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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Laurie Fendrich

Tickle Me Emo

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.

Posted at 07:29:08 PM on July 13, 2008 | All postings by Laurie Fendrich

Comments

  1. I’m guessing that such affectations are limited to the upper middle classes, youngsters going to school on daddy’s money, with plenty of free time. The kids I teach (at an open enrollment institution) nearly all have jobs. I’ve never seen a single emo.

    — Fred · Jul 13, 08:27 PM · #

  2. It’s fashionable to hate rich kids, isn’t it Fred. Or rather, kids you don’t like the look of. You are noble indeed.

    — Tired of class bigots · Jul 13, 09:33 PM · #

  3. Pacifiers are from 90s rave culture. This is a good 10 years out of date. Also, “emo” is an adjective, not a noun – you can be “a goth,” but I’ve never heard anyone say a person is “an emo,” rather “X is so emo.” And emo never had anything to do with 70s punkers. I’m an old fart, and even I figured these factoids out. When we old farts try to hard to overuse the lingo, we just look silly.

    — B. · Jul 13, 10:04 PM · #

  4. I agree with B’s comments in general, though I have a photo of one of the punks in the New York Dolls sporting a pacifier in the 1970s, see The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock, rev., ed., p. 169.

    — rb · Jul 13, 10:16 PM · #

  5. From the LA Weekly, hardly an old-fart publication: “The outpouring of mob violence was generated on the Internet, where for weeks before the March 7 incident, messages circulated on social-networking sites and message boards calling for the ‘rescue’ of the Queretaro plaza from the emos, who had unofficially designated it their public social space.” Golly, “emo” as a noun. Guess things change, language evolves, etc.

    When self-described old farts try too hard to play gotcha about other people supposedly overusing the lingo, they just look silly, don’t they.

    — LuckyJim · Jul 13, 10:49 PM · #

  6. Er, #2, me saying that I don’t see rich kids at my CC doesn’t mean I hate them. What do you teach—critical thinking?

    — Fred · Jul 13, 10:52 PM · #

  7. Two trends are at work:

    1. We have a disgruntled youth culture. That in itself isn’t new, but the emo phenomenon is sullen rather than rebellious, alienated rather than active. The Werther comparison is apt. Large numbers of educated young people either feel shut out in an ever more competitive world or, more alarmingly, don’t see productive inclusion in it as a rewarding goal (in relation to my academic career, I’m not sure I disagree). We shouldn’t take this lightly – as Bloom pointed out, it does say a lot about the nature of our society, and alienation can lead to ugly things. Napoleon is said to have read The Sorrows of Young Werther nine times. The Columbine shooters seem to have fit the pattern, too. Add to these problems overinvolved, stress-inducing parents and the socially manufactured prolonging of adolescence into the late 20s, and you can easily see in addition to that basic alienation the infantile accoutrements, the real or affected depression, and an adolscent emphasis on non-conformity lasting into or beyond the college years.

    2. We will have to see it in our classrooms because our friends in critical theory and the PC movement have among other activities sabotaged both the institutional and personal authority to maintain tasteful standards of dress and decorum. Let’s face it, in the current climate our cowardly administrators would much rather see emos “expressing themselves” than heroic civil rights lawyers suing them for trying to infringe upon the undoubtedly solid first amendment right to appear in Laurie Fendrich’s art class with exaggerated boobs and visible ass cracks.

    I wonder when junior faculty will start to “self-represent” in this way.

    — bored with academia · Jul 14, 04:29 AM · #

  8. Regarding B’s comment: B – You just look silly. Emo is indeed a noun and an adjective, though that really wasn’t the point of this article. Why rip the authour apart like that? Feeling a little emo yourself, I suppose.

    I have been studying adolescent emo subculture intentionally for over a year and was happy to see someone discuss it from the college perspective. Thank you.

    — A · Jul 14, 07:02 AM · #

  9. L.F.: Were you on a safari or at an outdoor cafe? The way you describe the young men you observed on the 3rd St. Promenade smacks of smugness and positional superiority. As long as you take that stance, you will experience difficulties understanding or relating to other humans who may express themselves differently. I suggest you take a risk and look beyond their fashion. Of course, that might necessitate actually interacting with the “natives” in a meaningful way rather than gazing at them. Bottom line: Get over it. Perhaps you should spend more time analyzing yourself than others.

    — Nauseated · Jul 14, 07:27 AM · #

  10. This speaks to the disturbing relationship contemporary teenagers have to fashion. Learning to express one’s intellectual opinions in a meaningful and thoughtful way, both in writing and oral communication, is an important part of the college experience. Students who are not disabused of their belief that their style of dress & their affectations are the sum total of their identity are being done a great disservice.

    It is not so much the excesses of fashion in and of themselves that I found bothersome when I was an undergrad, but rather, the insistence on the part of so many students to bring their affected identity into the classroom. So, you could count on the punk-rock student in the corner to generally disregard the rules of the class and continually rail against capitalism (regardless of the topic), just as the neo-hippy with faux-dreadlocks would never pass up an opportunity to express an ardent respect for the beliefs of other peoples, as if they were beyond criticism, on the basis of uninformed cultural relativism. This sort of posturing just holds students back from realizing the actual potential of their own minds.

    — crazy horse · Jul 14, 08:01 AM · #

  11. great title for the piece

    — nancy · Jul 14, 08:38 AM · #

  12. Much easier to construct an identity by cobbling it together from what you consume (low-rider jeans, baby doll tops, asymmetrical haircuts, tattoos done by other people, jewelry, black trenchcoats, varieties of rock concerts, posters, stickers, etc., etc.) than from what you do. Buying is much easier than doing. But it’s not restricted to youth, e.g., “I drive a Beamer Z4, live in Honeysuckle Terrace, and have all the Josh Groban CDs.”

    — Just Passing Through · Jul 14, 09:03 AM · #

  13. Pacifiers are associated with use of the drug Ecstasy — to counter the drug’s teeth clenching effect.

    — JJ · Jul 14, 09:10 AM · #

  14. Pacifiers were used by rap stars in a bygone era, the 1990s. Should you really be commenting on fashion when you don’t even know the basics here?

    — J · Jul 14, 11:03 PM · #

  15. Some sources in the library at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford say that babies used pacifiers well before the 1990s.

    — Mr. Wiki · Jul 15, 08:54 AM · #

  16. Regarding comments that pacifiers are obsolete in youth fashion/culture: I only finished my undergraduate degree four years ago, and I had both emo and raver acquaintances in college who most definitely still carried pacifiers. They were not worn in the same ludicrous jewelry fashion as in the ’90s, but more as a deliberate subtle reference to drug culture (and thank you to JJ for correctly pointing out that relationship).

    — E · Jul 17, 11:56 AM · #

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