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Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

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Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#421

Post by PuppyTailWags »

dogleash wrote: post #311
PuppyTailWags wrote: post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really confused by this statement. I think queer culture can be countercultural depending. For example legislation is currently up in some states to ban dressing in a way outside your sex because drag queens exist, but even though drag queens have a tv show and a movie and stuff I'm sure it'll also probably scoop a butch lesbian or two or just a regular tomboy woman.

Legal status is terrible standard for whether something is counter culture. Outlawing something is neither necessary nor sufficient to be counterculture. Some legal and cultural boundaries overlap, some are orthogonal. There are a great many subcultures that would like legal boundaries shifted, and when they care enough they become interest groups participating in the democratic process. Even the blandest bland bland…

Subculture vs counterculture makes sense. I'd be curious what counterculture is and how it differentiates from subculture then, if we're not going to measure if institutions exist that are actively trying to outlaw a culture.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#422

Post by undersuit »

Dig1t wrote: post #390
undersuit wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority. Trads are part of a waning majority. All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open. Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.

>LGBTQ is a minority I mean yes, physically they are a minority. Culturally, they are incredibly mainstream. There are examples everywhere. There are tons of big movies and TV shows featuring gay people coming out. _Every_ company changes their logo during pride month. Look at the Apple Watch or iPhone, they come preloaded with Pride wallpapers and watch faces, they produce pride bands for the watch, which sell very…

Trads never left. They are the majority.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#423

Post by kennyadam »

jimbob45 wrote: post #346
undersuit wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority. Trads are part of a waning majority. All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open. Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.

[flagged]

[flagged]

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#424

Post by ckemere »

adamcharnock wrote: post #20

I'm pretty sure I've been existing in a number of counter-cultures for the last decade or two. These have been either linked to my identity or physical location, I couldn't have properly experienced them through consuming media on the subject. Certainly all required an active choice and/or lifestyle change on my part. Maybe people mean something else by counter-culture, but here are examples from my life: - Freelanci…

It's really unfortunate that the comment chain attached to the queer aspects of your comment, because it seems that the communal living/ off-grid aspects are more interesting. I think that the article is lamenting the idea that these sorts of things no longer appear to have runway to potentially enter "mainstream" culture in a way that, e.g., raisin bran did in the early part of the last century.

It's possible that maybe the reality is that there's some aspect of abiltity-to-be commercialized that has always limited counter cultures reach? Or maybe that's an alternate way of valuing culture - can it produce concepts that can be adopted by the majority.

Ironically, given the replies, it seems that Christian communities (i.e., Hudderites or Mennonites) had discovered what you discovered a century ago, but the very nature of the counterculture they express limits their impact on the mainstream?

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#425

Post by undersuit »

jimbob45 wrote: post #346
undersuit wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority. Trads are part of a waning majority. All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open. Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.

[flagged]

What is a women then?

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#426

Post by pocket_cheese »

irrational wrote: post #305
undersuit wrote: post #293

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ridiculous, LGBTQ is a minority. Trads are part of a waning majority. All evidence points towards LGBTQ always existing but just becoming more open. Trads being Counter Culture? That's the same double speak that gets us Citizens United and Right to Work. Where did these trads get their radically traditional values? From the majority.

It is a minority, but if I go into work and announce that I am trans and will now be transitioning and my name is now X, people will fall all over themselves be supportive and congratulating me. It literally happened recently when Chris became Christina at my work. But, if I come in and announce that I have decided to become Catholic or Evangelical or Mormon there will be a lot of awkward silence with maybe some "oka…

I've never had random people on the street threaten to beat my ass or make violent threats towards me before my transition, and now it happens a couple times a year. I also way to many trans friends that are homeless because their conservative parents disagreed.

Across every single metric, trans people, especially trans POC face disproportionate adversity. i.e. income, murder rate, housing insecurity, education etc...

