In The Big Lebowski, Jeff Bridges’ character is called, rather famously, The Dude. As a bumbling, mostly passive, but ultimately decent figure, he is an ideal protagonist for the Coen Brothers’ parody of sun-soaked LA noir. In the opening voiceover, Sam Elliot’s cowboy character says that dude is “a name no one would self-apply where I come from,” alluding to the original meaning of the word: city-slickers or dandies who wanted to participate in the Wild West but weren’t man enough for the real thing. That’s what the term “Dude Ranch” insinuates, and it’s why in the first episode of Deadwood, Al Swearengen refers to the fatally in-over-his-head Brom Garret as “the New York dude.” In any case, Jeff Lebowski’s nickname is central to his personality and captures everything that differentiates him from his mirror, the titular “Big” Lebowski. This latter figure is an avatar for all things un-dude-like: wealth, power, conservatism, The Establishment.
Now think about how people use the word dude on the internet these days. This article from Deadspin is a good example. It’s a jeremiad against the “rich white dudes” who run the country and their puppet-jurist, Brett Kavanaugh. According to this usage, it is the Big Lebowski who is a “dude.” What the hell? Where does that leave The Dude?
You see this phenomenon more and more. While I think that the shift in usage has seismic implications, usually when I bring it up, people shrug and point out that bro is a much more popular dysphemism (I use this word reluctantly, but “slur” or even “epithet” would be awfully gratuitous) for straight white men. And the two concepts — the dude and the bro as manifestations of sexism and privilege — certainly did emerge onto the national Discourse from the same milieu, that being online feminism, before being amplified during the 2016 Democratic primary contest and finally mainstreamed by the Me Too movement.
But what about the collapse in distinctions between dudes and bros, as captured in the unfortunate portmanteau dudebro? To my mind, it was the bros who played lacrosse, worked in law and finance, and dominated our political class. Dudes were, for the most part, surfers and stoners from Southern California. Now I know, people use both words prolifically in their form as direct address, and dude is even effectively gender neutral in this function. It’s not quite right to say that they refer to entirely different modes of masculinity. Nonetheless, they carry significantly different associations, or at least they used to.
I’ve been wondering whether there’s some deeper meaning to us dudes becoming rich and powerful. You could say we’ve been gentrified. Does this linguistic microtrend have any social value, or at least impact on The Discourse? A professor in one of my grad-school seminars might have asked — What kind of work does it do? The historical transformations of the word suggest that it has been central to American ideas of masculinity for over a century. And these days, when you see people talking about the subject of “Men,” it is usually a conversation about wrongdoing: toxic masculinity, arguing about the appropriateness of social penalties of sexual miscreants, backlash against the idea of toxic masculinity, male tears, paranoia about false accusations of sexual assault, etc. One of the main contributions of internet feminism, in my opinion, has been to show that all sorts of men can be bad, not just the sort of men you picture when you think of bad men. This process has taken many forms, for example the rising awareness that the elite can also be abusers, or the idea that “nerds” are not just shy, nice guys, but can engage in toxic masculinity as well.
Seen in this light, the collapse of distinction between dudes and bros, the hippies and elites, makes more sense. As we have seen just this week, in the Ryan Adams revelations, dudes can be monsters as well. There is still more to say about the process itself — for example, I think that the concept “Bernie Bros,” a group that was actually made of of dudes, was a critical inflection point in the story. I’m still not clear on exactly how it became acceptable to refer to the likes of the Koch brothers as dudes, and I’m not sure that it is entirely beneficial to think of masculinity as something that articulates itself in the same way regardless of class or other factors. I can accept, nonetheless, that this shift in usage has had some benefit to The Discourse. Still, I think we can all agree that dudebro has got to go.
HUGE REALITY 