Etymologically Speaking

You, though, are definitely not a bro. Unless we intend it as J. Evelyn did when he wrote in his diary in 1637: “I accompanyd my Eldest Bro (who then quitted Oxford) into the Country,” and the word was born.

Quite possibly you are someone’s Eldest Bro, or Youngest, or the only Bro in a swarm of Siss’es. Allowing that, I may be leaping to conclusions, but I suspect you’ve neither matriculated at nor quitted Oxford.

We are centuries past bro as shorthand; decades beyond bro as a signifier of solidarity inside a particular American oppression. We are in 2013 and we are in the sauna, and the bros I know are the ones I see stumbling out of my town’s cavernous sports bars at 2 am, stalking around the weight room at the gym, slouching into seats at the back of my classroom twice a week smelling of stale beer and weed, of hair product, of wintermint gum and pizza, of their mother’s laundry detergent. They’re white and young and all seem to want the same things: to get wasted, get laid, get swole.

You are too old, too thin, on too familiar terms with despair to be a bro. One does not need to know you to perceive this. Your face has sunk into itself and your posture as you squat against the wall outside the sauna, whispering to another squatting man, seems defeated. It’s the curve of your spine, the way you keep darting your gaze sideways down the hall. You look cornered even in a cornerless geography.

You enter the sauna alone on a waft of cooler chlorinated air, barefoot, in yellow mesh shorts and a black tee-shirt. For a few long minutes you stand stretching in the middle of the floor, grunting, doing leg lifts, pinwheeling your arms. And then you lie on your back, arms stretched, feet planted and spread, knees in the air.

You, splayed out on the sauna floor, are the tragedy of a man with something to prove and no bro-approved way to do it. Now there is only one word for what you are: tumescent.

And here are the rest of us, sweating and looking politely away, not saying a goddamn thing about it.