“Now that we’ve infiltrated the mainstream, we have ample opportunity to mess with people. . . . So far, we’ve done it in a classy way — we made music we like that’s weird, but it also got picked up on the radio. . . . There are so many clichés we can fall into. An ultimate goal is not to become a douchebag.”
— Andrew VanWyngarden of MGMT, Spin, November 2008
I WAS 22 YEARS OLD when I first learned the sting you feel when your self-image is altered in the blink of an eye. Pierre and I were standing unsteadily on the back bumper of a motor rickshaw as we tore down a dirt road in Bihar, and Pierre said what he did. My head did not feel like it was spinning, so much as reconfiguring itself from the inside out, at great speed and with considerable damage, as it must feel to undergo an Ovidian transformation.
A soldier finds out the war is over; a prisoner becomes a free man; a former president leaves office; all three stare out a window and realize, with a growing sense of dread, that they are no longer equipped for life back home. In my case, I learned that I come off as a douchebag.
Multiple connotations clicked through my head: a guy I knew in high school who nicknamed himself “The Hammer” and got laid off from Bear Stearns; a summer’s breeze through feathered, shoulder-length brown hair and the words “Sometimes I just don’t feel fresh, even after a shower”; Jägermeister; toothy smiles; Jimmy Fallon. “Sort of a douchebag.” “A real douchebag.” “That fucking douchebag.”
Pierre and I were living with other students in a monastery in northeast India. There were no televisions or computers or even radios allowed in the monastery so when we weren’t writing by candlelight about Pratītyasamutpāda or eating or meditating or sleeping, we played chess, traded books, and talked. A favorite topic of conversation was our impressions as we first appeared to one another in the London airport. Where there was so much talk of deconstructing identity and fostering an understanding of no-self, and with a shaved head and more or less identical clothes, it was easy to forget who you had been back home. And yet it still wasn’t altogether comfortable for me that, upon first laying eyes on me at Gatwick — me, in a button-down shirt and a hat (non-Castro, non-trucker, non-porkpie), with short hair and friendly Midwestern sensibilities — Pierre’s brain had flashed:
DOUCHEBAG (var.: FRATTY DOUCHEBAG)
We all know where the epithet originates; it refers to a soiled object, a private shame. According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the term “douche bag” was first used to refer to something other than a female cleaning implement some time in the 1960s, when it was used to describe “an unattractive co-ed,” or “by extension, any individual whom the speaker desires to deprecate.” Other sources imply that the term originally indicated a woman of “loose moral repute.” Where the term leaped across the gender gap from denigrating unattractive women to describing contemptible men remains unknown.
In the 1980s, the term seems to have been popular among young teens as a blanket insult — used for example to disparage a priggish teacher that one did not like — though it lacked any attached cultural codes. It is perhaps in a sense of ’80s-inspired nostalgia that the term was resurrected in the early 2000s, along with various other appurtenances from that era.
Reviewing the earliest 21st-century literature on douchebags, the word in its early revival seems to describe a certain kind of male — juiced, gelled, bronzed, plucked, collar-popped — who is stereotypically thought to have originated in or near New Jersey, but who, sometime around 2002, suddenly begins popping up everywhere. As this type hardened into the New Guido, the word escaped and articulate definitions became more difficult. “You know one when you see one,” ran the tagline of Obvious Douchebag, one of the many new douchebag-focused blogs on the internet. The expansion marked a turn in meaning, as well as the word’s quick devaluation and fall. By 2008, a rash of hip publications were already declaring the word “dead,” among them Esquire, SF Weekly, and Gawker.com (twice). Wrote one reader to the Gawker editors:
[The word “douchebag” has] been completely played out. the number of times i hear it now applied to any circumstance other than what i believe to have been its true intention is getting annoying. furthermore, i feel the douche’s [sic] themselves have co-opted the word and use it against hipsters and the like. people who aren’t particularly witty, or even funny, began throwing around the word douche (in my opinion denigrating the original beauty of what it represented).
The expansion of meaning that this class of commenter seemed to be picking out for “douchebag” (now deprived of its “original beauty”!) was not the “Jersey Boy” at all, with his long history of derogatory names before douche: “townie,” “tool,” etc. Rather, to Gawker and to the likes of SF Weekly, the douchebag had represented the antipode to the hipster. And more than that. Like “douchebag,” “hipster” was a name that no one could apply to oneself. But the opportunity to call someone else a “douchebag”: that offered the would-be hipster a means of self-identification by a name one could say, looking outward. In the douchebag, the hipster had found its Other.
