If you’re not familiar with the cultural meme yet, College Humor has you covered:
Noreen Malone looks closer:
It seems to me that while what it pretends to criticize is unoriginality of thought and action, most of what basic actually seeks to dismiss is consumption patterns — what you watch, what you drink, what you wear, and what you buy — without dismissing consumption itself. The basic girl’s sin isn’t liking to shop, it’s cluelessly lusting after the wrong brands, the ones that announce themselves loudly and have shareholders they need to satisfy. (The right brands are much more expensive and subtle and, usually, privately owned.)
The basic girl is also someone who isn’t into androgyny.
She likes being a woman, or at least she buys the products that are so inherently female-skewing they don’t even NEED to be explicitly marketed to women, like low-calorie margaritas invented by Bravo heroines. She delights in all the things that men dismiss as unserious or that don’t often even register for them as existing — celebrity gossip, patterned disposable cocktail napkins that mean something sentimental. She expresses traditionally feminine desires, like wanting to get married or to have kids. She doesn’t have a poker face when it comes to those things, and doesn’t see the point in trying to develop one. She likes what she likes and she doesn’t care if it doesn’t make her outwardly special.
The word basic has become an increasingly expansive stand-in for “woman who fails to surprise us,” as seen in this Vice tournament of basic bitches that includes Gwyneth Paltrow and Mother Teresa and Shirley Temple and both Michelle Williamses, among others. And so the woman who calls another woman basic ends up implicitly endorsing two things she probably wouldn’t sign up for if they were spelled out for her: a male hierarchy of culture, and the belief that the self is an essentially surface-level formation.
The Dish 