Gabrielle #20 – The Bro Collector

Part two.

by Barbra Kruger.

This is the second part of an essay I published in June, regarding dudes and how they rock.

It is a common position adopted by women to love men but not like them. There has been too much suffering, perhaps. Too many indignities and disappointments. Maybe they’ve never felt seen as a complete person in a romantic context, and that leads them to view men in equally limited terms. Long-held dreams slip between the cracks of expectations and reality. Even the word – men – leaves the mouth like a sinking weight; a heavy stone rolled off a ledge into a deep body of water. Some find them at irreconcilable emotional odds. Others simply find them irritating, the way they sneeze like a poorly controlled demolition and spend an average of 45 minutes a day watching Reels on the toilet. As Whoopie Goldberg once said of marriage: “I don’t want somebody in my house.”

This is impossible to articulate without sounding like a Pick Me, so I’m just going to press on with the acceptance that that’s how it will come across to some people: I enjoy men. I’m comfortable around them. I perform less. I find them funny, or at least curious (yellow pillow, cool stick or rock found on walk, physical copy of Stalingrad – every man has a fascinating emotional attachment to at least one of these items). I chose the hypothetical man over the bear in the woods because I thought he would be ‘useful,’ though I’m sure I will regret this when the apocalypse comes and all the guys God put on this earth to hunt start panicking about their crypto wallets and mewing. I find boys easier to engage with when I’m going through it because I like offsetting my feelings rather than talking them out, and it doesn’t occur to them to put themselves in my shoes or ask direct questions. If I approach a male friend with an emotional problem he will tell me to stop being “gay” (this roughly translates to “I’ve got you x”) and send posts by the LATMAN incrementally over the following weeks until my mood improves. Healthy? Irrelevant. It works.

I rebuke the Pick Me allegations because these aren’t inauthentic behaviours tailored to please. It’s the fault of men that I’m like this in the first place. I’m lucky to have been surrounded by good ones my whole life, and their influence is glaring. I am in many ways my father’s daughter, quietly concerned and inclined to offer comfort through humour and unsolicited financial advice. As a kid I split my summers between both sets of grandparents and, while I presumably would have spent more time with my nans, my most vivid memories place me with my grandads. One taught me how to play chess, the other taught me how to play blackjack. One was a self-made cobbler and fiscally responsible member of the neighbourhood brass band, the other was an Elvis fanatic and ex-army nutcase. Utterly restless, unless he was hungover. He’d take me to the betting shop and let me pick the horses, then drag me up the tip with the dog – a black Staffy called Joe, who was wide and solid like a foot stool because my nan fed him a full roast dinner every Sunday. All three of us would scale it and race back down, the loose rubble and construction waste giving way under our feet. Who cares about cuts and bruises? Last one to the bottom was a loser. The dog usually won.

One summer I split my head open using a skipping rope to swing over a flight of concrete steps, which led down to a wall that collapsed on my dad three separate times when he was a kid. It didn’t really hurt but remember it because I was wearing a white t-shirt and when I went home the back was soaked fire truck red, like one of Bring Me The Horizon’s Suicide Season-era press shots. My mam nearly had a heart attack. Our neighbour was a nurse so she stitched me up in the living room. I found that quite satisfying. Nothing beat the feeling of getting in after a long day of fucking around, absolutely battered to bits. 

I’m the same now – with tip-scaling and Jackass behaviour swapped out for 30+ things like ‘rough sex’ and ‘the gym’ – and it was the same when I was a teenager. I’m an only child but my first cousin is like a big brother in that he was the first person I looked up to as soon as I started searching around for an identity of my own. He’s seven years older and was easily the coolest person I knew in my first 15 years of existence, so I basically tried his life on for size and kept most of it. I played all his PS1 games. I watched all his 80s action cartoons. I burned his entire CD collection. He wore a bike chain around his neck, so I wore a bike chain around my neck. He rollerbladed, I rollerbladed. In the 90s he had this incredible bedroom that looked like something out of an American sitcom. An unhinged colour scheme of black, orange, and purple sat somewhere beneath the layers of posters for The Crow, Limp Bizkit’s Significant Other, Green Day’s Dookie. There was a drum kit in the middle, a rack of ice hockey jerseys against the wall, a blow up alien in the corner. Teen paradise. I tried to recreate it when I was older, but it wasn’t the same. It was an early lesson in the shortcomings of nostalgia. One of many reasons why I’m immune to its charms now.

As is often the way in communities like the one I grew up in, the women in my family taught me how to care for other people. They cared for me and kept me alive and gave me an emotional map of the world. It was purely through circumstance that men would be the ones to demonstrate that I could do whatever I liked in it. That's what they seemed to do, and they brought me along for the ride. Because of that I associate men – not rightly, and not always – with personal freedom. Which is why it was so frustrating, in young adulthood, to feel so many doors suddenly slam shut on me by virtue of being a girl.