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#427

Post by throwaway894345 »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #331
throwaway894345 wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the entire establishment is seeking to ally itself with your movement/culture/etc then that’s a strong indicator that your movement isn’t counter-culture or otherwise subversive. They don’t have to become True Believers IMHO. And FWIW, lots of big companies have DEI departments that preach this stuff internally and market it externally (my wife is a marketing consultant with these big companies and they eat this s…

When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"? Of course it did not. The flower children, the back-to-the-landers, the bikers, the free love communers all remained a tiny slice of the population (and a shrinking one by that time). What the late 60s/early 70s US counterculture had going for it was…

> When Coca-Cola embraced the flower children with its ads in the late 1960s / early 1970s, did that mean that the US counterculture of that time had become "the culture"?

Surely you understand that Coca-Cola wasn't "the entire establishment"?

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#428

Post by daveslash »

htag wrote: post #349
jl6 wrote: post #76

Personally I think the word “counterculture” should be retired, as we no longer live in monocultural societies. We no longer gather round any shared fireplace. For a counterculture to meaningfully exist, it has to be somehow discordant with a dominant narrative - but there is no dominant narrative any more. The west is not ruled by the left or the right or the church or the state. We are all fragmenting off into echo…

I think this is an ideal we are heading towards in comparison to ~1970 but we are far from there yet. There are a hundred TV channels where before there was less than 10. There are more newsfeeds, movies, tv, books, music than ever before, and we can get the impression that our choices in which part of the culture we engage with places us in our own chosen bubble. When surfing around, it becomes clear there are sever…

I think you and the user you're replying to are both right. To expand upon that, for most of the 1900s, there was a dominant culture (as you pointed out, fewer than 10 channels). For there to be a "counter" culture, there must be a dominant culture.

I would posit that in the current time, we have a wide variety of well established subcultures whereas for most of the 1900s we didn't. Today our subcultures can exist easily due to mass media, whereas for most of the 1900s they couldn't - the subcultures were more "underground" - underground in the sense that you really needed to be part of a community in person to be part of the subculture. The "counter culture" was a push back on the smotheringness of the monoculture. Now that the monoculture is not so smothering and the subcultures can breath, there's less pushback - there's less "counter".

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#429

Post by Dig1t »

Shared404 wrote: post #356
phkahler wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> LGBTQ is a minority Nope. The number of letters keeps increasing as more people are brought in. In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight.

Context: Am LGBTQ person who also has traditional religious views. Big disagree. You carry a pride flag in the wrong parts of town where I am, you'll get beat up. Walk around preaching hellfire and damnation and at most you'll get a lot of annoyed looks and at best you'll get people cheering you on. > In schools these days it's trendy to be anything but straight. In high schools in my town people get beat up for comi…

Yeah it seems you can have wildly different experiences depending on where you live in the US. Probably why we are so politically divided, at this point we're living in different societies.

Anywhere in California you would not experience any of that. In fact it really is as OP describes. Look at polls of kids in elementary schools where 50%+ of young kids are identifying as non-binary because it is trendy.

Re: Do we live in a society without a counterculture?

#430

Post by AlexandrB »

gbN025tt2Z1E2E4 wrote: post #133
CaptainFever wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Genuine question from a gay person in a conservative country: What sort of healing would traditional values do? Is it the nuclear family sort of thing? I'm not familiar with those theories.

They are values which promote the functioning of a healthy and balanced society with people less inclined and/or enthusiastically supported for being inherently self-centered and self-destructive. Endless drug epidemics are a very prominent and visual symptom of the damage rampant degeneracy has inflicted upon society and that in general, things as they are currently are NOT alright.

This argument is contingent on things actually getting worse, whereas most social indicators like crime rates or life expectancy seem to indicate that things have improved over the last half century. I would not want to go back to the society of the 1980s, for example, because I'd be more likely to be robbed.

Also, what about the role that greed has played in the latest drug epidemic? The Sacklers were not driven by degeneracy but by the lust for money.

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