Once, when I was working as a hostess at an nightclub with a totally unnecessary velvet rope, Farouk, a waiter asked me: what's the freakiest thing you've ever done? It was 2002 and I was new to the word freaky. I thought he was going to share a story about dressing up like a vampire and trying to steal blood from the local hospital. In that case, I was all ears.
What a wonderful thing that this guy who didn't seem to know how to talk to women without hitting on them was finally opening up about his awkward years. So I answered honestly, "I pretended I was British for my entire junior year of high school." It didn't register with him.
"No," he said. "Freaky!"
"You mean like go to a psychiatrist?" I asked. Strike two.
But before I could try again he shared his freakiest moment -- which was really all he wanted to do in the first place: "Once I got really drunk on shots of Patron and had sex with a girl I didn't even know in the bathroom of a club," he bragged. "Now that's freaky."
I appreciated him bringing me up to speed to what the kids are saying: freaky= raunchy porn-fantasy sex; that is to say the kind of sex we're supposed to think is hot but is really just guaranteed to make you feel lonely afterward.
I find my 28 year-old self nodding in heated agreement with this recent Andy Roony-esque CNN.com article that cites the domination of porn in mainstream pop culture. Noting E's Playboy reality show The Girls Next Door, Girls Gone Wild, and the Pussycat Dolls as symptoms of our raunchy zeitgiest, the article inevitably veers into how it's affecting our children (the children!).
Eh. I'm more concerned with the fact that said pop-porn has co-opted a word once reserved for social outcasts and turned it into a description of really bad head-knocking-against-headboard sex.
Traditional freaks challenged audiences' notions of sexuality: the bearded lady was an early drag queen, contortionists challenged the mind to consider sexual impossibilities and the sword swallower spoke for itself, gentleman. But these new "Freaks" (see Kendra Wilkinson) are just the opposite. They are flawlessly fuckable. There's not a hair out of place or a genuinely original affectation. Their bedroom noise-making promises to be of the whiney sort and their faces will never hideously contort no matter what level of ecstasy they reach. They are video game versions of women. Freaky sex with freaky women should be had to remixes of Fergie songs featuring a host of li'l guys on the same label. It's antiseptic, corporate and possibly video-taped, but never, ever truly freakish (see Kim Kardashian).
When the Pussycat Dolls -- dressed like Fredericks of Hollywood models auditioning for the role of Eponine in Les Miz--- sing "dontcha you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me" it makes me wonder just who exactly is wishing this. I'll take a gander and say people who say "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas" 50 times during their trip to Sin City. People who think there's nothing sexier than tying a cherry with your tounge and people who think drunk sex is good sex.
Correction: nobody feels this way. Those are fantasies we've been spoon fed to mask our real,far more freaky fantasies -- the kinds that books like Geek Love and films like Freaks insinuated.
I have a hunch that even my waiter buddy Farouk, a 24-year-old who had moved to the states from Egypt two years prior, used word "freaky," as a way to seem more American or rather "normal" -- the opposite of a freak.
But it's only fitting that the original meaning of the word freak, would dissipate along with it's homebase: Coney Island. For New Yorkers who grew up a train ride away from the culture of true freaks, the devolution of the word is even more poignant. Thanks to the $2 billion makeover in 2008, this is the last summer before the charmingly dilapidated amusement park Astroland and it's host of outcast inhabitants is replaced by a shiny new Vegas-style mammoth hotel and spread,
presumably littered with sideshows of a new kind of freak: the showgirl.