What the F Page 8
Anthropologists have argued, at least for the phallus case, that it’s just one of many examples where “the act of male erection or copulation becomes symbolic of male dominance and can be used as a dominance gesture in totally non-sexual situations.”24 If that’s true, it’s hard to recognize in the modern world. I suspect you’ll probably agree that revealing an actual erect penis would probably be out of place in most situations where someone wants to exert dominance. You wouldn’t see that happening at the weigh-in before a mixed martial arts fight or in a presidential debate. Moreover, if you were a supervillain, you wouldn’t engender fear in the hearts of interlopers by lining the entrance to your lair with erect penis statues. So even if this is why phallic gestures came to have the function they now have, it doesn’t seem to relate to the real-world experiences of people in today’s developed world. And the phallic representation explanation really falls limp when it comes to anus- and clitoris-based iconicity. So at best, it’s a story about why some of these gestures originally came to have the functions they have—and not for why they continue to have them.
We do know that the various Bird analogs we’ve reviewed find their ostensible origins in things that are themselves taboo: genitalia, sex acts, and so on. So the best explanation relies again on the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle. Perhaps the same selection pressures that make words about these big four topics most suitable to become profane also take handshapes and body movements about the same topics and groom the best candidates into profane gestures.
But even if these historical accounts are correct in their broad strokes—even if there’s a nugget of iconicity in the origins of profane gestures—this still doesn’t tell us whether profane gestures remain iconic in the minds of modern language users. The proposed resemblances between fingers and penises (and so on) aren’t particularly hard to see—the Bird looks plausibly like a penis. But we should check ourselves to make sure we’re not just reading in iconicity where we want to see it. Geometrically speaking, there are in fact a lot of things in the world that, like the Bird and like a penis, are longer in one dimension than in the other two. Likewise, many things are circular. And we wouldn’t want to fall into the trap of labeling everything so proportioned as phallic or anal, respectively. So how can we tell—in the mind of a contemporary speaker of English, Russian, or Brazilian Portuguese—when a finger is a phallus and when a finger is just a finger? How can we know that we, along with anthropologists, historians, and indeed the people of ancient Rome, aren’t just being drawn in by a simplistic explanation, one that we might be biased toward based on what we know about linguistic and other cultural taboos? How do we know we’re not seeing what we want to see?
In essence, I raised this same question in the last chapter about four-letter words. Simply observing a pattern in a language doesn’t mean that the pattern also has an internal manifestation in the minds of individual people who use that language. We know that raising a middle finger predisposes you to interpret events more aggressively. But does it also activate thoughts about penises?
There’s only one way to answer this question, and that’s to flip people off and see if that makes them think about penises. An experiment! The first thing to decide is which version of the Bird you want to show people. As I mentioned above, there are at least two major variants, one where the middle finger erupts alone from the fist and another where it’s flanked by half-raised index and ring fingers. An Internet image search for “middle finger” reveals that—if online images are representative of real-world proportions—the large majority of Birds are of the former, lone-finger type. There might plausibly be differences in the detailed interpretation of these two variants—perhaps, as Desmond Morris suggests, the curled index and ring fingers represent testicles in the minds of gesture users. And yet, if people today interpret these gestures as iconic, the middle finger ought to represent the shaft of a penis in either case, so going with the more frequent variant seems like a reasonable approach.
The second big decision is how to detect when a person is thinking about penises. Cognitive psychologists have devised a lot of tools to detect whether a word or concept has been activated in someone’s mind—everything from measuring how long it takes that person to read a word to whether or not he or she can solve an anagram puzzle with the word’s letters jumbled up. One tool that seems particularly well suited for our task is word completion. Suppose you give people a few letters followed by some blanks, like p e n _ _ . The job of your participants is just to fill in the blanks to make an English word. This particular set of letters has several possible correct answers in English. There’s penis of course, but also penny, penal, pence, and penne. The question is whether people are more likely to recognize p e n _ _ as the beginning of penis when they’ve just seen the Bird. If so, that would suggest that the Bird activates the concept of a penis or the word penis in their minds.
There’s a final decision we’d have to make in designing an experiment like this: determining the control condition. In an experiment, you want to know whether something you do to people (say, flipping them the Bird or giving them an experimental drug) has an effect. But that effect has to be measured by comparison to something else. In a pharmaceutical experiment, the control is usually a placebo—a pill, for instance, that’s identical to the one that delivers the drug, except that it’s missing the experimental compound. What should the control be in a middle finger experiment?
If the control were just nothing—that is, if people completed the anagram task after seeing the Bird in one condition and after seeing nothing in the control condition—then we wouldn’t know if increased penis spotting was due to the Bird in particular or to gestures in general. So a first attempt at a reasonable control condition might be to show people a gesture that doesn’t have any plausible association with penises. Like maybe the A-OK.
