PopSmart

In the world according to Jay Louis, there’s no such thing as too many douchebags. No, not the countless politicos that Jon Stewart likes to skewer on “The Daily Show,” but the tatted-up, hair-spiked, shiny-foreheaded, six-pack-packed, hand-symbol-thrusting, shades-sporting, wife-beater-wearing, tongue-thrusting, hand-gesturing and pec-bearing American men who somehow wind up with really attractive women in living color.

Louis, aka douchebag1, hosts the phenomenally popular website Hot Chicks with Douchebags, in which he and alert readers hip the rest of us “normal” folk to the cheesily over-packaged American men hanging out with women who would seem way out of their league. As popular as the site is, the next logical step would seem to be a book, Hot Chicks with Douchebags (Simon Spotlight Entertainment), which fell into our reluctant hands this week and will hit bookstores July 8. The book’s thesis seems simple enough:

In this book, we will identify every type of ’bag within the douche spectrum, from the youthful stage-1 Fratbags to the polluted, noxious stage-4 DJ Club Douche. We will tap directly into the core of not only how douchebaggery manifests, but also how it corrupts the hottie within its wily, greased-up charms. These unnatural cohabitations must be exposed to the disinfecting light of detailed scrutiny if we have any hope of societal redress.

Louis fancies himself a culture critic; his diary-style blog posts are laced with heady name-dropping that actually lead nowhere: “Lighting up a stogie and pouring a shot of rum for Jobu, I contemplated the famous words of 16th Century astronomer Tyco Brahe, who stared up at the Prague skyline one night and casually remarked, ‘I have to pee.’ So I peed.”

It’s all kind of dismissive, smug and superior in a Greg Behrendt/He’s Just Not That Into You kind of way that isn’t nearly as female-empowering as the title suggests. (Women don’t exactly come off that well either.) But HCWD is at its funniest when coming up with the seemingly endless labels for these poor creatures: The Greasy Euro-Douche, The Garden Gnome, The Furry-Man, The “He’s My Best Friend” ’Bag,” and so on. The book’s denouement suggests a 12-step program of “De-Douchification,” which starts with “Accept That You or Your Loved One is a ’Bag” and concludes with “Disband the Woo Hotties and Douche Scrums,” a form of bold group disassociation that would appear to be the height of naivete. (These douches ain’t going away anytime soon.)

Ground Zero for the douchebag, according to Louis, is former ’90s power couple Richard Grieco and “Baywatch” babe Yasmine Bleeth, whose tragic tale is recounted in these pages. It’s all not nearly as funny as Louis thinks he is, but the photos of them, and all the other douchebags/hotties, suggests incontrovertible evidence of their existence.

Now, if we could get a book featuring Dick Cheney, Lord High Douchebag, and his minions, we’d be getting somewhere. But I fear we’ll never see Condi in a thong.

(Photos courtesy Simon Spotlight Entertainment)

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