There was a fraternity brother a few years ahead of me in college who earned a certain amount of notoriety for snorting vodka at a party. To the gleeful horror of all, he bent his head over a shot glass and actually aspirated the stuff.
“Gross!” everyone was said to have yelled.
“Yaughtfph!” the fellow was said to have spluttered, gasping and gagging. Thus the legend was born, and it lasted long after he had graduated. But no one was tempted to follow where the daring student from Alaska had gone. What he did was funny, but everyone knew it was depraved. Why snort vodka, anyway, when a person could just drink it?
Fast-forward to the present, and, thanks to the special genius of mankind, the young once again show that they will insist on outstripping those who came before them.
Now we have frat boys giving themselves painfully intoxicating vodka eyewashes (see Examiner, Washington, May 25). Apparently, some co-eds are even drenching feminine sanitary items with spirits so as to get a buzz without calories. From the private parts straight to the bloodstream with no intervening moment of civilization! The mind reels.
Yet, I fear, ’twas ever thus: Some portion of youth is always vulgar — and always pushing past boundaries that any sensible person recognizes as good and reasonable.
Thus in similar fashion we had the spectacle this week of the muscular buttocks of Venus Williams, fully revealed, as she thrashed her opponent on court at the French Open in a tennis dress of her own design. Part boudoir, part bordello, the lacy black frock with the hot-scarlet trim was as far from the sedate white cotton tennis dresses of yore as it’s possible to get. (Well, maybe; perhaps in 20 years everyone will play tennis wearing only gold lame thongs). Venus’ dress was startling enough, but it was her semitransparent skin-tone panties, captured from behind by a quick-witted AP photographer, that established a new aesthetic frontier.
Wait long enough, and what was once unthinkable becomes a blurb on the Drudge Report. In 1987, the travel writer Paul Theroux produced a bleak science fiction novel, “O-Zone,” that seemed to fall short of the ideal mix of plausible and unimaginable. Plenty of elements of its dark vision were believable enough. A nuclear detonation might conceivably lay waste to the Ozarks and render the region uninhabitable, for instance. It wasn’t futuristic to posit a society in which wealthy urbanites recoil in horror from gap-toothed rustics (we saw that among the press corps during the 2008 election).
No, the part of the novel that seemed wide of the mark was the way chic New Yorkers dressed: The women wore face masks and kept their bottoms bare. That’s just silly, I thought: No American woman, science fictional or otherwise, will ever stride about publicly with her backside exposed! Which just goes to show, I suppose, why Paul Theroux is a famous novelist … and I am not.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column
appears on Sunday and Thursday.
She can be contacted at
[email protected].
