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Spot the douchebags: (clockwise from top left) Adam Levine, Kanye West, Katie Hopkins, Pitbull, Shia
Spot the douchebags: (clockwise from top left) Adam Levine, Kanye West, Katie Hopkins, Pitbull, Shia LaBeouf and Henry VIII. Photograph: Rex/Getty/Frantzesco Kangaris
Spot the douchebags: (clockwise from top left) Adam Levine, Kanye West, Katie Hopkins, Pitbull, Shia LaBeouf and Henry VIII. Photograph: Rex/Getty/Frantzesco Kangaris

#Douchebag: from useless contraceptive to universal putdown

This article is more than 9 years old
It has become this year’s catch-all insult, powered by social media and broadcasters keen to avoid more sweary options. But where did it come from – and who really deserves the epithet?

If you’re reading this in public, look up for a second. Chances are you’ll spot a douchebag. You might even see a few of them. If you’re reading this in certain parts of London, you could probably put a snooker ball in a sock, spin around once and take out dozens of douchebags in the process. Douchebags are everywhere. Suddenly, without realising it, we’ve all somehow ended up living on Planet Douchebag.

Search the internet and you’ll see for yourself – everyone’s a douchebag. A quick sweep through Google News tells me that this week Shia LaBeouf is a douchebag. Batman is too. So are Ben Affleck, Justin Bieber and John Grisham. Sleepy Hollow’s Horseman of Death is a douchebag. The unfortunate ex-boyfriend of a woman paid to write about prehistoric placoderm reproduction is a complete douchebag.

What links all these figures, of course, is that they’re men. They’re all (mostly) rich white heterosexual men who, to some extent, are prone to demonstrating signs of bratty male entitlement. They might not deliberately set out to make the world a worse place but, thanks to their vanity and self-infatuation and myopic obliviousness, that’s exactly what they do. Maybe they strut around with their collars turned up, or wilfully disrupt theatre productions. Maybe they use their position to spout badly informed opinions about child pornography, or talk in a silly voice while running around fighting crime in fancy dress at night. Whatever, they’re all douchebags.

The douchebag demographic has become so clear-set that this week Gawker ran a feature calling it: “The white racial slur we’ve all been waiting for.” This is problematic for reasons we will come to in a moment, but it nevertheless speaks to the fact that douchebags have saturated our culture.

After all, what was this summer’s Transformers 4 if not a film made by douchebags for douchebags? To hammer the point home even more gratuitously, it even starred Mark Wahlberg – the walking, talking, blank-faced, crotch-grabbing totem of successful modern doucheism.

Mark Wahlberg: the modern douche. Photograph: Andrew Cooper

And your TV listings are riddled with douchebags, too. While early episodes of American sitcoms used to rely on funny animals to attract attention – the dog in Frasier, the parrot on Will & Grace, Ross’s monkey in Friends – when New Girl debuted in 2011, it chose a device known as the Douchebag Jar; a sort of swearpot used to penalise anyone caught indulging in obnoxious behaviour. Meanwhile, douchebags have all but colonised the structured-reality genre. Watch any episode of The Only Way is Essex or Made in Chelsea and you’ll see thousands of them, all banging into each other, leaving streaks of fake tan everywhere and failing to enunciate properly.

Spotify has even created a dedicated playlist for douchebags; an absurdly male collection of songs that veers haphazardly from tongue-waggling ironic rock (Guns N’ Roses, Motörhead) to obnoxious fare designed specifically to be played full-tilt through too-bassy car stereos at traffic lights (Skrillex, Turn Down For What). There are songs by Oasis, for British douchebags such as Tim Lovejoy. There are songs by Limp Bizkit, for American douchebags such as Joe Rogan. And to top it all off, there’s a quick jaunt through the greatest hits of recorded misogyny, from Smack My Bitch Up to Under My Thumb to Girls by the Beastie Boys. Subtlety never was the douchebag’s strongest point.

One artist notable for his absence on the playlist, incidentally, is the rapper Pitbull. He’s currently the crown prince among musical douchebags; a man who, despite looking astonishingly similar to Dominic Littlewood from The One Show, has managed to claw his way to fame by dressing up in his dad’s suits, forcing out a disappointing dribble of bumfluff on his chin and attacking each song as if it’s a flung-together Apprentice task. Pitbull is such an unremitting douchebag, so utterly transfixed by the wrongheaded notion of his own ability, that it’s a wonder he doesn’t end each of his songs by mumbling into the microphone: “Thank you for the opportunity, Lord Sugar.”

Justin Bieber: ticks all the boxes. Photograph: Getty Images

Almost 10,000 people have subscribed to the douchebag playlist – not a huge amount (as a guide, seven times more people subscribe to the playlist Jazzy Romance), but then again douchebags aren’t exactly known for their self-awareness. There are probably several hundred thousand more douchebags out there than we realise. The douchebag economy, in fact, is thriving. The market for men’s skincare products is now worth more than £100m a year. In April, Retail Week named Hollister, the badly lit garment-cave that’s become the official douchebag outfitter of choice, as the 10th fastest-growing retailer in the country.