SINCE INDIA, I have been called a douchebag no less than six times by hipsters. On one occasion I asked a 19 year-old RISD student if I was acting like a douchebag. No, you’re nice enough, she said. But you’re wearing a collared shirt, and loose jeans, and that’s what douchebags wear. “I bet you even have abs,” she said.
Like a hermit crab, the mainstream is in the process of sloughing off one aesthetic and adopting another. It picks up what the hipsters leave behind. I imagine it felt similar in the mid-1970s, when hippies’ shaggy hair and mustaches became mainstream grooming, or in the mid-1990s when the sweatshop clothing market started manufacturing Seattle grunge flannel. The wheels are in motion again now: the Jonas Brothers are wearing keffiyehs.
More and more, young television characters resemble people I thought were hipsters six months ago — chronically undernourished, seasonally over-dressed — and writers have conspired to surround them with a dummy army of douchebags. The arch-douchebag is for me best typified by Andy Bernard (played by Ed Helms) from the NBC version of The Office. You can read him from his smirk — that unique mixture of unflinching entitlement, measured success, and undue self-worth. When he opens his mouth, his words only confirm what his posture telegraphed. “I went to Cornell. Ever heard of it? Yeah, I graduated in four years . . .” But you might argue that the biggest douchebag is actually Michael, the tragic corporate clown who travels to New York to eat a slice of Sbarro pizza, or the bespectacled, cardigan-wearing Ryan, a burgeoning “hipster douchebag” — which is to say, yesteryear’s hipster. Part of the show’s genius is that each character represents a different facet of the hateful mainstream, which correlates to figures in our lives. Which you perceive as true douchebags, well, that depends on whom you identify yourself against.
The great majority of douchebag theory published on the internet is penned by professed fans of the word, those who apply it liberally and with a certain sense of vindictive glee. Occasionally the message reaches its intended prey. “So I started Googling myself, you know,” said John Mayer, to a TMZ cameraman, “And I had to kinda put it all together at once to realize, at the end of it all, I’m kind of a douchebag.”
He is, almost definitively. One month after staring into our cultural lens and conceding he was a douchebag, Mayer took to his blog to defend himself, not by denying the label, but by disassembling it. In his ham-fisted analysis, Mayer posits that the epithet is applied out of jealousy, or a sense that fame has been dealt to the undeserving. “Is being a douchebag actually all about having a bigger smile than someone else deems you deserve to in life?” he asks.
Such a question would earn Mayer the title all by itself. But one hears the plaintive cry beneath it. Above all else, the douchebag believes he seeks a kind of legibility, or in simpler terms, normalcy. Don’t chicks dig smiles, guitars, and shiny fabrics? If you listen to his judgments of others, the douchebag reveals that, above all else, he strives not to be “weird”; in fact, not to be labeled at all. Who strives for something so mundane? In a culture where normalcy is as quicksilver and fleeting as ours, where trends seem to shift at an ever-increasing rate, and norms are demolished and reconstructed yearly — in a culture such as this, achieving a state of normalcy can be a kind of triumph.
The famous douchebag arrogance comes with the false assumption that normalcy has been achieved and that it’s a true triumph. The douchebag who considers himself “relatively normal” thinks he is speaking from a centralized location, a place of authority. To the outside observer, however, he simply looks mediocre and smug. And indeed, why should the douchebag be humble? He is at the center and apex of all things. The average American douchebag is a model citizen of our society: masculine, unaffected, well-rounded, concerned with his physical health, moral (but not puritanical or prude), virile without being sleazy, funny without being clever or snide; he is at all times a faithful consumer, an eager participant, and a contributor to society. He buys what the mainstream tells him to buy; he listens skeptically to the current hits and reverently to the hits of the past. In all respects he is the Hegelian synthesis of the ’60s culture war: taking bong hits during timeouts in the Packers game, he keeps his eyes on a flashing advertisement for the Marines. If he is high (or poor) enough, who knows, he might just enlist. He is everything he has been taught to be; he does everything society asks of him. And for all of this effort, he assumes that he will be granted a slight, unspoken modicum of respect and admiration.
Yet this respect — respect predicated upon normalcy rather than uniqueness — is exactly what the hipster withholds. Only in this way can the hipster maintain his complacency, believing he deprives some douchebag of his. But when douchebags have discovered skinny jeans, as they surely will . . . with what will the hipster then cover his pale, skinny ass? Parachute pants?