Farewell, douchebag

I spent two of the most unpleasant years of my childhood attending an all-boys' prep school in Severna Park Maryland. As a short, chubby, nearsighted lad, I quickly learned a whole lexicon of insults. It was the end of the 1960s, so a lot of sexist, homophobic stuff was just normal. Cocksucker?    Fag? Homo? Pussy?Hell yeah. Douchebag? Absolutely.

When you know better, you do better. Cocksucker fell by the wayside when I reflected upon the fact that I had friends who were. There is nothing inherently wrong or contemptible in consensual participation in oral pleasures. Interestingly, I can still say "fuck you," and a host of other fuck-related profanities. It's such a satisfying word to say, in all of its combinations. It's also an act of pleasure, and sometimes of love. But when something's fucked, nothing sums it up more succinctly. When someone needs to fuck off, they need to fuck off.

Douchebag had been hanging in there. I was so young when it was first leveled at me that the first meaning I assigned to the word was "contemptible loser idiot." I'm not sure when I actually learned about the device and its uses. I was pretty slow in that regard. It has so many connotations of douchebagitude that it almost has its own existence independent of the device that gave it its name.  In fact, as far back as the 1970s, when I became a visitor to vulvas and vaginas, and conversed with women about their intimate lives, I was hearing that the douche was unnecessary, and becoming obsolete. I have no standing in that court, so I take my opinions from those who know. I champion whatever cause requires my alliance. But the apparent end of the douche era did not diminish the popularity and pervasiveness of the insulting potential of the bag.

Some technical purists would say that the bag doesn't really do anything, and the nozzle is the real dirty business. And that starts to penetrate the controversy in which I inadvertently found myself today.

I like to post photo comments. When commenting on the antics of a male engaged in acts of dicklitude, I use this picture of a stinkhorn mushroom a lot.

But it was getting a little old, so I rustled up another picture that could apply perhaps to a slightly wider range of offense, and give a little change-up from the fungal dick-pic.

It never failed to get a laugh...until today. A woman whose views I respect stated that the term equates her intimate anatomy with a dirty place that renders the tools of its maintenance -- whether still in common use or not -- symbolic of filth and degradation.

Well shit. If you want to get technical about it, it's absolutely true. A douchebag is no more contemptible in and of itself than a cocksucker. The contemptibility of a cocksucker would come not in the act itself but in the motives for the act. So then you need to append a bunch of supporting scenario to the insult that robs it of all of its immediate whip-crack power as a combat word. And there's no such thing as contemptible douching. I mean I suppose you could -- again -- construct a scenario in which the application of a douche could be degrading, but there you are, digging around for cumbersome qualifiers again.

Sack of shit is still usable. Schmuck is a degrading reference to the penis, but so far no one has been able to refute the fact that a lot of stupidity does seem to emanate from the masculine. So, dick, dork, wang, they're still in play. Or you could be a men's rights dickhead and hold out for the right to insult vaginas. But let's face it: men have gotten away with generations of insulting vaginas as part of a generalized contempt for women. Godammit, we know better, and now we have to do better.

Farewell, sweet douchebag. Unless we can all decide on a treaty that permits insulting use of those syllables unmoored from their vaginal derivations, we must bid farewell to a fine old war horse in the cavalry of harsh words. I shall do my best now to remember and amend my ways. I don't want to be a dou-- fuck! Shithead. I don't want to be a shithead.