Counter-Currents
Including Audio Version by Jim Goad!
The Difference Between a Man & a Douchebag
Jim Goad
1,276 words / 9:17
Audio version: To listen in a player, use the one below or click here. To download the mp3, right-click here and choose “save link as” or “save target as.”
It’s a statistical fact that men die younger than women do, and not simply because we want to. The odds are so stacked against us these days that even though black women are supposed to be doubly oppressed, they outlive white men.
In America, the law and public sympathy are so lopsidedly biased against men that we are shouted down for daring to broach the subject. This broken modern world offers boundless support for women, but often forces men to walk into blizzards naked and unarmed, unsure if there’s anything waiting for us on the other side. Men are in a rough place, no question about it.
I’ve been a dogged critic of the ongoing defamation and ritual cultural emasculation of males. The record will show as I stand here today, ravaged top-to-bottom and inside-and-out with physical and emotional scars that lend me a ruggedly ugly charm, that over the years my poisonous quill has dipped into a testosterone-filled inkwell to write passionately vociferous defenses of douchebags, dudebros, and toxic masculinity.
Many others have also written in defense of masculinity. A lot of it is necessary, but much of it is painfully cheesy and unintentionally hilarious. The fact that men are under systemic attack in no way changes the fact that many men can also act like utter imbeciles and morons, especially in the name of manliness and particularly while acting amid groups of other males.
So my aim here is not to demean men en masse — only a certain type of adult male. One that is far too prevalent and one that threatens to drag us all down through his innate immaturity, tackiness, clumsiness, superficiality, and lack of grit.
I intend to make a sharp and ultimately unforgettable distinction between the noble “man” and the ignoble “douchebag.”
I need to define my terms here, because my definitions are arbitrary and won’t be found in any dictionary: When I’m talking about “men” and “douchebags,” I’m talking about personality traits, not physical ones.
I don’t mean “man” in the generic sense of “adult male.” When I say “man” in this context, I’m referring to an adult male with a strong sense of self and character. In contrast, a “douchebag,” regardless of his physical prowess, is crass, boorish, doltish, oafish, and more emotionally shallow than a raindrop evaporating on hot asphalt.
I use the term “masculine” in a strictly physical sense. Both “douchebags” and “men” can be either physically strong or frail.
These traits run along intersecting spectrums of character and physicality. To be a “man,” physical strength doesn’t hurt, but it’s not essential. There are musclebound steroid casualties who are emotionally infantile, while there are 90-pound weaklings with characters forged of iron. One can be a winner on both fronts: physically strong and intensely manly in matters of character. But one can also be a two-time loser: weak in both body and mind.
But one can never simultaneously be a douchebag and a man. Where it gets mutually exclusive is that douchebaggery implies a fundamentally juvenile lack of virtue and gravitas, whereas manliness implies the opposite.
These two personality types, the douchebag and the man, are not affected by intelligence or social class; they seem to operate independently of such factors. I’ve met convicts who are as dumb as rocks but carry themselves with a searing sense of personal dignity. I’ve met intelligent millionaires who are shallow, vain, and, at base, fiercely douchey. Whereas suffering doesn’t necessarily build character, neither does being pampered.
A douchebag can be extremely masculine — physically. But his personality is unmanly, unseemly, and unbecoming. For the douchebag, his masculinity is performative — sometimes to impress women, but mostly to impress other males. Douchebags tend to prefer the company of other males, possibly in hopes that it will be a multiplier factor for their own masculinity. Douchebags crave being around the smell of male sweat and male hormones. In their more tender moments, they are found squeezing one another’s muscles, snapping one another’s jockstraps, and sniffing one another’s balls.
On the other hand, manliness is not defined by how much you can bench-press, but how much adversity you can endure without crumbling. How much you can remain honest while swirling in a maelstrom of lies. How true to your word you are. A man feels things deeply, but he does not allow his feelings to ruin him.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
A man only needs to be okay with himself; a douchebag needs constant reassurance.
