Late last year, a video emerged online of a woman who called herself the The Vegan Swearing Grandma. Resplendent half-moon spectacles and fetching silver perm, the pension-aged host claimed to make her own seitan because she had "no time for weak-ass bullshit." She called meat-eaters "simple douchebags" and referred to her marinade as "the tits."
Of course, the video wasn't actually uploaded by a foul-mouthed grandmother, but part of an ongoing Christmas campaign from PETA. The organization urged viewers to share its message with friends and "let them know that there's nothing festive about eating fucking corpses."
Nevertheless, Vegan Swearing Grandma went viral in certain vegan circles—evidence of a rhetoric that has recently infiltrated the movement: the frat bro.
While the term "bro" historically referred to African American men, it now mostly relates to a specific type of white guy. One likely to wear cargo shorts, bring red cups to a party, and say "man cave" un-ironically. NPR helpfully mapped the four basic tenets of bro-ishness (dudely, jock-ish, stoner-ish, and preppy) and frat bro rhetoric mostly reflects this in its somewhat aggressive character, with undertones of sexism and homophobia. It's "pussy" as insult and "sick" as endorsement. It's white guys calling each other "homie." Writer Daniel Maurer's magnum bropus, Brocabulary: A New Manifesto Of Dude Talk, breaks this lexicon down further.
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