Basic emerged during my high school years and was first marked by the appreciation of Starbucks, Ugg boots, and yoga pants. Any one or combination of these three preferences ws enough to make someone basic. I’m not sure when exactly it happened; as slang does, the word permeated the vocabulary of my community. It snuck in like a thief in the night. No one asked where it came from, or for a definition. According to Buzzfeed (referencing Buzzfeed in this article is basic and/or meta), basic came in to usage around 2011. By 2014, the term basic as it is used now was widely recognizable. Perhaps the most popular display of the word can be found in a video shared by CollegeHumor entitled “How To Tell If You’re a Basic Bitch.” This is where the slang basic derived from: the designation of a woman as a basic bitch. The use of basic bitch draws on elements of white culture, and the woman in question is white.

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As Buzzfeed notes, “that original usage had nothing to do with middle-class white girls. Instead, ‘basic bitch,’ like so many things that become commonplace within mainstream (white) culture, was appropriated from black culture.” Madeleine Davies, in an article for Jezebel, writes that the phrase was new only to white people at the time it became popular. In fact, it had emerged in hip hop around 2009, and was, seemingly, only adopted by white people after white rapper Kreayshawn used it in a song. Like most of the slang that emerged in the internet age, it’s hard to track when, exactly, the meaning changed or when the word was passed from one group to the next. There’s not a distinct lineage for basic bitch or for basic. When white culture co-opted the phrase, “basic bitch” was shortened to basic.

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Basic, in its mainstream slang form, is used to indicate a woman (almost always white in this iteration of the word) who likes things that are popular. The sin of a basic woman is consuming what other white women consume. The basic woman’s habits are boring; of course she likes the popular thing. She likes it because it’s popular. Although, you’d think, it became basic because it became popular, and its popularity happened because consumers liked it, which might have happened because it was simply a good product. It feels a little paradoxical.

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And the problem isn’t simply that her personality is deeply ingrained with her taste in material goods, with her particular way of consumerism. Her taste is unoriginal, therefore her whole being is unoriginal. Therefore she is basic. Because the most sensible thing to do, obviously, is decide that someone’s whole essence is encapsulated by their pumpkin spice latte order and thusly condemn them. If it hasn’t become clear, basic is, or was at one point, strictly negative.

Since its inception, basic has grown and changed. Now, partaking in any number activities can make a person basic. Basic activities include (but are not limited to) buying scented candles, wearing Timberland shoes, and ordering white wine. My most distinct basic characteristics are as follows: I like brunch (+ mimosas), Warby Parker glasses, and the musical Hamilton. I can’t even track what’s basic anymore. As far as I can tell, you’re basic for liking anything that other people like.

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When women call other women basic (not in a friend way, in a judgey way), we play into a patriarchal assumption that women have to prove their power by belittling other women. In media, we frequently see women in competition. Female characters are frenemies or straight up challengers after the same man. The purpose of female friendships as they are often represented is to exhibit rivalry, to demonstrate that women are too dramatic/petty/emotional (take your pick of adjectives) to simply be friends with another woman or a group of women. This isn’t real. Women being incapable of friendship with other women without competition or drama is a lie. But women are often conditioned to think that they are in competition, that there are a limited number of spots at the top of the hierarchy and that, in order to save one for themselves, they have to convince men that they do not partake in one of the many inferior ways to be a woman.

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Think about how it’s supposedly a compliment to tell a girl that she’s “not like other girls.” That she’s better because she has differentiated herself from other women; other women typically possess some shared, negative trait but this one woman does not have it. This is the way we tell women that it’s a good thing to not be like the rest and encourage her to look for ways to set herself apart from other women. Using the designation of basic gives women an easy category sort others into and exclude themselves from, so they can boost their position in the hierarchy by demeaning the tastes of a different group. Basic, as an insult, “derives its power from the knowledge that if you can recognize someone or something as basic, you probably, yourself, aren’t it.”

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Basic also depends on the oft-internalized idea that women exist to be seen. It relies on the assumption that women’s tastes are performative. Basic only works because we expect that the whole motivation behind women’s preferences is to tell others (like men) something about her, that everything she does has the express purpose of making people think she fits into some specific group. But when she picks the wrong things, or wants people to feel a specific, arbitrarily-determined wrong way about her, we deem her basic. Women are not allowed to just like things; every single thing they choose to consume is picked with the purpose of crafting a persona. Essentially, calling someone basic assumes that what a woman prefers, from clothing to coffee order, was chosen for the purpose of telling you who she is and that your judgement is something that matters to her. It probably doesn’t.

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I do think that basic has lost some of the power it once had. I think we’ve collectively leaned into it. While it may still tend negative at times, women use basic now familiarly, with affection. The people who call me basic don’t do so with animosity, or even with any particular judgement (I think). And while it was never a particularly impressive or barbed insult, it has found an even more casual place in the vernacular and serves just to call white girls out for doing anything that at least one other white girl might like doing. It has even turned to a term that can be used for men, though basic dudes are more commonly known as “bros,” as can be seen in a CollegeHumor video published the year after the basic bitch video came out.

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Basic as a popular put-down isn’t good for anyone. It perpetuates patriarchal ideas and encourages women to break each other down to secure their own place in a tenuous hierarchy. It solidifies this notion that women have to earn respect by demonstrating that there are women who are inferior. As the writer Dana Schwartz once tweeted, “Let's stop calling girls "basic" for liking things that are objectively likable.” Insults, especially gendered ones, lose their power when women refuse to bow to the pressure of undermining other women to secure their own status.