Last week, as the intensity of Painting’s Edge at Idyllwild was finally wearing off, I sat relaxing with my husband at an outdoor café in the Third Street Promenade in Santa Monica, Calif. Enthusiastic flaneurs, we were enjoying the parade of buff Angelenos. Suddenly, two skinny teenage guys strolled by, arm in arm, one dangling something odd from his mouth. A closer look revealed this 15-or-16-year-old was casually sucking on a pacifier, chained around his neck. His friend, meanwhile, sported a teddy-bear backpack. Both had long, dyed black bangs, swept dramatically over one eye, and both wore tight pants and retro t-shirts. “There go a couple of emos,” I whispered.

The term “emo” first showed up in the 70s as a description for punk musicians and their fans. In the 80s, it morphed into a term that described bands with a lot of emotion in their music. In the 90s, it morphed yet again into describing the new indie rock scene. Nowadays, the term is used to describe young people who demonstrate, through choices in clothing and music, that they possess exceedingly emotional personalities.

Emos share with many young Japanese a love of the cute and cuddly (the word in Japanese for this is kawaii), but their main characteristic is a shy, sensitive, and nervous nature. They bear some resemblance to the English transvestite comedian Eddie Izzard in the 1990s, but they’re not as confident in their skin (nor as adorable), appearing instead to be slightly pathetic and forlorn. Their whole demeanor conveys harmlessness and a desire to be left alone with one another. (Dressing as they do, though, betrays a simultaneous yearning to be looked at). Although they aren’t out to cause trouble, emos are vulnerable to being picked on — even violently. In Mexico, for example, there have been several examples of gangs going in for bloody “emo-bashing.”

In The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that if you want to know young people, you have to know their music. I know next to nothing about young people’s music (I’ll confess: it’s hard on my ears), but in trying to understand them, I’ve spent a lot of time observing their fashion. I pay close attention, in particular, to how college students dress. Overall, college kids dress in a very casual, slightly slobby fashion. Their taste ranges from the preppy to the hearty jock, the hip-hop, the late-stage hippie, and the sexy-slutty.

Most college campuses, however, sport at least a handful of milder versions of full-blown goths, who dress as if they are playing roles in a horror movie. Goths share with emos the claim to being outsiders, but are far more theatrical and flamboyant than emos. Unlike emos, they clearly relish playing their role. Emos affect an air of sensitive uncertainty about everything in the world. When they speak, they speak hesitantly, and like to apologize for whatever it is they’re saying. They think of themselves as still discovering who they are. Although the emos I saw in Santa Monica were probably still in high school, I’ve seen a few of their tribe on more than one college campus.

In its limited way, fashion reflects personality, and we professors ignore the fashion of our students at our peril. To my eye, goths and emos both look a little silly, but then again, so do we all — to someone. My own approach to the vagaries of college fashion has always been to pretend I’m oblivious to whatever fashion my students adhere to. I’ve learned to stare unperturbed at young women with lycra tops two sizes too small for their breasts, young men with pants two sizes too big for their waists, and faces pierced by shotgun blasts of silver jewelry — even as we all carry on a discussion about the complexities of Leonardo’s ideas on sfumato. A pacifier, however, is an altogether different challenge — one I’ll likely never be up to. (Query: Is it legal for a professor to forbid students to suck on pacifiers — chained or unchained — during class? My answer: Too bad if it’s not, because my answer is “yes.”)

Emos are deep narcissists, but I think they’re genuinely sensitive. They’re an extreme version of the increasingly rare, thin-skinned, and poetic type of human being — rapidly being shoved out of the way by those I call “monsters of overachievement” (I’ll be posting on them soon) — which was vividly delineated in Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (originally published in 1774).

Goethe’s fictional Werther is a youth equipped by nature with an intensely sensitive soul. As the story progresses, Werther’s sensitivity grows increasingly more raw and becomes excruciating, even to himself. His suffering (over a woman he cannot have) leads to pathetic, almost non-stop weeping, and culminates in his suicide.

The book, an overnight sensation in Germany, set off the first mass-cult phenomenon in modern literary history. Its popularity spread throughout Europe, resulting in thousands of copycat Werthers (young men who affected the dress and behavior of the fictional Werther and, in hundreds of instances, even copied his suicide). Werther marked a dramatic launch of the Romantic movement — which, despite the repeated announcements of its death — still lingers today.

Though emos should chuck both their pacifiers and their narcissism, their deliberate display of sensitivity reveals how astutely they understand that our hyper-competitive society has little room for “losers” of any sort. That applies especially to bright young people who refuse to prep maniacally for their SATs or pad their résumés with soup-kitchen service or to dress for the prom as though they’re going to be interviewed on the red carpet by Joan Rivers. In short, society has little tolerance for those who refuse an early start to clawing their way to the top.

Those of us who reflexively tend to hold the emos of the world in contempt should perhaps take a step back for a moment. In many cases, we could probably use a small dose (emphasis on the word “small”) of whatever demurral tonic it is that emos are taking.

Young adults using pacifiers are, however, a whole different thing.