masculine ‘flavor’ to the word. I think man and bro are creating different flavors in these words, and the resulting meanings relate to how American culture treats the imagined categories4 of people who are men and bros.
How the bro-words are different from the man-words tells us something about how we think about masculinity in my culture. Man seems to be used in words that describe something that relishes in the privileges of masculinity, often at the expense of those who are not masculine: manspreading, manterruption, and mansplaining. The man- ‘prefix’5 in these words always modify an activity like spreading (body), interrupting, explaining, and when they’re done by a man, they take advantage of cultural dominance of masculinity.
So when the man-words are used, they call out this dominance - they make it visible. The man referenced in these words is not a specific man, and he is also not a generic ‘toxic’ man. Rather, these words point out ways that men throw around their power and might not even realize they are doing it. Yes, some men might do these things very intentionally. But the point of the of terms is that interrupting and taking up physical space are so a part of ‘being a man’ that men aren’t really even supposed to notice they are doing them.
If you want a good humorous demonstration of the overall attitude of cluelessness here, look no further than this Saturday Night Live skit from 2017. It aired just after a International Women’s Day “Day Without Women,” aka a women’s strike. So the setup was that the men did the writing, even for a sketch about women’s issues. You can see the mansplaining coming down the track already. In the skit, the men who wrote it mansplain in an earnest way, trying to be allies about women’s issues but still managing to silence them. It’s a thorough distillation of mansplaining, especially the cluelessness of the two men.
This cluelessness is why the words are important tools of resistance to such behavior. They are tools for naming power and even for mocking that power and the cluelessness with which its wielded. It’s not easy to stop a conversation and explain to a man what is going on, but it’s much easier to stop and say, “Please stop your mansplaining!” The naming in itself begins to diminish power, as the power to name is a power in itself (you can see this in how POTUS47 is fond of making up nicknames for people, a small but significant power move).
The bro-words are doing something different. They are also resisting, but in a different way. Masculinity is involved in bro-words too, but a specific kind that is, well, bro-wy. In other words, the specific category of man known as the bro.6 This is not a new category, but it has changed over the years. The history of bro could probably form another post, but the more recent history starts with a bro being “the type of person who says bro a lot.” This is the fraternity bro, stereotypes with the backwards baseball hat and a casual but at the same time enthusiastic embrace of partying, and vocally heterosexual while also hewing to the “bro-code.” It is not unimportant that these dudes are generally from privileged, white, upper middle class backgrounds.
At some point, this bro made the jump to silicon valley, where we heard about tech bros and brogammers. The tech bro started out as kind of a charming, geeky stereotype, but then quickly became associated especially with a gatekeeping misogyny in tech, and could be used for wealthy men running tech companies. Still generally white and privileged.
Bro has been used in more terms than man, probably because of the sound shape of the word (linguist would say “phonological structure”). Bro ends in a vowel, so it’s easier to combine with a lot of English words than something that ends in a consonant like dude or man. So it is prolific, or what linguists would call “productive.” There’s even a meta-commentary about referring to these terms as portmanbros7 (from portmanteau, or a blend of two words), and a paper about the use the masculine vocatives bro, man, dude, mate, and so on as brocatives. The linguists are having fun with it, too.
So that brings us to broligarchy, which seems to have beaten out the other bro-derived government structure, brotocracy (as used in this substack post). Wajahat Ali, writing in the The Progressive Magazine, provides a good articulation of the new broligarchic reality and defines the broligarchy as a “cabal of selfish billionaires” who also identify as men. Ali focuses mostly, however, on the “oligarchy” part of the word, outlining the importance of wealth in being in the club. An oligarchy, more generically, is just “rule of the few.” But its recent use has been in talking about a specific group of oligarchs who came to prominence after the fall of the Soviet Union in Russia. These are without a doubt economic or business oligarchs, as are our broligarchs. Perhaps one of the reasons for the popularity of broligarch over brotocracy is the connection of broligarch to the Russian oligarchs who rose to power economically and as Putin consolidated his power in Russia, even as it seems POTUS47 wants to do in the US.
Once again, having a term for something complicated like this makes it a tool of resistance. It’s easier and more effective to say “fight the broligarchy!” than “fight the cabal of selfish billionaires!” In that sense, “anti-broligarcharism”8 might be the best path for resistance to the attack on democracy and law in the US.
Some more bro links:
https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/bro-brah-bruv-bruh-and-breh-meanings-explained
https://livewire.thewire.in/livewire/the-great-bro-liferation-should-women-be-calling-each-other-bro/
And it is inevitably mostly women, although only once were there no men at all.
Although this is complicated topic, because it depends on the setting and even more on how you define and measure interruption.
That’s a word I made up. If you say “Is that a word?” around a linguist, the answer is inevitably “It is now!” I will henceforth use this coinage as a loose way of saying what would normally be '“ the English Language” or even “American English” or some other ethno-geographic linguistic construct. But I don’t want to be that precise, I just want to say, stuff I’ve heard and can find people using. Could also be glottosphere I guess, since we like to use latin and greek for ‘scientific’ terms for things. If I’m true to my ethnic roots (Netherlands), I might use spreeksphere or taalsphere, but that’s a thought for another day.
What I mean by imagined categories is something like a stereotype, without the negative baggage of stereotype (which might be a good word to tack in a later post). Imagined categories are not the same thing as imaginary categories, because imagined categories are based on some real observation of some real people, who are made into a ‘type.’ I don’t want to get too into the weeds with this, but Gender categories are imagined categories, as are more specific imagined categories, like “absent-minded professor.” Imagined category as a term gives me a way to talk about the type of person people have in mind when they use man and bro, which are not really the same thing.
I’m not sure it’s a real prefix, but it might be on its way. Linguists will argue about this, and I will bring my popcorn to the argument.
I have a paper talking about the bro voice if you want to get all academic-y about it. A preprint version of this paper is here. The reference is: Hall, Kira & Barrett, Rusty. (2024). The Oxford Handbook of Language and Sexuality. 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190212926.001.0001.
This is a rare one where the bro is at the end of the word. In fact I had mis-remembered the word when I first typed it and I wrote bromanteau. Either seems to work for a derivation of portmanteau, but portmanbro (portmanbreau?) is more transparent as to the original. Portmanbro is also possible because the final vowel sound in English is identical.
Like I said, us linguists like to make up words. At least it’s shorter than antidisestablishmentarianism!
While I’ve run into all these terms in my particular linguasphere, I love your explication of many of them, as well as the idea of “imagined types” vs. stereotypes. I look forward to a post on that topic.