What Do You Really Mean When You Say ‘Basic Bitch’?

Over the past year, we have touched base at an odd social and lexicographical minute: To dress "typical" is the tallness of chic, yet to call someone "basic" is the chicest put-down, one that shows no signs of disappearing. This is despite the increasing obviousness, with steadily widespread usage, that basic isn't an especially new or insightful insult. It's just about the oldest one in the book.

 

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Basic, as indicated by the Buzzfeed quizzes and Collegehumor videos that wrested the term from the hip-bounce world and brought it into the domain of white-girl-on-white-girl insults, means someone who owns things like Uggs and North Face and leggings. She likes yogurt and fears carbs (there is a special case for brunch), and loves her friends, unless and until she secretly hates them. She finds peplum complimenting and long (or at any rate shoulder-touching) hair dependably appealing. She exercises in various non-mass building ways, some of which have inspired her to purchase special socks for the experience. She purchased the Us Weekly with Lauren Conrad's wedding on the spread. She Pins. She runs her gel-manicured hands all over the spine of female-driven pop culture of the last 15 years, and is satisfied with what she feels. She doesn't, clearly, yearn for additional.

The basic bitch — as she's sometimes called because its more entertaining when things use similar sounding words, and because you're considered a poor sport in the event that you don't think that it interesting — is almost always a she. In more sophisticated renderings, her particularities shift by district and even neighborhood, however she is almost always depicted as completely besotted with Starbucks' Pumpkin Spice Latte. It is the setup to almost every now-commonplace punch line around a basic bitch, her affection for the pre-winter mass-market refreshment. Pumpkin Spice Lattes are "shopping center." They uncover a girlish interest in seasonal changes and an unsophisticated inclination for sweet. They are sidewalk chalkboards reporting their existence in spotted air pocket letters. They are from the mid-aughts. They are easy targets.

Basic rolls beautifully off the tongue. It's a useful insult. Like trashy or tasteless, it derives its energy from the learning that in the event that you can remember someone or something as basic, you most likely, yourself, aren't it. It also feels restrained, somehow. You don't exactly need to stoop to calling someone a slut or an imbecile or anything really brutal. It's not as ensnaring as calling someone crude — the basic lady is so clearly nonthreatening she doesn't even deserve such a raised pulse. Basic-labeling is coolly lethargic. It conveys a graduate seminar of semiotics in five letters. "So basic," you think, scrolling through your Facebook channel. "She's basic," you offer to a companion, remarking on her ex's new girlfriend. It was an expression we'd been searching for.

Be that as it may why? It seems to me that while what it pretends to scrutinize is predictability of thought and activity, most of what basic really seeks to dismiss is consumption patterns — what you watch, what you drink, what you wear, and what you purchase — without dismissing consumption itself. The basic girl's sin isn't getting a kick out of the chance to shop, its cluelessly lusting after the wrong brands, the ones that affirm themselves uproariously and have shareholders they have to satisfy. (The right brands are a great deal more expensive and subtle and, usually, exclusive.)

The basic girl is also someone who isn't into bisexuality. She likes being a lady, or in any event she buys the products that are so inherently female-skewing they don't even NEED to be expressly showcased to ladies, in the same way as low-calorie margaritas developed by Bravo heroines. She delights in all the things that men dismiss as unserious or that don't regularly significantly register for them as existing — big name gossip, designed disposable mixed drink napkins that mean something sentimental. She expresses generally ladylike desires, such as needing to get hitched or to have kids. She doesn't have a poker face regarding the matter of those things, and doesn't see the point in attempting to create one. She likes what she likes and she doesn't give a second thought on the off chance that it doesn't make her ostensibly special. The statement basic has turned into an increasingly expansive stand-in for "lady who fails to surprise us," as seen in this Vice competition of basic bitches that includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Mother Teresa and Shirley Temple and both Michelle Williamses, among others. Thus the lady who calls another lady basic ends up verifiably endorsing two things she likely wouldn't sign up for in the event that they were spelled out for her: a male progression of culture, and the conviction that the self is an essentially surface-level framing.

It's all enough to make you think about whether what individuals really will be truly interested in is permission to use the thing and not the descriptive word. At any rate a Basic would have the stones to call someone a bitch, if that is the thing that she implied.