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> I awkwardly asked the one with the pierced eyebrow whether her piercing had a “meaning.” She smirked a little. “Self-expression,” she said. “But what does it express?” I asked, entirely in earnest. She repeated herself very slowly, as if to a total doofus, “Self. Expression.”
> I thought that I’d eventually understand what she meant, but even now I’m not sure I do.
There's a strong smell of anti-intellectualism here.
If the author truly doesn't understand the meaning of a pierced eyebrow, then the logical first course of action would be to assign no meaning to a pierced eyebrow and see where that takes them.
I.e., a pierced eyebrow gets added to the set of socially meaningless decisions and physical attributes: which hand you scratch your nose with, the exact curvature of your ballcap, which direction your belt goes, and so forth.
Armed with this new meaninglessness, the author can eat the cost of the pain of an eyebrow piercing and test out its ostensible meaninglessness.
Cue the article about the subjective experience of receiving different treatment based on said piercing, and the emotions that follow.
Thus, we return to the girl who responded "self-expression" as a short hand for noticing the way pierced-eyebrow people interacted and desiring the subjective experience of being part of that group (plus perhaps the visceral sensations of getting a piercing, touching it, looking at it in the mirror, etc.).
I'm not sure this needs an entire horse-and-buggy trip through 19th-century Europe to comprehend...
> If the author truly doesn't understand the meaning of a pierced eyebrow, then the logical first course of action would be to assign no meaning to a pierced eyebrow and see where that takes them.
If you see something you don't understand meaning of, just think that it actually doesn't have any meaning, got you. By the way, this will take you nowhere because if something has no meaning then that's the end of the story, no more investigation is needed or even possible.
“…assign no meaning to a pierced eyebrow…”
Excellent. And an alternative is to say a piercing does not have symbolic meaning, but performative meaning.
For example, maybe a nose piercing keeps a person from picking their nose.
"Why do policemen have metal buttons on the sleeves of their uniforms? So that they won't wipe their noses with the sleeves. Why are those buttons so shiny? Because they wipe anyhow."
How sad to get to write for the New Yorker only to lead off by putting down some teenager.
The size of the chip on his shoulder is really remarkable.
Agreed. Read all the way through and let's just say he doubles down. May he find joy in life.
He was 16 at the time.
When he wrote this article?
Well, Self. Expression. I guess.