It’s probably different now, but certainly for anyone born in the 20th century it didn’t matter what you were like as a kid. There would come a moment, usually around 11 or 12, when things were mapped onto you from the outside, overriding most of your natural impulses in the process. I was a fucking miserable teenager partly because all teenagers are fucking miserable, but also because I couldn’t cope with the blow to my sense of reality. That world I thought I could do whatever I liked in turned out to be illusory. It took me a long time to turn back around and say “ nah fuck that.”

I think often, and with a full heart, about the cinematic masterpiece ‘British lads hit each other with chair.’ All good things about men are represented within it. The little kiss at the beginning, which says “I love you, brother. Do what must be done.” The exasperated “aw fucking hell” the cameraman does immediately afterwards. The one lad flicking his cigarette on the floor and the other picking it up to have a go on. The way the chair awkwardly unfolds on the third smash and the legs hit him directly along the nerve highway. The fact that they’re all topless, just because. “COME ON THEN!”

This video is discussed in comments sections like a piece of Greek mythology because it represents something fundamental about brotherhood, which is show not tell. It’s a crash course in men’s love language for other men. Their lips touch the same things. They offer encouragement and practical solutions when things don't go as planned. They pick their boy up off the ground when he’s temporarily paralysed due to being an idiot. Skin on skin, muscle against muscle. The whole thing was almost certainly the product of one of those “do you think you could take a bear in a fight?” types of conversations that lads like so much. Reckon you could break a chair over your back? Yeah mate, easy. Few bits of wood is it? Piece of piss son. And I think what’s beautiful about it, above all else, is that they want him to be right. They’re all on the same side. 

It’s basically Barbra Kruger’s Untitled (You Construct Intricate Rituals Which Allow You To Touch The Skin Of Other Men) brought to life for the Discord age. That image was controversial when it was made in the 1980s because it suggests that men will go to incredible lengths to justify touching each other without being perceived as gay, but it also acknowledges that hypermasculinity is rarely one dimensional. It’s often a facade for something gentle. A potentially threatening thing to cop to on a societal level, because it risks upsetting the balance. It’s that ‘show not tell’ thing again – the formal title, Untitled, acting as the cold front for what’s really going on in brackets (You Construct Intricate Rituals…). 

One of the questions it asks is why violence and intimacy exist in such close proximity for men. There are many ways to answer that, but I will say that I don’t think it’s a bad thing. I touched on it in part one of this essay, talking about how the author Gabriel Krauze reframes behaviour often deemed “toxic” as “the discovery of brotherhood in a dangerous and hostile environment.” I said that’s basically how I feel about sex, but it’s also how I feel about bonding in general. I get on with lads because their path to emotional intimacy is a physical one, which is something I understand. Fighting. Sex. A conversation. It’s all the same. I was pleased to have this confirmed at a Thai boxing class the other day when one of my trainers said “I wouldn’t tell you how to fight for the same reasons I wouldn’t tell you how to speak.”

I don’t mean to paint myself into a corner here. Anyone who vaguely knows me in real life will know that [bigotry defence voice] sOmE oF My BeST FRiEnDs ArE wOMeN! But I struggle in groups. Large groups of women scare me. Single-sex friendship groups in general scare me, to be honest, which is why I can’t look away when Love Island is on. I’m obsessed with what a psychological car crash it is. Everyone is sorted along distinct gender lines like the aisles at Toys R Us. Men who naturally get along with women are doomed to the friendzone. Women who “didn’t come here to make friends” are tried at The Hague (fire pit) for crimes against being a girls girl. It’s a nightmare, but it does get one thing right: boys run in packs.

For a while, I was in one. In the early 2010s I lived in what was essentially Cardiff’s answer to the Workaholics house. It was me and two lads, another lad who lived next door, an extended friendship circle of further lads, plus my best girl friend from young. Everyone was in a deep recession anti-grind, unemployed or in a band (same difference) or bouncing from dead-end job to dead-end job with no urgency to do anything else. We had a revolving door of people coming through to smoke rollies made with heavily discounted under-the-counter tobacco from the Turkish bossman shop at the end of the road, binge watch Jersey Shore, and play Rock Band until the bailiff’s turned up because no one had thought to pay the council tax. We partied together, we cooked together, we deep cleaned the house together when everyone agreed that it had become intolerable. My room was downstairs so every morning I’d be woken up by one of them booting his door open, stomping across the landing while doing a cartoonishly loud yawn, and announcing something like “THAT WAS AN AMAZING SLEEP” out loud to the house. Every single day. It was lovely. The other one did grey area sexually assault me, which is unfortunate, but even with that factored in they were some of the best years of my life.

What was transformative about the Workaholics house, I think, was that it collapsed the social boundaries that had previously been there with men. The ones that kept me on the wrong side of the frosted glass as a teenager, orbiting the parameters of some boyfriend or another’s group of friends who were (understandably) not interested in getting to know me. That’s still how a lot of straight people socialise now, which is insane. There can be an impenetrable wall around male friendship groups that I used to find infuriating, because I sensed what was on the inside and I wanted it. I wasn’t content being a visitor, granted entry via the guest pass of being someone’s girlfriend only to be bounced out when we broke up. I would frequently find myself sleeping over at a house inhabited by four or five men, being in the bathroom and observing their kingdom of crumpled Head and Shoulders 2-in-1 bottles, misc items that belonged to other rooms (an iron???), and stacks of Front magazines and thinking: this is ridiculous. How do you live like this (complimentary). The Workaholics house let me in and gave me all the answers. Even the ones I could have done without knowing.

