Maybe All Bars Are Terrible?

So Complex published a slideshow of the 25 douchiest bars in Boston compiled by Kim Westerley that’s getting some attention on the web, and whew! The sheer vitriol this woman feels for Boston’s bar scene is at once hilariously entertaining and sort of depressing.

She writes her descriptions of each bar with an impressively bitter wit, though in her quest to tear down every single place she selects, she sometimes seems to overstate her case. (Barstool Sports wishes they’d made the list, it seems, and well … they’re obviously qualified.) A sample from her summary of Alibi Lounge on Charles Street:

Located inside an old prison, Alibi has great ambiance so long as there aren’t humans present … Alibi is notorious for being a weekend meat market, where the well-dressed cosmopolitan crowd comes to find Beacon Hill babes with family money. Any decent person will cringe with each arrogant one-liner directed at the severely-coiffed 20-somethings…

The first line, especially, is funny, but you have to figure the rest of the scene is caricature. Westerley doesn’t focus her rage on any one kind of bar. In fact she groups bars by the types of “douche” that most often frequent them, and refers at one point or another to the “seasoned douches,” the “affluent douches,” the “moneyed douches,” the “European douches,” the “melting pot of douches,” we could go on …

At some point she had us thinking of a popular rhyming hater from childhood. Think: She does not like preps with nice shoes. She does not like bros with pool cues. She does not like the Euro-tools. She doesn’t like suburban fools. She does not like green eggs—okay you get it. Without a companion list of 25 great bars, it’s hard to get a sense of what exactly she’s looking for. Maybe she just hates bars? As BostInno’s Dave Eisenberg summarized, “The Douchiest Bars in Boston? All of Them.”

Call us what you will (a douche), but while her descriptions of some terrible bar scenes had us laughing along (you won’t see us at Tequila Rain anytime soon), there were moments during other descriptions when I thought, “Wait, that sounds kind of fun. Maybe I should check this place out.” At the very least, maybe this list could be used as a diagnostic tool for you to find the douche within you. See a bar you like? Now you know the reasons Kim Westerley maligns you. (At least you now have a destination at which to go drown your sorrows.)

Bars, especially the over-hyped, well-populated kind she targets, are obviously a little irrational. Why are we all gathering together to spend 400 percent more on alcohol than we would at a liquor store? Because sometimes as a society, for whatever reason, we’re compelled to hang out among strangers, have Red Bull vodkas poured on us, and hear a disgusting live band, even if, as Westerley suggests, “it technically qualifies as noise pollution.”