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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   29064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 24, 2024

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I agree for the most part, though I think an under-considered part of this is that LGBT and other Woke phenomena are now official dogma meaning that not only is it useless as a signifier of status, but that it’s something that everyone is more or less required to believe in public. There’s no place where one can really be openly and explicitly anti-LGBT in polite society. If you’re not pro LGBT everything, and you tell people this in the workplace, you’re going to have to clean out your desk. If you say it in school, you’re going to have a chat with the school counselor trying to get to the bottom of your bigotry. If you say it online, you’re getting reported to either your workplace or your school.

But the thing is, that all of this performative behavior the requirement to not only not be against it, but be for it makes the opposite an act of rebellion against The Man. The model isn’t anything politically motivated, it’s the same thing that drove kids to liking weird bands, or take up smoking, or dress funny or get piercings. In the 1990s, liking rap was not because white suburban kids discovered spoken word poetry set to music was cool. It was cool because it got a huge and often negative reaction from the adults. They liked rap precisely because Mom and Dad and all the adults hated it and would yell at them about it. Kids took up smoking and vaping less because they like it and more because it would annoy and frighten the adults. One of the great draws of this is of course that such reactions prove that you’re independent and not controlled by the adults. A kid like that, one that rebelliously refuses to bend the knee to what the adults think of them especially in the teenage world (although somewhat in college as well) is one that everyone else thinks is cool.

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

Most kids are conformist. Maybe some small percentage will truly rebel, but the overwhelming majority will only rebel in allowed ways. That's why LGBT among teenagers took off in the 2010s and not the 1990s. By that time, LGBT had become an allowed method of rebellion, much like gangster rap was in the 1990s.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing. It's not allowed. Teenagers find other harmless ways to annoy their elders, like brain rot memes.

Which isn't to say that LGBT will remain cool now that it is official state dogma. It won't. But rebellion against it will not be tolerated either.

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing

Aren't most of the 'Active Clubs' young men? I don't think I'd describe them as performative.

You appear to have cut off my quote to invert what I said which was this:

We're not about to see a kids rebel by being performatively right-wing.

I was not my intention to invert your meaning but to rebutt it by providing a counter example. I've updated the quoted text to avoid confusion.

I'd say the idea of teenage rebellion as a social reality originates from the era of capitalism when teenagers appeared on the consumer market as a separate target audience. It was no coincidence that the thing all outlets of teenage rebellion had in common was and is their profitability.

"The revolutionaries are on CBS [Records]" - 1968

I agree that direct rebellion to LGBT won't be tolerate. You won't suddenly see a resurgence in kids calling the dork loser in class a faggot.

But I think ostentatious differentiation will always be there. The original punk rock aesthetic was all about LOUD self-distinction. Unnatural hair dye, spikes and other metal ... thingys ... on clothes, dramatic makeup. You couldn't not be seen because everything was arranged to catch the eye.

So how do you loudly self-differentiate when the PanGenderDemiQuarks have taken over the library?

Retro inspired hyper-normie gender roles. It's not the weird TradWife meme, it's a kind of Volume-Up-To-11 1980s masculinity. To me, it kind of complements a lot of the Instragram Face, cosmetic conscious women online who, despite their large followings on a silicon valley platform, probably have pretty right-coded beliefs about gender and gender roles.

I think that youth rebellion is somewhat astroturfed.

In other words, culture wars, like regular wars, are fought by the old with the young as merely collateral damage.

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