Cheugy is new TikTok slang that means something between 'basic' and 'trying too hard.' It's not always mean, but it's fueling the intergenerational feud between Zoomers and Millennials.
On social media, some have condemned the term “cheugy,” accusing it of being misogynistic and used as yet another way to “bully” women. This is misguided: bullying is what happens when you weaponize markers of someone’s identity against them, and if you consider wearing Tory Burch sandals an integral aspect of your identity, then you probably need to take a long hard look at your own privilege.
Misogyny is insidious and takes many forms in our culture, but making fun of someone for posting Minion memes is not one of them. But even if “cheugy” is relatively inoffensive, it does seem targeted at a very specific cohort: white, middle-class, millennial woman., Kelsey Weekman describes it as an encapsulation of the “millennial girlboss aesthetic.” And students of the term “basic,” which gained traction among millennials in the early 2010s, will recognize an overlap between many of the markers of basic bitchdom — furry boots, inspirational quotes on Instagram, self-identifying as an “iced-coffee addict” — and cheuginess. Part of this is to be expected; no matter how much they believe otherwise, no generation ever comes up with anything new , and the internet has made it especially easy for memes to float around in the ether until they are repackaged in slightly different forms. Lorenz disputes that cheuginess is defined by race, class, age, or gender . “It just means corny, like trying too hard with the trends,” she says, adding that “all of straight TikTok is cheugy, basically.” Nor is it necessarily a bad thing; indeed, if one is designated cheugy, being ashamed or embarrassed about it is possibly the cheugiest thing one can do.ongoing culture wars between Millennials and Zoomers . Much of the mockery has been fairly light-hearted, with Zoomers skewering Millennials for their side parts, skinny jeans, unironic use of the term “doggo,” and predilection for using the crying-laughing emoji; some of it, such as criticizing millennials for embracingcorporate feminism, has been more serious. But Millennials have not reacted to this particularly graciously. Some TikTok users even went so far as to put out