I’m not one to care about what bros post on Instagram, because the content is usually the same. Either they show off their pong skills in a room with stiff white walls, try to prove that they can lift big fish on their dad’s boat, or sing their praises for eating Frosted Mini Wheats cereal #gains. But among this homogeneous male newsfeed is a lone-wolf, a breed of Instagram-post that makes you stop scrolling right where you are: the hot cousin pic.
I’ve determined that there are two types of bros in this world: the kind that posts benign, very appropriate pictures of their cousins on Instagram, and the kind that posts pictures of themselves posing with one, very specific, very beautiful individual who they neglect to acknowledge is, in fact, their biological first cousin.
It often goes a little something like this:
Comment Section:
@ChadManasia35: cuffing season bruh lol
@TristanWalke_: 🍑
@BenWhite: WHO DAT 👀
@brett_calloway: My cousin.
@ChadManasia35: really
@Sam-Lovett: wut
@BenWhite: ok u do u man.
And these photos are seasonal, always surfacing around summer and the holidays. Because what do people do when they have time off from work or school? Go home, visit their parents, eat late-night cereal in the fluorescent light of the refrigerator, and if you’re a certain type of bro, ask your mother if Aunt Susan and family can make it to Thanksgiving this year because pics with cousin Kaylee get mad likes.
At first glance, a bro posting a hot pic of him with his stunning cousin seems entirely illogical. Because, after all, doesn’t posing with a person that’s more attractive than you inevitably make people focus on the fact that you look worse than you did in high school? This is why I exclusively post pictures of myself with the tin foilies when I’m at Brown, because I have to look better than them (or at least like to think so).
But these bros could give less of a shit if they look good or not. In fact, they look bad in these photos. Bad in the sense that they are beaming with a trophy-wife glow of achievement. Except wait… that’s not his trophy wife, that’s his mother Cheryl’s sister Susan’s 19-year-old daughter Kaylee and why is he holding her arm like that? Why does the caption call her “this girl.” What’s happening here? Does anyone else see this? Is Kaylee okay? Hello? Kaylee can you hear me?? You’re more than a prop!
But this is all part of the plan.
It’s what makes hot cousin pics so tempting for these dudes. The bros you follow on Instagram don’t want you or need you to know the truth. They just want you to be intrigued. Chris wants you to be impressed. Sam wants you to be jealous. And Tom wants you to think:
Wait… does Tom have a new girlfriend? Did they meet over the summer? Did they meet when he studied abroad in Rome last semester? Is she Italian? Wait, how did he get her to come to the states for Thanksgiving? Why the fuck do I care about this?
This is the power of the hot cousin pic.
So yea, it breaks up the ceaseless Instagram cycle of pong shots, fish pics, and cereal anthems, but when you stop and think about it, it’s really just a hop, skip, and a jump away from incest. There I said it! Food for thought.
Illustration by Caroline Zerilli