If there’s any truth to the idea that Shakespeare may have had a good intuition about the English character and that this in turn is relevant for all English-speaking peoples, then it is important that we analyze his embarrassing portrait of men. This is how the brovolution works. We have to face ourselves to improve ourselves.
Important question: was Shakespeare a brother or a bro?
Jay-Z wrote a song clarifying what he considered to be the difference between a sister and a bitch. The same thing is true with brothers and bros. They are not the same. The bro is a hoe version of a brother. But let’s not slut shame.
Slut shaming should never have been allowed to happen. If people had read Much Ado About Nothing adequately, the lesson was taught four hundred years ago. Because of a slut-shame-based society, the so-called nobles of the play (the prince himself and his right-hand man) are easily deceived and provoked into emotional tantrums. They are so triggered by what they think is a woman’s promiscuity that they all decide and say that she cannot be allowed to live. Then, they learn that she is innocent. The consequence of their ignorance comes close to murder. A young innocent woman is almost murdered because of the fatal logic of a slut-shame-based society.
It has happened too many times in reality to adequately grieve.
Slut shaming is not a joke. But, because it touches on the taboo, humor is going to be surrounding it. Anything that is repressed is fodder for comedy.
Truly, the play is a caricature of what it means to attempt to be a man in a world with slut shaming. It makes fun of the idea of manhood through a ridiculous representation of manhood. This is expressed in the song that they sing on the island, “ladies sigh no more” the chorus teaches us that men are never constant, always deceptive with one foot on a boat and one on shore. There is an interesting remedy to the existential situation presented by gendered roles suggested in the lines that say to turn that sadness into something artistic through song and dance. It’s a trippy song to say the least. It’s a kind of therapeutic and pragmatic advice. It shows how men are easily deceived because of their fears and how they project those fears onto women. It instructs women on how to deal with the inconstant nature of men.
In this play, men police women’s sexuality, ordering Claudio’s fiancé to death because they mistakenly think that she has had sex with some random soldier. They are deceived by another man with malicious intent into believing that she has been unfaithful. In this context, sexual promiscuity is punishable by death. Her own father says that death is the only suitable cover for her shame. The urgency to police women’s sexuality leads to poor decision making and reveals a faulty belief system.
Amber Rose started an anti slut-shaming movement during the 20-teens called the Slut Walk. Cardi B made waves during the pandemic of 2020 with her pull no punches video for her song, WAP. The bold and unapologetic expression of women’s sexuality is at an all-time high, today in 2021 with OnlyFans and Instagram models. We should celebrate this movement. It is surely the antidote to the woman hating attitude expressed in Much Ado. The effect that women have on men is wild. Celebrating that power helps to keep it in a healthy balance, where repressing it causes a situation so radically imbalanced that a father could be tricked into killing his daughter.
Shakespeare was a brother, but maybe he was a bro, too. It’s not as though you can’t be both. That is one of the paradoxical outcomes of this gender configuration. It’s another layer of confusion that leads to such consequential misunderstandings. We should stop bro-shaming, too.
In a world where the expression of sexuality is more accepted, the consequences of slut or bro shaming lose a lot of their power. Slut and bro shaming is the equivalent of making drugs illegal: it only empowers the destructive side of the equation.
We need to find a healthy relationship to sexuality in our culture and we can start by letting bros be hoes and hoes be bros.