Why it’s apparently bad to be a basic b*tch
Still image from “Meeting in the ladies room” music video
The worldwide witch hunt, an online phenomenon, was at least what was happening in 2010. An obsession exploded in trying to find the identifying signs of a basic bitch. These signs created a need to find out if you were a basic bitch or whether you could determine one. It also made the knowledge that if you can recognise a basic bitch, you are probably not one.
What is a basic bitch? It was condemned to the likes of a person: pumpkin-spiced lattes, scented candles, and the love of Taylor Swift. The idea was solely focused on marginalising women, allowing the term basic to become weaponised. In the early to mid-2010s, basic was changed to meaning average, the run of the mill, and was a comical critique on social class and behaviour. However, by the late-2010s it was less about social class and more about someone’s originality and personality. The conventional girl conforms without knowing, and a conventional girl, now grown up, who continues to follow trends, is uncool. “I saw Cady Heron wearing army pants and flip-flops, so I bought army pants and flip-flops.” A grown woman who continued to follow after her friends like a lost dog was deemed pathetic and was looked down on. They think that continuing to resist originality is popular but don’t realise that the ‘current’ cool is to be original.
“The basic bitch is “always on trend” and they “never [step] outside the box. ”
term implies a miscalculation of your specialness, how you are not perfect, and your boringness is evident to everyone but you. They were seen as girly girls, liked pink, and didn’t need gender-specified items as everyone knew what they would pick. Their sin wasn’t shopping; instead, it was shopping at the ‘wrong’ brands. The rise of the basic bitch created an atmosphere of pressure for young girls to have a thin line between fitting in and standing out at school. To be normal, you are considered trendy; to be basic, you are anything but chic. The term basic held a superpower; one used to put down others and express, “You think you are cool, but you’re not.” The insult was similar to trashy or cheap, where it seemed to roll off the tongue. It allowed people not to call someone something as cruel as slut, but still allowed them to have power. They were not threatening, conceived as not deserving a raised pulse. Instead of saying “women who fail to surprise us,” the term was instead coined for basic bitch.
The term basic first originated in the 20th century when Sylvia Plath talked about her attempts to socialise in upscale fraternities, “you’ve had all you can take of good-looking vacuums and shallow societies, so you try to be basic. You are such a basic character yourself.” It was expressed as a more general term than one to insult; however, this changed in 1985. The term resurfaced when, in Klymaxx’s song Meeting in the Ladies Room, the lyrics stated, “id hate to come down to their level and become a BW. A basic woman.” Basic with the intention of insulting continued to appear, and in the 2010s to 2011s, it meant a fake girl who loved faux designer bags and clothing. With the help of BuzzFeed and CollegeHumor videos, the insult became targeted at white women and became a new fuel for the white-girl-on-white-girl insults of the 2010s.
The rise of the basic bitch created a vehicle that drove misogyny and created a hostile environment. Women were prompted to isolate and judge each other on the ideals of superficiality. Men took advantage and used the phrase to make themselves feel better and make women feel as though they needed to work to be noticed by men. This reinforces the patriarchal idea of competing for a man’s approval. A basic bitch delighted in everything men dismissed, celebrity gossip, cocktails; she expressed traditionally feminine desires for marriage/kids. She allows herself to feel and express those desires and doesn’t see a reason to hide them. Women who call women basic, support two things that she wouldn’t support if she knew what they were in the clear: a male hierarchy of culture and the view that the self is a surface-level formation.