In the past few years, youth culture has converged around two opposing stereotypes – the hipster and the bro. Both have been around for quite some time but more recently they’ve become common parlance at the high school and college level. Hipsters and bros define themselves in opposition to each other. I was recently conducting research with a bro at a certain college and I mentioned Wesleyan University. He said, “that’s that place with the skinny jeans” meaning “that’s that place with the hipster guys,” meaning that’s the place he wouldn’t be caught anywhere close to.
Although hipsters and bros are antithetical – The hipsters revel in irony, wear scarves and skinny jeans, and congregate in Brooklyn. The bros detest irony, wear baseball caps, and are geographically attuned to wealthy suburbs – there are essential traits they have in common: both are expressions of affluence and privilege. And, although both are open to individuals of differing skin color, both are essentially White. Less weighty perhaps but certainly crucial in their eyes, both celebrate cheap beer.
The hipster-bro cultural axis leaves all kinds of students out – young people who are neither hipster nor bro. It would be tempting to call these students “nerds” and often the students themselves identity in this way. But the group of neither-of-the-above is broader than self-identified nerds. It includes kids who are not particularly socially outgoing. Those who don’t drink. Good, solid kids who occupy our high schools and colleges. The ones who mainly want to grow up, get on with their lives and don’t feel the attraction of either of these strongly socially defined groups. They find both hipsters and bros intimidating and off-putting.
I attribute the recent success of some hot colleges such as The University of Chicago and Tufts University to the fact that they offer comfortable homes to good solid students who desire to be neither hipster nor bro. These neither-of-the-above students are looking for a home and what schools like U of C and Tufts offer is a fairly down-to-earth, not highly stylish student culture. This is a market niche. It’s not necessarily one that schools would deliberately cultivate. But it is important to remember that the vast majority of young people, especially young people from public schools, more modest economic backgrounds, and non-White families do not have the cultural resources nor desire to be either hipster or bro. The stereotypes leave them out. Luckily there are many fine colleges where they can find a home.
Interesting comments that maybe you can expand a little further in the comment section. Namely, I’m interested in hearing more about how both affinity groups negotiate their relations to privilege, specifically White/Class privilege.
I attend a school with a hipster/bro ratio of roughly 2:1, though putting it in that terms erases the fact that most of the students at my school reject that binary or don’t find themselves on that spectrum like you said. Because of my White, privileged upbringing, I find equal points of identification with both poles on the spectrum. As a point of full disclosure, however, people would probably classify me as hipster due to my thick-rimmed glasses, long hair, obsession with post-anything, and indie music tastes. Oh, and I also live in West Philadelphia (and by that I mean west of 45th, where Penn students are too afraid to go.)
What I think complicates the binary, however, is when you add other axes of oppression to the mix. Hipsters are a lot less likely to balk at you when you ask them for their preferred gender pronoun. Bros are less likely to excessively lionize people of color within their midst and prefer to let character speak over social positionality. Both, in my experience, are fairly tolerant of people with differing physical abilities, and intolerant of other forms of ability differences. Whereas a woman-identified person can also identify as a hipster, she cannot identify as a bro or as fratty.
What I’m saying is that while it might be easy to separate hipsters and bros by their negotiations of race and Whiteness, as with most prevailing social identifications, they’re a lot more complicated than just a few variables can measure. And assigning value judgments to one’s social practice is tempting, but seldom a fruitful endeavor. Rather than binarize and dismiss hipsters and bros in favor of a “silent majority” à la 1968, maybe we should be complicating and troubling these classifications a little further.
Or maybe I should stop reading Derrida. He’s gotten so mainstream these days…
Dude, how totally hipster! -;))
But seriously, thanks for the thoughtful comment. I totally agree that my portraying this binary opposition is simplistic and doesn’t leave room for many nuances (and ironies) within the categories. However, what interests me is the degree to which these two identifiers seem to have become much more codified and concretized over the past few years. I never used to hear either term among high school students. Today, they are pervasive.
As to the issue of privilege, it seems so self-evident as to hardly require comment. One of the traits of the bro identity is a sense of cultural superiority based on affluence, race, and gender. The working class people in Brooklyn look at the hipsters and one of the main questions they ask is, “How do these folks support themselves.” Hipsters possess a cultural capital that enables them to avoid the challenges of the more mundane people in their midst.