Dear Mom and Dad: It’s 7 a.m., and your 18-year-old son is scouring the laundry basket, desperately looking for a clean “wife-beater.”
Shocked? Let us explain. A “wife-beater” is, in teenage parlance, an old-fashioned, sleeveless undershirt.
But it’s not the shirts themselves that are causing a stir. Instead, it’s the audacious, politically incorrect name the under-30 crowd has given the shirts.
For the unhip among us, the “wife-beater” shirt isn’t some nouveau version of a tank top. It’s the ribbed undershirt once worn only by granddads and Stanley Kowalski in “A Streetcar Named Desire.”
“If you’re wearing one, kids will say, `Oh, I see you’ve got your wife-beater on,’ ” said Christopher Reilly, 17, a senior at Winter Park High School in Winter Park, Fla.
A number of slang experts across the country had never heard of the term, but kids know where it comes from.
“It’s a white-trash thing,” said one Orlando teen. The term “wife-beaters,” they say, is a mockery of the men in the news or on TV shows such as “Cops,” the lowlifes who get home from work, get drunk and then beat up their wives or girlfriends.
“Wife-beaters,” said Jeremy Smith, 22, a student at the University of Central Florida, “are associated with a blue-collar, factory worker, tire-changing kind of person.”
Everyone, it seems, under the age of 30 knows the meaning of the term.
“Why is it called a wife-beater?” repeated Jamie Zaccardo, co-owner of Venus & Mars, a clothing store in Orlando that caters to the young, hip crowd. “It’s named after the beer-belly drinking men who beat their wives.”
Although most teens use the term as a joke, critics are uneasy with the slang.
“By using the word `wife-beater,’ it becomes a public way and a fashionable way of trivializing violence against women,” said Hollan Pugh, director of Safehouse of Seminole, an Orlando-area women’s shelter. “To some people it might seem benign, but to us it seems pretty alarming. When you trivialize it, it desensitizes people, particularly of that age group, to violence against women.”
Pugh recognizes that many teens use the term in a joking manner, but she’s still troubled.
“Although the kids say it came from trailer trash, and they use it as a joke, it’s important to remember that violence against women doesn’t just happen in trailers,” Pugh said.
The term is shocking, but it’s not new. It has been circulating amid the high-school and college crowd for several years.
But before you subject a whole generation to a round of sensitivity training, take a deep breath. Linguists and sociolinguists (who study society and language) say that these young men are not being as politically incorrect as most of us think.
“Sure, it’s an outrageous term,” said Pamela Munro, a linguistics professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and expert in college slang. “But I think simply drawing attention to (violence against women) shows that they’re politically aware. They’re acknowledging that this is crummy behavior.
“I would draw a real contrast between that (`wife-beater’) and calling a boom box `a ghetto blaster.’ Calling this T-shirt something that they only associate with a redneck type of person demonstrates that they recognize this is unacceptable behavior,” Munro said.
In the coming months, expect to see more of these so-called “wife-beaters.”
New York designers are starting to show tank tops in their lines, and even Jamie Zaccardo’s suppliers write “wife-beater shirts” on the invoices they send to her at Venus & Mars.
Zaccardo says the shirts are most popular with men in their 20s who are fans of rockabilly music, the ’50s music that fused rock ‘n’ roll with a country sound.
“Rockabillies wear the shirts more than anybody,” said Zaccardo. “That’s a big part of the look. They’ll wear a wife-beater with blue jeans rolled up with a big cuff, and they might wear a bowling shirt on top over the wife-beater.”
The trend also can be attributed to the swing movement, which has sent young people to vintage clothing stores in search of clothes from the ’40s and ’50s.
“I think it’s sort of that Fonzie look,” said Tom Kusnegzky of Twisted Palms, a men’s retro clothing store in Orlando. “It’s sort of this retro movement. What’s hot are no longer clothes from the ’70s. They’re now reaching back to the ’40s and ’50s.”
Perhaps the greater question is this: Why would someone want to look like a Stanley Kowalski or a Fonzie? That, said sociolinguist Leslie Beebe, is easy. For men, there’s a certain machismo in behaving like blue-collar men, either affecting a blue-collar accent or dressing like a blue-collar type.
But it is society’s reaction to the “wife-beater” term that amuses teens, said Beebe, who teaches about language and society at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York City.
“It’s a classist remark; it’s an elitist remark,” Beebe said. “They’re looking down on people, and yet, at the same time, they seem to be kind of laughing at the working class and at themselves.”
Take an incident that occurred at the University of Florida. During a “gender awareness program” run by the university’s housing department, some male residents from Tolbert Hall were asked to participate with female residents of East Hall.
When the men showed up for the presentation, all were wearing “wife-beaters.” And how did the women react? “First their mouths dropped open, but then they started giggling,” said Tolbert resident Paul Wollner, 19, a sophomore from Altamonte Springs. Soon, the women ran for their cameras and took pictures of the guys wearing their wife-beaters.
It was a statement of sorts. Beebe believes the young men were slyly tweaking the noses of authorities.
“It’s embarrassing for guys to go to this kind of situation,” Beebe said. “They’re expected to go in these proper clothes and sit at attention while they’re getting lectured on how to behave. So they wear these clothes. There’s a lot of rebellion in a very nice way.”
