On Language: Big House Edition
Last week Mike Tyson helped prison language continue its journey into the American mainstream. But he's just scratching the surface.
by Matt Labash
02/06/2002 12:01:00 AM
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Matt Labash, senior writer
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WHEN MIKE TYSON recently mounted a stage at the Hudson Theater for his pre-fight press conference, started a melee with Lennox Lewis's entourage, then munched a hunk out of Lewis's thigh, the media called Tyson everything from a cretin to a cannibal. But they failed to label Tyson a cliche. For in one of the more underreported details of that day, after a journalist yelled out to Tyson that he belonged in a straitjacket, Tyson gathered himself, began massaging his crotch, then called the male journalist a "white bitch" before promising him that "I'm gonna f--- you 'til you love me."
Presumptuous though it may be, I think I speak for most white bitches when I say that if Iron Mike decided to [take] us until we loved him, he would indeed be at it for a very long time. Call us old-fashioned. But we like a little romance. If Tyson were serious about courting this journalist, he should've invited him over to listen to some records, or at the very least complimented him on his really sharp sweater.
But of course, this was no storybook romance. As any prison psychologist will tell you, making someone your "bitch" is not about love, or even lust, it's about brute intimidation. It's the kind of courtship that Tyson is likely all too familiar with as a creature of the yard (arrested 38 times by the age of 13, his lengthiest prison hitch was the three years he served for raping Desiree Washington at the
Miss Black America Pageant). For Tyson to speak this way, however, is a tad disappointing, since his threat was such a honking cliche of a faux-tough guy thing to say.
According to my vast network of sources in correctional facilities--many of them avid Weekly Standard readers--overtly threatening to make a male rival your "bitch" is the mark of an amateur, an anachronistic threat that instills about as much fear as boasting that you are a "mean motorscooter," or that you're about to serve up a "knuckle sandwich." It's the fastest way to signal a hardened con that you are a suburban workadaddy doofus who watches too much "Law and Order."
As if that isn't bad enough, it is also the surest way to telegraph that you are a subscriber to the most irksome esthetic to come down the cultural pike since wraparound belts: that of prison chic. You see it everywhere. There are the urban lofts that feature stainless steel Neo-Comby toilet-sink-storage cabinet combos (modeled after prison bathroom facilities, which refrain from using porcelain fixtures since they can be shattered and the shards employed as weapons). Then there's faux-prison garb, so popular amongst designers, teenagers, and gangster rappers that the Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution actually has its inmates manufacturing commercial clothing apparel, from work jeans to yard coats, with buttons that contain the slogan: "Made on the inside, to be worn on the outside."
The most ubiquitous and cloying tic, however, is the all-bitch-speak, all-the-time. It's been run into the ground by everyone from sitcom gag-writers to morning zoo jocks. When a gay Village Voice writer recently took Eminem to task for his homophobic rants, he didn't want to get the rapper censured by GLAAD, rather, he wanted Eminem "to be my bitch." And when Ion Storm, the video game company, marketed their new offering, their ad promised that John Romero, the company's founder, "is going to make you his bitch."
Val:Y
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