A man sets goals for himself and doesn’t rest until he attains them; a douchebag lives thoughtlessly and aimlessly.
A man focuses on personal honor; a douchebag is obsessed with social status.
A man cannot be psychologically broken; a douchebag will snitch and sell out to the first bidder.
A man will go against the crowd if his heart tells him it’s the right thing; a douchebag will follow the crowd wherever it goes, even off a cliff.
Even amid a crowd, a man is still an individual, whereas a douchebag is a sucker for the blunt, soul-snuffing savageries of deindividuation.
From my observations, manliness of character is better developed in solitude rather than in packs. At first, it helps to have mentors and coaches, but many things can only be learned by experiencing life directly, with no one else blocking your view. One often needs time away from other males, and from people in general, to learn how to be a man. Being a man means being a wolf rather than a sheep. Yes, wolves also run in packs, but I’ve never heard of a “lone sheep.”
But solitude is also a dead end. A plug needs a socket, or it serves no purpose. Nature has made it so that no man is complete without a woman. He can never be complete merely hanging around with other men.
In certain pro-male/all-male/nothing-but-male online circle jerks, one often hears that it’s “gay” for men to try to impress females. Assuming that such a brain-dead assertion is true, what would that make men who try to impress other men? In the grand scheme of things, it seems far less gay to flex for a woman than for a man, but such a simple concept is far too complex for douchebags to grasp, which is why they often wind up commiserating about women with other douchebags.
There is a time for male bonding, and that time is childhood and puberty. Male bonding is a preparatory phase for mating. Once you start mating, things get more serious and you have to let the adolescent nonsense go, or you are at high risk of becoming a lifelong douchebag.
Male bonding should be seen as a rite of passage rather than an end in itself. Aggressive male-bonding should end around the same time that the “sowing your wild oats” phase ends. When you become a man, you put away such childish pursuits. Male bonding has a biologically encoded expiration date. After a certain point, it is a sign of arrested development.
Every boy’s fundamental project in life is to mature from an adolescent to a man. Douchebaggery is the norm when you’re a teen; it’s to be expected. But it becomes distasteful in adulthood and unforgivable at any point past middle age. An adult douchebag is an adolescent boy who has outlived his shelf life and is starting to stink. There’s nothing noble in being 14 years old forever. If you don’t outgrow being a douchebag, you can never be a man.
* * *
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26 comments
This was superbly written.
When they publish The Quotable Goad, this will need a volume of its own.
What a scorcher. Lol
Like The Little Red Book by Mao Zedong.
Thanks Jim: Great stuff!
All too true. And yet the opportunities for boys and adolescents to grasp these eternal truths, from the feminist media-and school-constructed world they must inhabit, are sorely limited. Institutions like Boy Scouts of America were fantastic for channeling youthful energy in a manly and patriotic fashion up until quite recently but I suspect no longer. There’s also a pervasive cynicism which seems to afflict a lot of young people, perhaps as a result of an excess of critique in their education and entertainments.
This,
But one can never simultaneously be a douchebag and a man. Where it gets mutually exclusive is that douchebaggery implies a fundamentally juvenile lack of virtue and gravitas, whereas manliness implies the opposite.
and this,
On the other hand, manliness is not defined by how much you can bench-press, but how much adversity you can endure without crumbling. How much you can remain honest while swirling in a maelstrom of lies. How true to your word you are. A man feels things deeply, but he does not allow his feelings to ruin him.
are excellent observations.
I tend to use the world “douchebag” a lot, though always in a political context. I tend to associate douchebags exclusively with whites, as I also do liberalism. Neither is to be found among nonwhites (whatever their failings). While I’ve tended to think that a douchebag is like porn – hard to define, but you know it when you see it, if I had to hazard my own definition it would be “a white person who is inappropriately or promiscuously altruistic”; that is, someone who insists that his fellow whites (or Americans, or middle class taxpayers) make sacrifices for undeserving others. There is usually an air of self-righteousness, and lots of virtue-signaling, with douchebags. Former FL Gov. Jeb Bush calling illegal immigration “an act of love” while utterly neglecting to notice the horrendous consequences to his own fellow citizens of the Federal Government’s de facto toleration of annual migratory invasions is classic douchebaggery, as is the use of terms like “homeless” and “unhoused”, which conjure up mental images of people who lost their homes in human or natural disasters (an expensive illness, wildfires, floods, tornados), when what are almost always really being described are smelly vagrants and criminal junkies.
