Submission chic

National Review, March 9, 1998 by Richard Brookhsier

Mr. Brookhiser is an NR senior editor.

NEW York's most highly charged consensual activity is talking. When Arguing the World, the documentary about four New York intellectuals, was showing in the West Village, the line stretched halfway down the block. The previous movie in the same theater had been O Amor Natural, a film about Brazilian erotic poetry; when I saw it I shared the dark flickering room with about six people.

But the mating game gets played out here too in all its variations. One of its recently fashionable accouterments is body piercing.

Piercings -- nose-, lip-, eyebrowrings; multiple rings curling along the ear's upper rim like the spine of a cheap notebook -- have been sported for years by the obviously feral, those who showed up late for the sack of Rome. I looked twice when they began appearing on the innocent. A waitress at a restaurant in my neighborhood sports a nosering. She is not a beautiful girl. She doesn't have to be. She has a freshness she will never have again, and whose value she does not realize. Her unconsciousness is part of the freshness. She is at the age where vice itself loses half its evil by losing all its routine. But there, stapled right on the bull's-eye, is her nosering, like a little keychain, or an old-fashioned pullchain on a watercloset. Questions crowd the mind: Does it get cold in the winter? Does it set off metal detectors? Why would she wear such an ugly thing? I know the obvious answers to the last: 1) like most twenty-year-olds, she thinks she is immortal (I'll always have skin like flower petals; why not stick some metal through it?) and 2) like most twenty-year-olds, or indeed people, she has no taste.

But there is also a taste that leads her on: submission chic. It takes people to places a lot wilder than where she is. In the locker room of my gym, a man, also young, also not otherwise obviously abnormal, revealed as he changed a collection of piercings in his navel, nipples, and, most horribly, his Clinton. The reaction of my fellow bodybuilders -- four mesomorphs seated on the locker-room bench like the Budweiser frogs -- was agreeably reactionary. "Whoa!" they bellowed. "That musta hurt!" He smiled politely -- he had dived deep, he had trafficked for strange webs with Eastern merchants --and kept dressing.

People pierce for many reasons. Some personalities are so fragile that they do it as self-definition. A bolt marks an edge. Feeling it confirms: This is me, beyond must be not me. Normal people make mental notes; these people make metal notes. For most, it has to be read as a theoretical sign of submission. Tagging is what travelers do to luggage, or scientists do to manatees. If you are tagged, you have submitted, if only to yourself.

There is a lot of submitting going on. A bar on 23rd Street called La Nouvelle Justine has been much written about. Patrons get spanked, have drinks thrown in their faces, get led around on leashes. I have no first-hand testimony to offer. Even though these meek souls want to do it, indeed pay for the privilege -- to get a drink thrown in your face will run you twenty dollars -- it would be wrong to go there as a gawker. It is true that I have been writing about campaigning politicians since the Carter Administration, but they humiliate themselves unintentionally. Certain performances must not be looked at, out of respect for the men and women enacting them, however much they do to forfeit that respect.

It is getting harder to avert one's eyes. A few seasons before he died Gianni Versace brought out a collection modeled on the fashions of dominatrices. My liberal wife, seeing it in the Times, muttered, "I'm joining the Religious Right." More recently, Bass Ale took out a full-page ad in the New York Observer, the weekly paper I write for, showing a man licking a stiletto-heeled boot. (The ad also ran on some bus stations and phone booths.) Conceivably the people at Bass thought that after looking at a post-boot tongue you would hanker for a tall cool one. But the more likely reason is that they were hitchhiking on submission chic. The average Bass drinker will not be induced by the ad to seek out the next size 71/2. But bright, well-paid folk at the agency figured the image would arouse some kind of positive response.

We live in a world of hierarchies: because it recalls our childhoods, when the power and size of our parents was both threatening and comforting; because every day, as adults, we meet people who are stronger, wiser, or better than we are (as well as people who are weaker, dumber, or worse); and because, when we consider the sexes, men and women differ, and in their endless dogfight -- or, if you prefer, pas de deux -- now one, now the other has the upper hand. Hierarchy is natural.

Officially we deny it. All men are created equivalent is our declaration of interdependence. New York is the capital of denial; Washington, D.C., may write the laws, we walk the walk. Horace knew better: Drive nature out with a pitchfork, she will still come hurrying back. When nature returns, it will be in its most primitive, or barbaric forms: beating, prostrating, getting tagged.