Coarsening of Our Culture and the Middle Finger #162

There has always been name calling and taunting and bullying, but I thought “the finger” was a recent insult. I figured it started with the youth protesting the Viet Nam war and the general dissatisfaction with the old “squares” who were running the country in the 1960s. 

The first time I saw the bird being flipped was in Bloomington in the early 1970s and  it was the height of obscenity. When I showed them what I saw and asked what it was my parents wouldn't even tell me. I didn’t have to wash my mouth out with soap, but did have to scrub my hands. 

Then in the late 1980s, as the Dean of Students in the high school, it was not uncommon for students to voice their displeasure by flashing that sign. Students defended their retaliatory actions by saying, “They flicked me off.” I eventually stopped correcting them on the difference between flipping and flicking…. 

However, the insult is much older. According to the New York Times, the Greek playwright,  Aristaphones, has a character flip the bird, flick someone off, or otherwise give them the finger.  This is the first instance of this particular insult and profanity. Aristaphones was not afraid to work blue. In Lysisitrata the plot is that the women of Greece go on a “sex strike” until their husbands decide to end the war. The play was a little dirty without being obscene. And that was 2500 years ago. 

But to the present day, the “bird” is relatively common, but still obscene in some quarters. However, with the coarsening of our culture I believe it is just a matter of time before a national political figure gives the “bird” to a reporter they don’t like. And that would be obscene.