Conservatives can be douchebags, too, usually when they use liberal rhetoric to try to score points against liberals (eg, “Democrats are the real racists”). I still remember 30+ years ago when Ur-douchebag Jack Kemp castigated some poor audience guy who was asking him about illegal immigration enforcement. Kemp responded by noting that the white questioner’s last name (which was a Continental European one, though the dude was clearly a white Middle American of at least several generations’ standing, if I had to guess) “didn’t sound very American“, and that this guy’s “ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower”, the implication (in the context of the overall discussion) being that an illegal Mexican border crosser has just as much right to be here as the questioner, despite the questioner’s obvious status as an actual American citizen, and the equally obvious fact that he was a Real American. What a douchebag, I thought at the time.
Indeed, one perfect sign of the douchebag is that he denies that there is such a thing as a Real American. The more extreme douchebags even think someone can choose his pronouns.
Interesting take. My own usage of douchebag runs much closer to Goad’s definition. An old neighbor of mine personifies what in my mind is the archetypal douchebag.
This guy was 50 years old and to his credit looked considerably younger. He wore his hair in a gel-spiked California wantrapreneur style favored by trendy young men. He wore clothes like a fashion-conscious frat boy. He frequently referenced his own good looks and talked endlessly about all of the women he had done, including multiple female neighbors. But I never knew him even for a single day to have a girlfriend.
He first drove an early 2000s BMW entry-level 3-series, the quintessential douchemobile, then sold it to get a 2000s Range Rover, another douchebag favorite. He had been to jail many times for drunken fights and DUIs and was in the process of being forced out of the condominium he inherited. This was after a number of incidents, including having damaged the building when he drove his Range Rover over the lawn and smashed various bushes and fixtures in an apparent effort to avoid the 100 foot drunken walk to his front door. He was later charged with assault when a verbal altercation he initiated with a complex employee went bad, ending with him knocked out on the asphalt. The fracas was unsurprising given his penchant for casually insulting people and badly violating personal space norms, both not necessarily in a mean spirited way but more in the manner of a pubescent male roughhousing with close friends. Of course, adult men often interpreted it differently.
I observed him behaving in a mildly abusive way towards his cat, who appeared malnourished. I never observed him to have a job, instead spending most days smoking weed and most nights drinking in bars. He was always in bad financial shape, despite being for years on the verge of starting his proclaimed career as a personal trainer. He was eventually forced to sell the unit he inherited either by action of the condo association or by simply being unable to afford the involved costs.
He’s a middle-aged 14 year old.
All that said, he could be fun to hang with for an hour or two, which might be a little of the douchebag in me talking.
I realize we’re trying to give some content to inherently nebulous terms (which is possibly somewhat douchebaggy in itself, like a nerd-argument of over whether “Klingons” are smarter than “Romulans”), but your neighbor to me sounded more like an a-hole or semi-delinquent. A douchebag is inappropriately altruistic, especially with someone else’s money or property. Imagine a dirty vagrant sets up a tent in between your and your immediate neighbor’s houses. You, assuming you’re normal, want to get him away from there. So you talk to your neighbor, and suggest first, calling the police, and then, if living in a douchebag (read: “liberal”) area such that the cops worry more about the scumbag’s “civil rights” than about your property rights and general civic peace, and so do nothing to remove the bum, taking increasing levels of direct action (accidentally spraying his tent when watering, tossing garbage out your window onto him, buying and training a dog to urinate on his tent, etc) to dissuade the dirtbag from staying there, menacing your property and peace of mind.
