June 30, 2003
Young lady, what are you wearing?
Generally, "countercultural" attire tends to annoy me. It's not because I think people ought to dress in any particular way; I think they ought to be free to dress however they like, actually. No, what tends to irritate me about countercultural fashion -- tattoos, multiple piercings, etc. -- is the assumption that clothing and fashion can be even vaguely rebellious anymore.
The Man long ago stopped insisting that young women and men wear prim, formal skirts and jacket-and-tie combos. Indeed, The Man is the one selling all of today's edgy Xtreme clothing to all tha rebel kidz. Come to think of it, The Man is making a hell of a tidy profit doing so, because The Man subcontracts the manufacturing out to Chinese prison-labor factories and sweatshops in the Phillipines that employ armless orphan children to stitch the clothing with their lips. So by all means, fight the power, dude -- rock that elite surferwear, get a post-ironic barcode tattooed to the base of your neck. The currency traders on Wall Street are cowering.
But anyway. You get the point. I'm a crank.
And as it turns out, I'm also wrong. Because there is one corner of the universe that still fulminates about loose morals and today's fashion: Christian colleges. A friend recently brought my attention to the web site of Liberty University, where one can peruse the Female Dress Code that was drafted by the Dean of Women. Using Powerpoint and a bunch of images that look like outtakes from an old Sears catalogue, the Dean outlines the rules of proper attire, including:
* Hair and clothing styles related to counterculture (as determined by the Deans' Review Committee) are not acceptable.
* Shoulder straps should be no less than two inches wide.
* Body piercing is not permitted. Earring and plugs are permitted in ears only.
* No tennis, athletic, sport shoes or flip-flops (of any style) for class.
* Wrap around dresses (or skirts) must be pinned at the top of the knee.
* No midriffs!
My favorite part is the fact that, according to this document, the Dean's Review Committee actually meets to determine precisely which hair and clothing styles are part of the "counterculture".
(Thanks to Ian Hannah for this one!)
Posted by Clive Thompson at June 30, 2003 06:11 PM
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OK, dude, as someone who actually HAS a barcode tattooed on the base of his neck (no, really, I do!), I take umbrage with your rage against the rage against the machine.
For starters, I think tattoo parlours and body peircing emporia are still vaguely independent of the Disney juggernaut. Yes, there actually are chains of tattoo parlours, but there are a fair number of independents too.
Secondly, many of the tattoo artists I have talked to are as jaded about the "counter-culture" as you are; one studio I heard about used to create a new "Taz-of-the-day" everyday, which was almost always ordered up by some dope who hadn't thought through their tattoo further than, "Hey. I want a tattoo."
I agree, though. Many of the punkiest people I know don't look the part, and wouldn't want to either.
Wow!! My god, I must be channeling my latent mutant psychic power, which never fully emerged during puberty.
And yes, of course, point well taken about the curmudgeonly-ness of my argument ... as I wrote, and as I reiterate here, I am a total crank. Heh.
Actually, I'm probably mostly just jealous of anyone who has the intestinal fortitude to withstand the pain of tattooing. I'd be crying for my mama two minutes into the process.
Jesus. No shorts? In Virginia? Why do all the garment fundamentalists live in such hot and/or humid climates? (Iraq, Virginia, etc.) One wonders if the scent of female sweat and the attendant pheromones are what really drives the Tailoring Taliban to demand such "modest" clothing on women.
I'm just dying to know what "David's Place" is...
http://www.liberty.edu/StudentAffairs/DeanOfWomen/index.cfm?PID=3000
I want to know how, given all the other rules of dress, they could even *tell* you had a discreet tattoo or a body piercing. What, they do naked full-body inspections to ferret out your labia ring?
I'm personally much more amused by the offering on the Dean of Men's main page, 'Getting help with pornography addiction.' Not too surprising it's an issue, is it?
Ahahhaah! I didn't even check the men's one ... that's superb!
Jesus, good point about how they'd find out about your crotch tattoo. Snitch lines installed in the communal showers?
It's called a metal detector. And they will be installed everywhere.
Why would you want to go to a College that didn't let you dress the way you want (of course, I suppose the same could be said about any company as well...)?
Yeah, I think that point about corporations is the real issue: Sometimes you don't have a choice. Though when you do choose a place with such tight control over stuff like your mode of dress, maybe it's because you're feeling scattered and want someone to beat that type of disciplinarian vibe into your head. Or maybe you're scared senseless by the outside world and want someone else to keep all the freaky people at bay.
I think your last sentence in the previous comment summed up the reason people would enter a fundamentalist institution like Liberty U. in the first place, Clive.
I once dated a woman who, at the ripe age of 20 had decided that she'd lost control of her life (too many parties, too much alcohol -- though we didn't date long enough for me to know how much she considered "too much," and she was a star athlete in her college, so it wasn't a debilitating problem), so she was baptised a member of the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) and was moving to Idaho to attend a Mormon College there...Her reasoning, in part, was that she wanted to be surrounded by people who shared her faith, and where there wouldn't be the abundance of temptations that exist in secular society. She wanted a place where her new faith could have a chance to grow without too many stresses around her.
I repected her decision, of course, but couldn't help but think that it was a drastic decision to make...
To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
When compared to the Stack, the Heap is a simple thing to understand. All the memory that's left over is "in the Heap" (excepting some special cases and some reserve). There is little structure, but in return for this freedom of movement you must create and destroy any boundaries you need. And it is always possible that the heap might simply not have enough space for you.
Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.
When the machine compiles your code, however, it does a little bit of translation. At run time, the computer sees nothing but 1s and 0s, which is all the computer ever sees: a continuous string of binary numbers that it can interpret in various ways.
To address this issue, we turn to the second place to put variables, which is called the Heap. If you think of the Stack as a high-rise apartment building somewhere, variables as tenets and each level building atop the one before it, then the Heap is the suburban sprawl, every citizen finding a space for herself, each lot a different size and locations that can't be readily predictable. For all the simplicity offered by the Stack, the Heap seems positively chaotic, but the reality is that each just obeys its own rules.
Note the new asterisks whenever we reference favoriteNumber, except for that new line right before the return.
The Stack is just what it sounds like: a tower of things that starts at the bottom and builds upward as it goes. In our case, the things in the stack are called "Stack Frames" or just "frames". We start with one stack frame at the very bottom, and we build up from there.
These secret identities serve a variety of purposes, and they help us to understand how variables work. In this lesson, we'll be writing a little less code than we've done in previous articles, but we'll be taking a detailed look at how variables live and work.