The admiration of men is something Patti Smith writes about beautifully. A rare example of a female artist with a significant slew of male muses, her way of seeing men is inextricably bound up with a desire to share in their world. She doesn’t look at them. She looks into them, like mirrors. In her obituary for Television's Tom Verlaine, she wrote: "Had I been a boy, I would have been him.” They dated for a while, and it was his physicality she noticed first. “I noticed the way his long arms hung, and his equally long and beautiful hands, and then we went our separate ways.” Later she wrote that he had “the most beautiful neck in rock and roll.”

It was a similar thing with Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom she had an extraordinary relationship that went beyond romance and existed outside of sexual orientation. To this day she can’t get through an interview without mentioning Arthur Rimbaud, Allen Ginsberg, or William S. Burroughs (she used to fantasise that the latter would fall in love with her and they would get married). It’s intriguing that almost all of these men are gay. Maybe there’s some common ground there, with Patti having an androgynous physical presence that could also be described as twink-like. I’m thinking out loud here, but usually when I get close to a guy it’s because there’s something about him that helps me understand myself.

Some people have called this a question of identity. The poem she wrote about becoming pregnant at 20 and giving the baby up for adoption is often cited as further evidence of dysphoria. I mean, who really knows, but I’m not sure that’s it. To describe the longing to experience life the way a man might as a gender crisis feels short-sighted. Is it not simply a desire to experience the world in full, and an expression of regret over the fact that having female reproductive organs saddles you with a degree of pain and vulnerability that often prevents that from happening? Isn’t it logical for these things to be felt especially violently around the ultimate body horror of pregnancy? Sylvia Plath confessed much the same, before the perceived limitations of her sex would contribute to her decision to stick her head in the oven at 30. 

“My consuming desire is to mingle with road crews, sailors and soldiers, barroom regulars – to be a part of a scene, anonymous, listening, recording – all this is spoiled by the fact that I am a girl, a female always supposedly in danger of assault and battery,” she wrote in her journal. “My consuming interest in men and their lives is often misconstrued as a desire to seduce them, or as an invitation to intimacy. Yes, God, I want to talk to everybody as deeply as I can. I want to be able to sleep in an open field, to travel west, to walk freely at night…” In short, she was hungry for possibility and envious of the great deal more afforded to men. To be a woman was to suffer. Men could do whatever they pleased, at least in theory. “They could die or go to Spain.”

That’s still pretty much true. It’s also the position from which most women begin their descent into TERF psychosis, but I’ll leave that there, suffice to say that I think Patti Smith’s public navigation of many of the same issues has unquestionably proven to be the more graceful path.

I am one. A woman, that is. I’m impractical. I use too many exclamation marks in work emails. I feel like Kratos when free bleeding into a pair of bike shorts. I look forward to late spring because it means I can start doing domestic chores in a black slip dress. I feel physically connected to the moon. I literally need to sit on the floor. I like my body how it is even if I do hide it by dressing like Jesse Pinkman. At the same time, I do envy men. I wish I could look that good topless in a pair of sports sports. I dream of hormonal balance. Oh, the things I could accomplish if I woke up most days with the same level of energy and didn’t spend 5-7 days each month “feeling mysterious” (this is the language my husband has invented for when he has to politely ask me not to kill myself). I would love to have the strength to knock a guy out cold for being cruel to someone I love, or push a broken down car into a layby. Sometimes I like to delude myself in thinking that, with enough cardio, I could eventually ruck 75lbs up a mountain like a Marine when I can't even read a hardback book in bed for more than two minutes without my wrists hurting. 

I don’t envy those things because I wish I was a guy, though. I envy them because I am protective in nature and I don’t like feeling limited – and yet here my stupid ass is, barely scraping 5'3 with no upper body strength and terrible reflexes (except when it comes to air hockey, which I am somehow incredible at). I bet it feels unreal to get a boner, but having a dick and balls? All that stuff down there, in the way? Not for me.

Anyway, I could armchair psychoanalyse myself all day but it all boils down to the fact that boys are just fucking funny. British boys especially are among the finest humourists on earth. They brighten my life in new ways every day. Arguing themselves into a rage blackout about the tiered rankings of childhood deserts. Alerting me to the fact that they have a new number by sending a fake promotional text claiming I have won a “Butt Blaster 5000.” Responding to my recent field research about why men are obsessed with anal by unanimously shrugging “it’s not meant to go in there.” When the heavy oven door of the soul falls open, it is football tweets that give me the strength to close it. Honestly I probably could have saved myself the last 3000w and just linked to the one below.

To all my boys, lads, dudes, dawgs, and bros out there (most of all the two Laurens, who are the biggest bros I know despite being even tinier and far more glamorous women than myself), let me stress my appreciation for you in the strongest possible terms: 👍.