Your neighbor responds by being “horrified” at your suggestions; worries about the bum’s well-being; lets the bum know “he’s on his side”; and even solicitously takes leftover food to the bum whist trying to befriend him. Your neighbor is not himself a criminal, but he defends the conditions that allow for crime and disorder to flourish at the expense of civilization. He is faux-virtuous. That’s a “douchebag”.
Good article, but I’d disagree that a man can’t be broken. Even the strongest have been broken in certain circumstances. POWs, prisoners, sometimes a good man can even be broken by a woman. Usually a solid man can pick up the pieces afterwards. But not always.
Poster boy for douchebaggery: white man driving a pickup truck that has a sticker advertising his membership of a labor union and wears an orange, or similar color, nfl/nba shirt bearing a negroid’s name.
I know a lot of White, pick-up driving union men and none of them wear shirts with Negro names on them. They are allies of the White nationalist movement and are an integral part of the future White homeland.
I think that men may be having a tough time being a man, not a Douch bag, since the array of women in this time and place are not so great or enticing themselves. In fact, it could be that most White men and women between 20 to 40 are the grandchildren of the 60’s hippies. The first indication of that which you might notice is that most women in America have pretty much the exact same hair style — totally straight hair parted down the middle and hanging around their face to below the shoulders. Count them on TV some time — hardly a curl in sight.
Also, there is the money problem — men think women are just after them for their better earning capabilities that result in men making more money. Actually, good women are just looking for ‘security’ — a home in which to raise children, and a man to faithfully ‘bring in the bacon’ for years on end to feed that family. Yes, it is true that women spend too much money on new clothes, shoes, cosmetics, etc. but at the base of that is their need to be pretty to keep their men interested in them.
Since I am over the age of seeking a mate — I’ve had three (long, boring story. including a couple tangles with douchbags) — and I don’t know the problems that men face today, I can only wish you luck, and follow the instructions and ideals that Uncle Jim has laid out for you here.
On the other hand, manliness is not defined by how much you can bench-press, but how much adversity you can endure without crumbling. How much you can remain honest while swirling in a maelstrom of lies. How true to your word you are. A man feels things deeply, but he does not allow his feelings to ruin him.
Cannot be better said than that.
This is a sort of antithesis to Jack Donovan’s postulate “The Way of Men is the way of the gang”.
It’s funny—someone on Twitter mentioned that this was an “anti-Donovan” essay.
I didn’t have Jack in mind at all when I wrote this. I like Jack. But we’re coming from complete opposite ends of the sociability spectrum.
It was difficult to write this without clarifying every sentence with “It is my opinion that…,” but it should be clear that this is an opinion piece, not something posing as objective truth.
I just found the contrast striking, because Jack very much believes in male bonding and such as a way to manliness. He certainly is also anti-douchebaggery in the Goad sense. I guess the sociability spectrum is the key for the different approaches and conclusions.
Would it be a sociability issue, or rather a difference in the view on culture? Goad seems to posit marriage as the ultimate goal in life:
“There is a time for male bonding, and that time is childhood and puberty. Male bonding is a preparatory phase for mating.”
This might be the case for (most) women, but not for men. A man’s nature is to conquer the world, together with other men, and therefore male bonding is essential throughout life. The Männerbund is the basis of state and culture. Marriage comes second. In this I completely agree with the pagan view, as opposed to the christian-jewish view.
Well, this might be the first time I’ve been accused of taking the “christian-jewish” view on anything. Not sure why you dragged religion into it. The article doesn’t mention religion.
It’s interesting that you seem to think mating is a “cultural” issue. I’m pretty sure it’s a biological one. And I didn’t mention marriage, either.
Men acting in tandem may have razed forests and built buildings. But as far as the men who invented the things that dragged us out of the Stone Age go, they were loners who weren’t involved in endless back-patting and jockstrap-snapping sessions with other dudes.
I doubt that the Männerbund ever created a single child on its own. There would be no Männerbund without women. A lot of males who don’t seem able to breathe without constantly smelling male hormones seem to forget this basic fact.