And, although this isn’t a scientific estimate, the online dating app Tinder must be about 85% douchebag at this point. It couldn’t exist without the douchebag. If all the douchebags were suddenly expunged from the planet tomorrow, the single women of the world would find themselves for ever doomed to swiping forlornly backwards and forwards between two photographs of balding men with bad teeth who read Haynes car maintenance manuals in their profile photos.

Why has the term douchebag become so prevalent? Historically, a douchebag was a piece of equipment used to flush out the vagina. As a contraceptive, it was useless but the implication that it was a piece of equipment used by promiscuous women stuck around, and slowly gained a pejorative air.

Hickman Powell’s 1939 book on the Lucky Luciano trials, Ninety Times Guilty, mentions a character called Jimmy Douchebag. The term appears again in From Here to Eternity, with one character referring to another’s “douchebag nose”. In 1980, Saturday Night Live broadcast a sketch called Lord and Lady Douchebag. Then in the late 1980s, Anthrax released a song called Starting Up A Posse, the second verse of which repeated the phrase “You’re a douche” eight times in a row.

However, since 2000, the term’s popularity has grown inexorably. This might be for a couple of reasons. The first is that it happens to be both incredibly rude and ostensibly safe. Although, like the C-word, it’s a slur with misogynist roots, it’s also safe to say it on television. Before he decided to accept bleeped-out swearwords as part of his act, for instance, Jon Stewart spent the first few years as host of The Daily Show self-editing the bulk of his insults back to the comparatively tame “douchebag”.

The other theory is that it’s all down to the internet. The use of douchebag has largely grown in tandem with social media. Thanks both to the internet’s tendency to homogenise slang into a handful of globally accepted buzzwords – think “Yay” and “Fail” and “Nom” and “Meh” – and its reliance on provoking instant, polarised opinion, people who found themselves out of favour with the digital masses were quickly slapped with the label “douchebag” and promptly forgotten about.

Once that happened, the word was everywhere. Games called Douchebag Workout began to pop up online, alongside douchebag name-generators and thousands of Are You A Douchebag quizzes. In 2008, the Guardian ran a list of the 12 biggest douchebags of the year (Nickelback’s Chad Kroeger was No 1). Olympic medalists were hailed as sexy douchebags. Earlier this year, Adam Levine from Maroon 5 was forced to offer a point-by-point rebuttal to GQ after consensus ungraciously chose to lump him in with the douchebags.

But just because the word has quickly exploded in popularity, it’s important to remember that douchebags have always existed. They’ve simply laboured under different titles. They’ve been popinjays and tools, townies and muttonheads. Nobody knew it at the time, for example, but Henry VIII was a prime douchebag. So were Walter Raleigh and Louis XVI. Genghis Khan, meanwhile, was almost Pitbullian in his douchery. The man was practically Leeroy Jenkins.

However, its popularity is now such that the definition of “douchebag” has become a little more nebulous. Despite the points made in the Gawker article, it is now less about a specific type of odious unearned white male privilege, and more just a catch-all insult to be lobbed at anyone who happens to display signs of acting like an oaf. Pharrell may not be white but, thanks to his participation in the Blurred Lines debacle, he’s undoubtedly a douchebag. Kanye West even identified himself as one in his song Runaway although, because he’s Kanye West, he even managed to wrestle that into a warped celebration of everything he stands for.

Meanwhile, Channel 4 News this week reported on the rise of the hashtag #Daeshbags, a word designed to mock members of Isis by playing on an Arabic acronym for the group that they find offensive. And then there is Katie Hopkins. Google “Katie Hopkins Douchebag” and you will be greeted with more than half a million results, topped by a site called People I Want To Punch In The Throat. This is all a sign that the douchebag is evolving. Forget gender or race divides – if you possess the correct level of attention-seeking social insensitivity, you too can become a douchebag. It’s a veritable meritocracy.

Boris Johnson: unquestionably a douchebag. Photograph: Reuters

There are signs, however, that the age of the douchebag might be coming to an end. Jezebel was proclaiming that the term had jumped the shark back in 2009 (one of the reasons being that Gawker claimed it had jumped the shark one year previously), and there is a general feeling that its ubiquity has helped it become a crutch for easy abuse, gifting unimaginative idiots an easy way to insult people they can’t be bothered to understand.

In a way, it would be a shame if the douchebag died out. They are at least preferable to their nearest equivalent, the arsehole, who is petty and spiteful and astringent and actively gets off on other people’s misery. The douchebag just blunders around in his obnoxious pool sliders, naively wondering why nobody’s having as much fun as he is. Boris Johnson? Total douchebag.

Given the choice of being one or the other, I would go douchebag every time. So would you, I expect. This is why we take such joy in pointing our fingers at them. It’s because, if we truly subject ourselves to a serious bout of self-examination, we’ll probably find that we’re all douchebags deep down. Just don’t ever let me sit next to one of them on a bus.

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