As it happens, I ran this experiment. I recruited two hundred people to perform a word-completion and gesture-memory task. They all saw the p e n _ _ prompt after seeing a still image of a gesture—either A-OK or the Bird. And I counted how many people in each condition responded with penis and how many generated another response, like penny or penal. You can see what I found on the next page. People who saw the Bird were statistically no more likely to answer penis than those who first saw A-OK.c
There’s no significant difference between the conditions, as determined by a Fisher’s exact test.
Now, you could reasonably object that I didn’t see any difference because the technique simply doesn’t work. Maybe I’m bad at science in any of a hundred ways that could have produced a null result. To alleviate this concern, I actually built something into the experiment known as a “manipulation check,” intended just to determine whether people’s word-blank-filling tendencies could be pushed around using gesture. Here’s how it worked. Everyone who answered the p e n _ _ prompt also saw another prompt, p e a _ _, which followed a different pair of gestures. The first was a Peace gesture. And the second was a Thumbs-Down. Overall, slightly less than half of people completed the word p e a _ _ as peace. Other popular words to type were pearl, peach, and pears. But critically, as you can see on the next page, people who first saw the Peace gesture were more than twice as likely to type in peace as people who saw the Thumbs-Down.d This successful manipulation check means that the technique works in general. Seeing a gesture can make you think about a word, as measured by how you complete a prompt. So if the Bird indeed makes people think about penises, it ought to have led to more penis responses to the prompt. That it didn’t suggests that perhaps it doesn’t.
A Fisher’s exact test reveals a very strong significant effect of gesture on word completion response, p < 0.00001.
The Bird doesn’t lead to significantly more penis responses.
The Peace gesture leads to increased peace responses.
Still, you could have other concerns about this result. Here’s an alternative account of why the Bird would have no significant ef
fect, which is what we observed. Maybe everyone who participated had exactly the same idea of what p e n _ _ was trying to get at—penis. But suppose that in the population, a certain proportion of people simply don’t want to type penis during an experiment. If this hesitant group comprises 35 percent of the population, that would produce precisely the pattern we saw: two-thirds of people wrote penis, regardless of the gesture they previously saw, and one third refused to. How do we know that this isn’t what was going on? The answer, as it usually is, is another experiment.
We need a way to determine whether a gesture can get people to think about penises. So why not use a gesture that’s definitely about penises, like the Finger-Bang gesture, in which the index finger of one hand moves inside a loop created by the index and thumb of the other hand?
If this doesn’t pump up people’s penis responses to the p e n _ _ prompt, then there’s clearly something wrong with the method. Conversely, if Finger-Bang works where the Bird doesn’t, that suggests that the Bird simply doesn’t lead people to think strongly about penises. So I ran the same experiment as before, but with two changes. First, people saw one of three gestures before p e n _ _ . They could see A-OK or the Bird, as before, or they could see Finger-Bang. And second, I ran the study with more participants—bumping it up to 240—because with participants divided among three rather than two conditions, I wanted to make sure enough people saw each gesture. Two interesting things happened.
First, there was still no significant effect of the Bird. As you can see below if you look at the two leftmost bars, there were slightly more penis responses after the Bird, but the difference wasn’t statistically reliable. This replicates the finding from the first experiment. Second, and this is the new thing, Finger-Bang did significantly increase penis responses, by about 20 percent.e
A two-by-three chi-squared test revealed a significant relation (p < 0.01), and the pairwise difference between Finger-Bang and each other condition was significant by Fisher’s exact test (both ps < 0.05).
The Bird doesn’t lead to increased penis responses, but Finger-Bang does.
The interpretation is pretty clear. This technique is sensitive enough to detect when gestures make people think about words or concepts. And although Finger-Bang makes people think about penises, the Bird does not. In its ancient history, the Bird may have originated as an iconic representation of a penis. But that association appears to have died off.
# $ % !
So does this mean that gestures like the Bird are arbitrary? Or are they iconic? In a sense they’re arbitrary. When you look at the simple mapping between form and meaning, nothing about a middle finger looks like the concept it conveys—roughly, in words, Fuck you. And an extended middle finger doesn’t convey this notion any better or worse than any of the other variants we see across the world. So, unlike cock-a-doodle-doo, there isn’t a resounding similarity among the Bird equivalents across the globe. And as we saw from the experiment results, seeing the Bird doesn’t appear to lead people to think about the word penis or about penises in general.
But at the same time, there’s a way in which these gestures are less than entirely arbitrary. Although they don’t look like what they mean, they often look like something else on which that meaning is based. Like a penis. Or other things. But usually a penis. Words denoting genitals and bodily functions often come to have profane functions as well (the Holy, Fucking, Shit, Nigger Principle at work). And similarly, gestures that historically derive from imagistic representations of genitals and their functions take on profane uses as well. In a way, that makes them less arbitrary. They look the way they do not by chance but by design. The fingers, the fist, and the palm were selected to represent things that they look like. And gestures that denote those things that they look like are recruited to perform profane functions. Their ultimate use is several degrees removed from where they originated. But it’s not random.