Jack Donovan obviously prefers hanging out with groups of men. Throughout my adult life, I’ve preferred to hang out with one woman at a time. I hate being in crowds. Some people can’t live without it. So it’s a matter of sociability and personal preferences.
This is a classic. I think it should be the seed of a short book on manliness that puts the manosphere, the groypers, and other aberrations in their place.
Two guys from Staten Island go into a department store…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=105Ds9K6cqA
This broken modern world offers boundless support for women,…
This “boundless support” is due to the fact that this broken modern world considers woman an instrument, a mannequin, and a piece of flesh that helps function industries such as advertising, “beauty & personal care”, porn, “entertainment”, “sex tourism” etc., whose combine worth exceeds a trillion dollars.
“When I’m talking about “men” and “douchebags,” I’m talking about personality traits, not physical ones.”
I’m not sure if choice of apparel qualifies as a personality trait, a physical trait or something in between.
There was a period in the mid to late 00’s where douchebag fashion was trendy. I assume this gave birth to the popularity of Jersey Shore and its culture. It was also the time when UFC/MMA really started to rise in popularity.
The usual articles of apparel included but were not limited to:
Really tight t-shirts with either a fighting theme or flaming skulls with angel wings. Usually Tapout, Xtreme Couture, Affliction etc.
“Douchebag jeans” – These usually were stonewashed, tight with flamboyant designs on the back pockets (sometimes with sequin) and flared out at the bottom. Brands include Ed Hardy & Christian Audiger.
Long plaid shorts.
Giant shiny belt buckles.
Flat brimmed ball caps, usually Tapout.
Aviator sunglasses (the only actually cool item imo)
I’m glad this annoying fashion trend is long gone but it’s sort of bittersweet because it made douchebags easily identifiable for a time.
Just describing the ridiculous apparel matter-of-factly is hilarious. Lol
I’ll never forget a few months after getting married I was on the phone with my Mom and said something like, “who would have thought? It finally happened.” To which she had the ultimate deadpan reply, “I’m so glad you’re living with a woman.”
It was fun having Mmale roommates. One of them I often made toilet jokes with after either of us used the toilet. At a certain point though living with guys is arrested development. It’s hard for me at this point to even relate with single guys who are around my age.
I think the amish are on to something with rumspringa. You get one year to be a douchebag and then it is time to get back to reality, that being the farm and whelping more Amish children.
Jim Goad’s comment (here, because the Reply space ran out):
Men acting in tandem may have razed forests and built buildings. But as far as the men who invented the things that dragged us out of the Stone Age go, they were loners who weren’t involved in endless back-patting and jockstrap-snapping sessions with other dudes.
***
This is a good point (about the inventors); I’d add to that the artists, writers, musicians. Not to say that creative men can’t have friendships or be sociable in what I’d call moderation, but anecdotally I’ve concluded there’s a connection between how much an artist/writer/musician spends fraternizing (especially in a collective with other artists, writers, musicians), and how derivative his work is.
I suppose if one is out raiding villages like the fabled “Chariot Chads” we’re all supposed to look up to, he’s going to need his network. But if you’re ever going to have a society that’s more than rapes and axe battles, at least for a good part of the time, step away from the athletic supporters.
A fine piece of work. Chisel it into to some granite like an honorable jawline. Unfortunately any extolling of men is quickly rebuffed by the usual suspects… their retorts quickly turn to drum circles or soundbites of some bro banging his chest. The laziest attacks come from those who talk as if it is still 1950 or invoke The Handmaid’s Tale.
To give a sense of how quickly things have turned, consider the book Manliness, which was birthed in 2006 by a professor with the eminently manly name of Harvey Mansfield. You can hardly imagine that a Harvard professor specializing in Classics (the University meaning) had the freedom and cojones to be commenting on this topic (especially in 2023). When this appeared in 2006, he seemed taken aback by the rise of gender neutral ideology… well, times have certainly changed in 15 years. To promote the book, Mansfield appeared on the Colbert Report (!) and held his own against Colbert’s gotcha-aspiring interview with deadpan sarcasm.
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