Basic bitches just can't win

I dragged myself into the pool on Friday morning, and while I was in there, I was thinking about two pieces I ran across this week: "The Basic Bitch: Who Is She?" and "How basic are you?"

I was mostly thinking that the worst crime the so-called Basic Bitch commits is being unabashedly girly. She likes Pinterest, and pumpkin spice lattes, and the Barre Method, and scented candles. The Basic Bitch has mainstream pop culture taste: romantic movies, The Bachelor, Taylor Swift, Coachella. She wears the Tiffany return-to-sender bracelet and calls herself a "daddy's girl" and reacts to trends; she doesn't create them.

There is nothing wrong with any of this.

I am sick unto death of how quick we are to immediately denigrate girly things as somehow inferior. When that Goldiblox commercial ran, the thing I found the most off-putting about it was not the intellectual property foofarah, but the implication that pink, girly toys are somehow inferior.

True, there's no need to shove girls into a pink, princess-shaped pigeonhole, and I'm no fan of how Lego's gotten all gendered in recent years. But I don't think the answer is to reject commercial, girly culture wholesale. Why not? Because plenty of awesome children like wearing sparkly dresses to soccer practice, or they decide to be Queen Elsa In Space, and the last thing those girls -- or boys --  need to is internalize the message that their love of sparkly, feminine aesthetics marks them as culturally inferior.

This is, of course, the flip side to the cool girl phenomenon. The cool girl, as elegantly described by Gillian Flynn and elaborated upon by Anne Helen Peterson, is cool precisely because she appears to embrace the entertainment tastes and preferences of the men around her ... without appropriating any of the social privilege the men enjoy. The cool girl is like a flattering mirror that makes men feel better about how they choose to spend their time.

By contrast, the basic bitch lives in a pink, floral-scented bubble where the language, values and power are all defined and reinforced by women. There are no cool-girl analogues for men who want to embrace the basic bitch world.

I don't get the appeal of the things basic bitches are alleged to like. But the thing is, I think it's even more despicable how easy it is to look at any flavor of feminimity and  turn it into a pejorative.

Comments

[DensityDuck]

I think the issue is that people hate the idea of female subjugation through tradition, but don't know how to think about the world in terms other than purely material, so they start attacking specific material things as a proxy for the feelings they haven't got the intelligence or breadth of education to actually articulate.

[gingerest]

Looking down on those with pedestrian tastes is a pretty longstanding pastime (we called 'em trendoids, but Marx got there first with his petite bourgeoisie - and his successors expanded his contempt for their parasitism to a loathing of their aesthetic.) The new twist seems to be gendering it.