We’ve all used the term. A certain cultural ubiquity has enveloped it over the past ten or twenty years. What once was a clever way to denigrate a pompous man by comparing him to a device used to cleanse a woman’s vagina has been overused to a point that people confuse its meaning and use it in improper contexts.

The term “Douche Bag” is not an umbrella pejorative. No pejorative is. These words are much more specific than anyone gives them credit for. We’ve already discussed the difference between an Asshole and a Son of a Bitch on this website. “Douche Bag” is misused along much the same lines. A Douche Bag is not an Asshole, nor a Son of a Bitch. The Douche Bag is something different altogether.

There are three defining characteristics of the genus “Douche Bag.” First is a complete lack of self-awareness, a total inability to conceptualize the outward manifestation of one’s personality. These men think that they are awesome, or at least on their way to being so, when in fact people are sick of their shit and only tolerate them, if they still do, because for some reason they have to. The Douche Bag is further defined by the meshing of this lacking self-awareness with a generally unpleasant personality. Not necessarily a contrarian personality or a prickish one, but an amalgam of undesirable male personality traits into one savagely unfortunate beast that people do not want to be around. The last character trait, the saddest one of all, is the Douche Bag’s apparent self-loathing, from which all unfortunate decisions regarding personal appearance and presentation result. These men don’t think we can tell that they hate themselves. But we know.

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Naturally, as with any species, there are a variety of mutations and delineations present in the modern American Douche Bag.

The first kind of Douche Bag is what I have termed the “Unmanly Super Douche.” This gentleman suffers internally from feelings of unmanliness on a daily, perhaps hourly basis. His sense of self has been poisoned to believe that, because he does not share much in common with the good-looking and/or ripped and therefore (he thinks) popular people he sees in advertising and on television, there is something lacking within him. In light of these feelings of inadequacy, the Unmanly Super Douche overcompensates with respect to his appearance.

He sports hairstyles that simply do not work for him. He wears clothes that should never have been purchased. He dons attire wholly unsuited for the occasion in which he finds himself. The Unmanly Super Douche attempts to turn himself into a carbon copy of the dudes fingering the hot chicks on shows like “The Hills” because he feels his reality should reflect the manufactured ones he sees around him. He does not realize that manufactured realities are exactly that, manufactured, and any attempts to bring those worlds into one’s own almost always end unfortunately. The best example of the Unmanly Super Douche is the disingenuous “party boy” you either work with now or used to, the one who incessantly talked about working out and partying with a certain air of desperation, even after the most polite among your co-workers long ago stopped paying attention.

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The next category of Douche Bag is one I will term the “Emotional Warfare Douche.” This Douche Bag wants to be thought of as cool, to be deemed a Bad Ass by those in his trusted circle of friends. Instead of performing feats of strength and ability or conditioning himself to be a stand up person with honor and morals, however, this gentlemen engages in mental and emotional warfare with whatever woman is unlucky enough to be his significant other at the time. Furthermore, the Emotional Warfare Douche loathes women in general.

A woman, to this Douche Bag, is an easy target with which to show his friends and any passing strangers taking notice how awesome he is. He attempts to do this through degradation and belittling; for instance, asking a woman why she is wearing a specific item when in a large group setting, or critiquing a woman’s attitude or mental acumen loudly enough for people nearby to hear. He often will laugh at his own commentary, as well, and think he is doing the woman a favor, when he is merely being disrespectful.

(side note: male friends of this Douche Bag enjoy an unexpected benefit from being around him, as the women who get sick of the Emotional Warfare Douche are often looking for someone to treat them like a lady and make them feel like a woman in the immediate wake of the relationship)

The best example of this kind of Douche Bag is that one guy in your circle of friends from college who dated a lot of girls and seemed like he was having a good time but often drank himself to sleep at night.

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The third and final kind of Douche Bag is the “Unfortunate Dickhead Douche.” He is not mean, per se. His attitude is not entirely unpleasant. He is also not charming and not all that fun to talk to or hang out with. He makes stinging jokes at the wrong times: every once in a while these jokes are funny, but just as often they are rude and uncalled for. He thinks he has abandoned any care for what other people think about him, when instead he has molded his personality into that of a lonely curmudgeon in direct response to what he’s perceived from other people regarding that same personality.

People stop wanting to be around this person after a time, so he turns up his supposed charm for the next batch of potential friends. They, in turn, tire of him, he ratchets up the personality, and the cycle perpetuates itself over and over again. This man has no idea the depths of his dickheadedness and therefore cannot get out in front of the cycle by showing kindness, warmth, and genuine enthusiasm to others. People may enjoy this guy in small does, but nobody likes this guy.

The best example of the Unfortunate Dickhead Douche is possibly your boss, or that guy that lived down the hall in the dorm or up the street from you when you were younger, the one you tried to be friends with for a little while and with whom, for whatever reason, you eventually stopped pursuing friendship. This guy has no idea why you stopped coming over, but his girlfriend only stays with him because she doesn’t want to die alone.

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Something happened to these men somewhere along the line, and the person that a Douche Bag truly is got smacked around and beaten into submission by an acquired personality trait that somehow gained a controlling stake in this man’s self-image. If only this man would ditch the unpleasantness and the overcompensation and embrace who he once was and still is, if only he would know himself and celebrate that person rather than attempting to mold himself into something he is not, most of his troubles would end. He may not find the largest group of friends that has ever existed in the history of human social interaction, but he will find good friends, true ones, and those are the only kind worth worrying about.

(Editor’s note: we at Satire would feel remiss without opening up this discussion to our dear readers. Have you come across a type of Douche Bag not listed in the above discussion? Feel free to use the message board below to share your view. The above study is completely unscientific, and therefore the writer is nearly positive he has left some kind of Douche Bag out.)