Earlier this year, a new fitness regime made headlines. Broga — a yoga class taught by men, aimed at men. The “Brogram” (this is a real, copyrighted phrase found on the Broga website) aims to strip away the girly stigma associated with regular yoga classes so that men can touch the floor in downward facing dog (downward facing dawg?) without worrying about their reputations. Perhaps after class, bros can join their instructor for frozen brogurt, which is just like frozen yogurt, except the crushed walnuts are swapped out for shaved wood chips and the chocolate syrup for motor oil.
Broga is neither the first nor the most recent in a long and already-tired trend of gendering things that don’t need to be gendered at all. Kleenex offers “mansize” tissue boxes because god forbid a man is crying tears (made of kerosene, of course) and only has regular, women’s tissues on hand. Bic offers pens “For Her” so that the delicate female wrist need not wilt under the weight of a regular man-sized pen. Yankee Candle offers “man candles” in scents such as "camouflage" and "man town"(what do either of these things smell like? It doesn’t matter as long as everyone knows that these are manly candles, for men.)
Some products are gendered for a reason —vitamin tablets, for example, can be aimed at men and women separately, each offering different concentrations of minerals based on the average female and average male body composition and weight. Shirts can be aimed at genders separately: some allowing for a woman’s smaller stature and others for a man’s broader shoulders. None of these other items — pens, yoga —need to be gendered. There’s no health reason or practical concern instigating the divide.
The thing with all unnecessarily gendered products is they aren’t just harmless and cute marketing gimmicks. The selling point of Broga isn’t in the pun in its name or niche-targeting strategy. It’s the fact that it is capitalizing on, rather than assuaging, the insecurity associated with a man doing something classically associated with women. By marketing Broga as something that can instill all the benefits of yoga without any of the feminine subtext, we’re reinforcing the concept that feminine subtext is something somehow undesirable, something that should be shed.
“Doodies” (again, I’m not making these names up) are male foodies, a concept elaborated on by Adam Rapoport, the current editor-in-chief of Bon Appétit. “It’s not like when women cook, in terms of nurturing someone,” he told Grub Street. “It’s cooking as sport.” The same methodology is in play here in the masculinizing of cooking as in the masculinizing of yoga. The subject is stripped of its feminine connotations (“nurturing" — even though we’re several decades past the notion that women only cook meatloaf in their kitchens for their husbands to enjoy after work) before being lumped together with some other male stereotype (sports) so that men who enjoy the activity can do so guilt-free without a worry that they might be shown as more feminine or lesser.
The shy-away from female attributes starts very early for most boys. The most common thing said to an upset young boy by his well-meaning parent is: “Boys don’t cry.” Boys don’t cry. Girls cry. The fact that you, son, should stop crying has nothing to do with the fact that there are better methods of conflict resolution. Rather, it has to do with the fact that you don’t want to be seen as a girl —the ultimate insult. And it continues into childhood: “You run like a girl” is an insult, even when the recipient of the statement is a girl. Girly attributes are to be avoided at all costs — and the mindset instilled in young boys grows into an innate sense of sexism as they grow in their teens and early adulthood.
This is why feminism is important for both men and women: It allows a full range of emotions, careers and hobbies for both genders without any useless and unnecessary asterisks to justify it. Men (and boys) are allowed to cry — on the playground, post-breakup, after a midterm on campus or just because. We don’t need to gender every action we take. Men are allowed to go to yoga and eat brunch and drink mimosas, and it doesn’t need to be called anything different.
Shruthi Deivasigamani is a molecular biology major from Cresskill, N.J. She can be reached at shruthid@princeton.edu.
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