I am 27 years old, young still by most accounts, though when I’m standing in front of my students at Western Carolina University, the chasm between myself and “them” seems like an unfathomable canyon - so deep and wide I cannot see to the bottom or the other side.

On the surface, the difference seems obvious. At work, I dress like a professional, at least in the collegiate sense of the word. I shave my legs. A lot of my clothes are from the Gap and Banana Republic. My hair is brushed, and, on good days, I wear lip gloss and perfume. My costume designer for my role as the young college professor did a great job.

Likewise, my students seem to do their best to fit their parts as well. I mean, college students, unless they’re going to a school that costs more per semester than my house, aren’t supposed to look professional. They are supposed to look comfortable, even slack, in the I’m-so-busy-studying/partying-I-don’t-care-what-I-wear kind of way. Add to this the need, the inherent necessity, of looking like their favorite actors and musicians - the way their parents wouldn’t let them look in high school - and you have my typical class, staring at me from behind their uncomfortable desk-chairs and defining the look of the new decade even if they don’t know it.

What I see is shocking, even though I am only eight or nine years their senior. Instead of the sound of crackling bubble gum or crumpling paper that I thought I would hear as a teacher, I hear instead the sound of a dozen or so tongue piercings, which the students like to knock annoyingly against their front teeth. “Click. Click. Click.” Other piercings are standard fare as well - eyebrows, belly buttons, noses, as well as regions only bragged about in class. Last semester I let a student do a paper on body piercings, and when she signed up for the second part of my writing class this semester, she immediately told me that as a result of her paper she had her belly button pierced again. O-kaaaaaaaay. Not exactly what I expected students to get from my class, but what the hell.

Tattoos also mark close to half the students in my classes. My female students often happily show me their recent acquisitions on their ankles, shoulders, and, most popularly, on the smalls of their backs. Usually, their proud displays are followed by a fierce whisper loud enough for the class to hear, “My Mother would KILL me if she knew!” Guys tend to go for the arm region and select as their material an odd array from Disney cartoon characters to Celtic art, though the strong winner for the men is the Greek letters of their fraternities.

My biggest surprise concerning students’ self-expression came a year or so ago when one of my best writers, a fairly strait-laced guy who had aspirations to become a FBI agent, appeared in class at the end of his fraternity initiation with the letters for his frat branded onto his bicep. I know my mouth dropped open when he pulled up his sleeve. I nodded with concerned attentiveness as he told me how it didn’t really hurt and how he was putting Neosporin on it, but I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a slow “moo.”

I don’t mean for this to sound like one of those articles that laments the degeneration of American youth. Neither do I want this to come across as a somewhat bewildered and bemused profile of “those crazy kids.” When I was 20, I pierced my nose. I explored the murkiest depths of the socially rebellious underworld with a fervor befitting a young woman from a Southern Baptist, small town upbringing. I teased my hair into a B-52 beehive and raved with the best of them. I was one of the tragically hip, who used freak-style fashion to make a statement.

Instead, I think my sense of confusion - my sense of feeling old - comes not so much from the way my students look, but the way my students think. When I was still in college, looking like a freak meant something. Generally speaking, people with body piercings and tattoos were outside of the box. To me these were outside symbols of an inward state of, shall I say, grace. Yes, they did in a sense brand you as one of the herd, but it was the outcast herd, the “alternative” to the mainstream cattle drive. But the people I knew in college who rejected standard dress also rejected the status quo; they were social reformers, even anarchists. At some point in the 90s, this alternative style became the standard way for young people to look, though the philosophical implications didn’t come as part of the package.

In fact, despite the overall radical appearance of my students, the majority is at heart quite conservative. Most of them voted for Bush. Many have “we still pray” stickers on their cars. While they endorse body art, the idea of a woman’s hairy armpits is revolting to them. Furthermore, according to their argumentative research papers, most support traditional right-wing stances on topics such as abortion, gun control, welfare, and the Confederate flag. Though they certainly don’t look like it, many could have worked on the campaign for Pat Bucannan.

I tell myself this is the expected backlash against the Clinton administration and that, since young people have to rebel against their environment, they are striking out against the popular liberal agenda of the ’90s. Perhaps, to them, Bush represents a different way of thinking and appears as an alternative. Maybe my generation went so far left that young people now are coming in from the right.

Sometimes I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe, like a mirror world from an old science fiction film. Everything looks a bit backward and it’s confusing. My friends from college and I have retired our nose rings and downplay other identifiers that mark us as radicals. But we are. Since looking like a freak no longer means thinking like a freak, maybe we’ll have to come up with a secret handshake or peculiar whistle. I ask my students to ponder this question of fashion and philosophy, and I can hear their brains working. Click. Click. Click.

(Esther Godfrey teaches English at WCU in Cullowhee. She can be reached at egodfrey@wcu.edu)

 

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