Subculture: My Thoughts.

Subcultures mainly consist of groups of people that like to distance themselves from the norm of society, typically due to the oppressive nature of whichever culture they belong to that demands that their social standards be met quite strictly. A few examples of this include goths, street punks, and hippies. This is typically done by dressing and styling themselves in a certain manner beyond social standards, as well as acting unconventionally. Sub-cultures are usually considered rather edgy and controversial, due to society's anxiety towards irregular folks within their community.

Subcultures are often looked down upon but some find their attitude and fashion-sense rather appealing. For this reason, you often find people not part of a subculture but still dressing like them. This has led many clothing stores to market their fashion products towards subcultures and people that look up to them. This kind of breaks the idea of subcultures, since the point of them is to go beyond the norm, and yet their style has become marketable.

Recently, "geek culture" has become rather popular, possibly due to TV series like Big Bang Theory and IT Crowd, and, in my opinion, it has actually led to a more positive perspective on geek culture within society, since before then it was considered more shameful to follow that lifestyle. Both the term geek culture, and people actually identifying as "geeks" is evident that this has essentially become another subculture. Granted, I am someone that by definition fits into this category of subculture but doesn't really identify as it. I feel like the difference between subcultures and everybody else is that they take pride in the fact that they are distancing themselves from society.

I personally think the very existence of subcultures is rather contradictory if the idea is go beyond the norm. They basically end up creating their own norm within their subculture, which is no different to what they were trying to avoid. I mean, are they trying not to conform by... conforming to their own culture? I don't have a problem with people being different, though. I wholeheartedly support individuality, but I don't think developing a group of people to celebrate this is necessarily the right thing to do. I always see subcultures as types of tribes, because people are basically forming a group based on their own differences and live in that particular manner. They create their own comfort zone because of this, and when they see other people/groups outside of that comfort zone, their instincts tend to vary between fascination, confusion, and irritation, most often the latter of the three. I believe this violent aspect of human nature as a species hasn't yet evolved since the Dawn of Man.