She’s the kind of girl who loves country music and calls herself “southern” when she’s from Ohio. Or she’s the girl who doesn’t prefer a genre at all and says she like “all kinds of music,” which really means she likes Top 40. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Basically, the basic bitch is marked by a fresh indifference, a passionless existence defenselessly predisposed to all of the strongest influences in culture.

The term is inherently sexist, and it’s not because of the word bitch. The jury’s still out on whether or not reclaiming the B-word is OK, but thinking that only women can participate in mass culture is dumb. Basic bitch, of course, has a male equivalent, but no one has bothered to call him out. That’s because drinking pumpkin spice lattes and wearing Ugg boots and watching “Friends” are all typically feminine things, and people who propagate the term are really saying is feminine interests don’t have value.

The basic bitch archetype is as destructive as it is unoriginal. It’s a stock character made to call out girls who don’t have their own tastes, styles and sensibilities. But now it’s become something that even further emphasizes unoriginal behavior. If you can’t describe someone as anything other than basic, how original are you?

But this isn’t even what gets me.

I’ll hear girls — and guys — talk about how they’re just staying in tonight, watching Netflix and eating food. These two activities have become so ingrained in young people, that it seems like there hasn’t been a get-to-know-you activity where I haven’t heard someone call them their hobbies. “I’m so basic,” they’ll say. “I’m a basic bitch.” They’ll giggle knowingly and indulge in their 15 seconds of self-deprecation. Wow, so brave.

They’re stuck in a sort of middle ground between embracing the character, and rejecting her. It’s not carefree enough to be genuine, but still not aware enough to be ironic. Essentially, to them, it’s OK to do basic things like get Starbucks or wear leggings instead of pants, but only if they recognize it immediately and make sure that other people realize it, too. It reminds me of people who make racist comments, but preface them with, “Listen, I’m not a racist, but —”

In her essay for Salon.com, writer Emily Gould characterizes identifying yourself and others as basic as a “kind of woman-on-woman micro-crime,” saying it’s “one of the ways (women) hold ourselves and each other back.”

The idea that watching TV and eating are somehow activities to be ashamed of is silly. With all the pressure to assimilate, how could someone not feel the need to be basic, ordinary, standard? That being said, culture thrives on a healthy tension and discourse between different ideologies, so being passionate about unique things is still something that should be celebrated.

Stop calling each other basic, and stop calling yourself basic, it gets us nowhere and it’s not funny. At its very worst, it’s misogynistic and at its very best, it’s unfunny.

If you want to make feminine things OK to do, then do them. Show that things a lot of people like still have value. Great. But, don’t qualify it with a silly one-dimensional character. Join me. Abandon the notion of the basic bitch. Then, maybe, we can free ourselves to just be people.

Eric King is a sophomore magazine journalism major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at [email protected] and followed on Twitter @erickingdavid.

Published on February 24, 2015 at 12:15 am