Headcase - Freud and baggy pants

Almost 25 years ago, when I was a (young, idealistic) contract writer at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution Sunday Magazine, I was given the go-ahead on a groundbreaking piece: a photo essay on Atlanta drag queens.

The conservative paper had never done such an outré story, but the magazine was then largely staffed by former editors and writers from Texas Monthly, about 20 light-years ahead of the AJC. After I spent weeks hanging out with four or five drag queens, the day arrived for them to get photographed in the AJC studio.

Three of them parked downtown, and, in their usual show garb, set out to walk the several blocks to the paper’s offices. Granted, they’d be quite a spectacle today, too, but they probably wouldn’t be detained briefly by the police the way they were then. Exactly why a cop stopped and questioned them, we never figured out. In most of America, cross-dressing, long against the law, was legal by then. We joked about the “fashion police.”

That memory came to mind when I read about Atlanta City Council’s most recent exercise in absurdism: the serious consideration of a new public-indecency law that would outlaw the popular fashion of wearing your pants so low your underwear shows. For young men, this usually means displaying boxer shorts – often, the entire butt, like a bird showing off his brightly colored tail feathers.

For women it means showing off a thong, probably the oddest garment ever invented, no matter which sex is wearing it. How you eroticize something that continually flosses somebody’s crack is confounding (to some of us). Well, sort of.

What do the drag queens and the butt-flashing-and-flossing boys and girls have in common? Both exaggerate the erotic. I’ve read about 2 zillion words on the proposed Atlanta ordinance, and I’ve yet to read a single piece where the reporter asked someone: “Hey, why are you walking around showing your ass all the time?”

It’s about sex, of course, but it’s specifically about an interesting cultural shift in erotic focus to the butt. Just Google “heterosexual anal sex” if you want to learn how popular the act has become. Both New York and Details magazines recently published stories about the trend. I’m not saying every guy who sags his pants wants to be sodomized. I’m just saying the popularity of the fashion coincides with a surge in the practice of anal sex and signifies the increased eroticizing of the booty.

Why that is, I have no certain idea (although I have a friend at Emory who is researching the subject in gay men). Of course, we can always turn to Freud for a likely explanation. This is from his 1908 essay, “Character and Anal Erotism”:

“An invitation to a caress of the anal zone is still used today, as it was in ancient times, to express defiance or defiant scorn, and thus in reality signifies an act of tenderness that has been overtaken by repression.”

In plain English, I think Dr. Freud is saying: Mooning strangers really means you want love.

Considering that the fashion originated in prison, where men’s belts are confiscated, it’s easy to buy Freud’s notion that showing your ass is a hostile gesture. (Indeed, “showing your ass” means acting stupid.) Since more than 10 percent of black men are incarcerated, it’s not surprising that the fashion belongs mainly to the African-American community, although white boys are adopting the look, too.

Still, I think the look is an extreme expression of popular anality. Ubiquitous low-rise jeans on men and women of all colors often provide an unsolicited glimpse of crack. Levi Strauss makes a pair of jeans called “the offender,” because they fit so low. There’s nothing repressed in that name. Will City Council also ask police to arrest men and women in $300 low-rise jeans? Will the police be able to do this and maintain a straight face?

Of course, this is all generational, too. While it may be new to so powerfully eroticize the butt, the young have always used erotic fashion to distance themselves from their parents’ generation. Can you say “miniskirt”? How about the topless bathing suit? And then there was fluorescent spandex that still occasionally ruins the view in the gym. Actually, there are dozens of such fashion crimes, and old fogies have always characterized them as harbingers of a disorderly, squandered adulthood.

That anyone takes the proposed new law seriously is, like so much else happening in America, a significant departure from our history. The more conservative we become, the more the state tries to regulate our bodies. Please get a life, people.

Cliff Bostock holds a Ph.D. in depth psychology. For information on his private practice, go to www.cliffbostock.com.