The Basic Douchebag

THE BASIC DBAG

I think it was Mark Twain who said “Children and fools always speak the truth.” I will go ahead and add teens to this equation. I always find that spending time with my 17-year-old niece is an invaluable experience that allows me to see life through a simplistic prism and reaffirms the notion once so effectively conveyed via Mean Girls: real life mirrors high school. This time around, the kid hit a nail on the head while volunteering a description of a guy her friend was dating: “He’s just one of those Basic Douchebags – he is used to always getting his way and f*cking girls over, so once he finds somebody who can play his game, he’s like “she gets me” and decides he’s finally found his equal and he’s in love.”

She didn’t have to elaborate any further – let’s just say that she had me at Basic Douchebag, a breed of male that transcends all age groups and social circles. And, while my niece might be smart enough to keep her distance, I foolishly flocked to them like a fly to horse sh*t throughout my early twenties, always yielding the same disastrous results. Since I was never slick enough to “turn” the BD, it would usually start with me being smitten and enamored, a feeling that would quickly metamorphose into a giant ball of disappointment once he lost all interest. Eventually, I developed a defense reflex against Basic Douchebags and began teetering more towards the Freaks and Weirdos end of the Dbag spectrum, and yet the memories of the Basic Douchebag stayed with me forever. So what, exactly, qualifies one for this eminent title?

To start, the Basic Douchebag usually has a deeply-rooted sense of confidence that comes from being moderately attractive from a young age, allowing him to avoid any sort of fat-kid or nerd complexes that eventually build excellent human beings. He peaks in high school, securing his positioning as the “popular guy” and breaking many a BFFL friendship while sailing though on a straight-C average. The poor one then usually weans off via Darwinism and transitions into his predestined path of lowlife and loser (my own BD from high school is now a fat divorced single dad!) The rich one, however, has a much longer douche-span. He usually go off to a good college, where he plays college sports and stands on his head, shoving funnels of beer up his throat and trying to tap every jegging-clad ass to walk down the hallway. At some point, he meets that one girl who can play his game, but freaks out at the prospect of a challenge and quickly reverts back to his emotional slacker self. He graduate and utilizes his “network” to secure a well-paid job in a finance-like sector, after which he f*cks around some more, wasting his bonus on bottles at Tao and summer trips to Ibiza. Towards his thirties, he gets tired of partying and finds himself a wife who is hot, skinny and smart enough to bring around in public, yet not smart enough to realize the tragedy of settling for a moron. They move to a Yuppie neighborhood, have a few kids, vacation in Europe (FYI he thinks ‘Europe’ is one singular place, kind of like ‘Africa’), and live happily for the next twenty years, with him cheating on her in the comfort of business trip hotel rooms and her looking the other way. Around fifty, he has a mid-life crisis, upgrades his car and possibly his wife, and lives happily ever after in the comfort of Palm Springs, occasionally attempting to tap one of his daughter’s friends, who look at him with the pity that he deserves.

The Basic Douchebag, in one sentence, is good on paper but bad for the soul, a freeway to a lifetime of spiritual mediocrity. He never touches anyone in any real way and is completely satisfied with this. (I have been reading a little too much Coehlo and it shows.) Personally, the idea of the BD depresses me so much, that I cannot help but yearn to continue plucking out the crazies, if only to comply to the wise words of Apple and Steve Jobs: “Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes!.. While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”

Because another thing about Basic Douchebags is this: he never changes the world, mainly because he doesn’t give a flying f*ck about it.

P.S. Pardon the fact that this post was pretty much written by a sailor with all this cussing, I’m feeling rather aggressive upon my return to France!

12 Comments

  • Great post! I especially liked the term “douche-span” and the very descriptive life trajectory of the Basic Douche. We all know those guys!
    Sidenote: you can never read too much Coehlo 🙂

  • “The poor ones then usually wean via Darwinism and transition into lowlifes and losers” Nice classist swing…guess I know what side of the barricade you’ll be on. Ironic being hosted from Paris. Liberté, égalité, fraternité! (followed by a perfect fart)

  • This post was so spot on! I keep falling for the rich ones with the longer douche-span which I meet through Tinder and since I am not from the same social circles as they are it has always turned into disaster. I got back in contact with one guy (from a well known old well to do family) and he told me that this was his last year of sleeping around. He has only one last conquest in Miami this month (a hot girl he met in Venezuela a couple of years ago). After this he’s going to settle down. With a girl his parents and social circle will approve of and which I found you to describe so perfectly: ” and find themselves a wife who is hot, skinny and smart enough to bring around in public.” Obnoxious to say the least! And the strange thing is kind of liked this guy? He didn’t want to take advantage of me because to him I was a good girl. Misogynistic to say the least.

  • * By the way I don’t know if misogyny is the right term to this describe this? Maybe it’s just double standards.

    • I’m not sure if it’s misogynistic, but definitely cowardly.. To be honest, I think it’s good you didn’t get further with him, easier to forget that way. Life is short to waste your time on people who 100% do not reciprocate how you feel about them!

  • Now I finally realize that I have been attracted to so many pathetic douche bags, who hide behind their fancy college degrees and jobs at McKinsey that one begins to think that they have stumbled upon an amazing man. No they aren’t amazing men. They are assholes who managed to read and write well enough to trick women into thinking they are kind, sensitive and evolved. Don’t get me wrong….I still manage to find these douche bags, but at least now my radar goes off very early into the meetings and relationships. Warning : The bigger the name of the college and company they work for… you’ll find a bigger jerk.

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