Now, most of the profane gestures we’ve looked at aren’t the most transparently iconic signs imaginable. They require a little interpretation, and the fact that they vary across cultures speaks to the importance of cultural knowledge. They’re subject to conventions. Even assuming that the Thumbs-Up and the Bird are equally iconic, they have different conventional meanings across cultures. So the story is a little more complicated than merely asking whether a gesture (or word) is iconic or arbitrary. Even if it’s iconic, we also have to know how transparent it is. Some gestures might be so transparently iconic that anyone in the world, even without specific knowledge of the language and culture that they derive from, could still figure out what they mean. Other gestures might require extensive familiarity with cultural conventions that users of that gesture are party to.
And when we dig a little deeper into profane gesturing, it’s clear that there exist other gestures that are far more transparently iconic than the Bird, the Fig, and their ilk. Consider, just for the sake of illustration, gestures representing sexual intercourse. We’ve already seen the Finger-Bang gesture, where one extended finger (often the index or middle finger) of one hand moves in and out of a circle formed by the other hand (usually the thumb and index finger but occasionally the whole fist). Another is a gesture I haven’t seen described in print, but let’s call it the Fist-Thrust. It uses a fist, usually palm down, pumping away from the body and then back toward it repeatedly. And then there’s the Pelvic-Thrust, where both elbows are bent and pump backward past the hips while the pelvis thrusts forward. And of course there are others. Each of these is more transparently iconic than the Bird. There’s more detailed shape information about more of the scene. That makes them easier to interpret independently of convention. Moreover, there’s more room for individual variation without compromising the message. With the Finger-Bang, the dynamics of the finger entering the circle formed by the other hand can, if the gesturer so desires, convey details about the dynamics of the represented sex act.
I’ll leave this line of argumentation here, because I think the point is probably made. Profane gestures like these, gestures at the most transparent end of the spectrum, look far more like what they’re meant to denote than the Bird does. And not surprisingly, we have limited experimental evidence, at least for Finger-Bang, that they activate words for the represented genitalia in the minds of language users. You can think of iconic gestures like these as the manual analogs of spoken onomatopoeia. Just as onomatopoeic words of spoken languages imitate sounds, so gestures can imitate actions, as these do.
And this easy activation in the mind of the observer may be a communicative edge that explains why we have vulgar gestures in the first place and why they tend to be iconic. Profane words, as we’ve seen, generally don’t resemble what they mean. Profane gestures, by contrast, often do. This makes them more direct, more evocative triggers for the concepts they convey than words often are.
To sum up what this tour of profane gestures has revealed, we now know that the profane gestures of the world vary and that they find their origins in areas like sex and bodily functions that are also, not coincidentally, the sources of taboo words. Profane gestures are largely more iconic (to different degrees) and more transparently so (in different ways) than typical words of a spoken language, and this can give them a leg up in directly activating what they refer to.
But we’ve only witnessed the beginning of the hands’ power to offend. Consider that there exist entire languages that are articulated, like gesture, via visible movements of the hands, arms, torso, head, and face. These signed languages are the more sophisticated, more articulate siblings of the gestures we’re familiar with. Gestures are isolated communicative bits, which limits what they can communicate. You can use a gesture (for instance, many of those discussed in this chapter) to start a fight, but gestures alone won’t allow you to talk yourself out of a fight by explaining how your anger-management issues stem from repressed feelings of low self-worth. You can use a gesture at a physics convention to summon someone over, but you can’t use gesture al
one to make advances on that person by showing off your quantum mechanics chops. Gestures are expressively impoverished compared with the words of fully formed languages.
So we should probably expect signed languages—which harbor all the expressive potential representative of full human languages in the visual modality—to set the standard for manual obscenity. But in addition, signed languages hold the key to why gestures are so much more iconic than words are. Gestures differ from words in several ways. The first is the modality: words create a predominantly auditory signal, but gestures are mostly visual. Maybe vision and movements of the body are better suited for iconicity than sound is. But there’s another possible factor at play. Words are different from gestures because they’re an integrated part of a communication system that allows them to be combined to express any thought. Signed languages can uniquely tell us whether the increased iconicity of profane (and other) gestures has to do with their visual nature or whether words are just more arbitrary as a consequence of being the building blocks of a systematic language.
# $ % !
Millions of people around the world communicate primarily using a signed language, of which there are hundreds. Most signers are deaf or hearing impaired, but some hearing people—usually relatives, friends, or associates of deaf people—also sign. Signed languages share one big thing with gestures: both deploy visible movements of the hands, arms, torso, and face. But in most other ways—their structure, their complexity, their expressiveness—there’s no comparison. Signed languages are fully functioning languages. Like the spoken languages you’re likely more familiar with, they place strict constraints on how to articulate words,25 and they have inviolable, meaningful, and abstract rules of grammar.26 Let me give you some examples.