Douchebag's Moment, Cover to Cover

Book Review: "Hot Chicks With Douchebags," Jay Louis, Simon Spotlight Entertainment, 240 pages. Photo above courtesy of ClubItUp.com.

It can be said with absolute certainty that douchebag is the swear word of the moment right now. And oh, what a swear it is, turning a female sanitary device into a slur against men whose primary purpose in life is to objectify women. Doesn't get any more deliciously nuanced than that.

In his new book, Hot Chicks With Douchebags (based on the blog of the same name), the Los Angeles screenwriter Jay Louis traces douchery's roots to effectively two Hollywood-based movements: (1) hair metal, starring the likes of Poison, Motley Crue, and GNR, and (2) 21 Jump Street's Richard Grieco. In fact, he devotes an entire chapter to how Grieco effectively ruined the gorgeous flower that once was Baywatch babe Yasmine Bleeth, Grieco's onetime beau. But while these may have been seminal moments in the douche movement, I'm not sure anything propelled douchebaggery into pop culture's consciousness quite like Neil Strauss' The Game, a best-selling book which chronicled Strauss' misogynistic misadventures with a crew of L.A.-based "sargers" -- i.e., douchebags who dress like "peacocks" and resort to mental manipulation of chicks to "f-close" ass. In essence, Strauss' book codified douchery and marked its ascent to the top of the Scrotum Pole, thus making Louis' attempt to throw the movement off kilter a necessary literary correction.

Whether Louis will succeed in his quest to knock the modern-day douche down a peg or nine remains to be seen (that drama will play out at clubs nationwide), but, if nothing else, his HCWDB is a marvelously cunning, consistently hilarious attempt at doing so. The book not only painstakingly catalogues the standard DB's most telltate traits -- hair gel, spray tan, popped collar, fake dog tags, ice, mandanas, wife beaters, no shirt, too many muscles, boy band facial hair, faux gang signs, et. al. -- but also relentlessly belittles uber-douche brands like Armani Exchange, Red Bull, and Grey Goose. 'Bout fucking time.

But where Louis' tome gets refreshingly unpredictable is in Chapter Five, when Louis breaks out the various species of 'bag. Here, he not only skewers the obvious New Jersey Guidos and Frat Bags, he actually attempts to claim that virtually everyone can be a douchebag -- hence the following categories: Punk Bag, Hippie Bag, Tickle Me Emo, and Fall Out Bag (the only members of the male gender seemingly not included are Fag Bags and Black Bags). At times, Louis classifies certain folks as douchebags simply for the effort they put in to not exude standard douche qualities, giving the book an absurdist air that only increases its comedic value, even as it muddles its focus a bit.

Just as creatively, Louis closes his book with a 12-Step Guide for how to un-douche oneself (my favorite entry: "Leave New Jersey"), as well as a harrowing account of his own pilgrimmage to what Louis considers to be the Mecca of 'baggery: the Vegas Hard Rock's Sunday afternoon "Rehab" pool party. No coincidence there: over half of the book's photos are culled from the popular LV website SpyOnVegas.com. Now that you can gamble virtually everywhere, Las Vegas has had to reinvent itself, and thus has become a breeding ground for all things douche. It must be obliterated in its present form, whatever the cost. Sinatra and Deano are rolling over in their graves.