Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Flannel Men Versus Makeup Boys

When I was in high school and college, grunge "alternative" music was the big thing. Consequently everyone back then--boys and girls--wore jeans, a t-shirt and a flannel shirt as the typical day to day uniform/outfit. I think a handful of the young people consciously copy the clothing they see in the popular culture, and then it sort of ripples through the crowd as everyone else just subconsciously goes along with it. A few years ago, for example, if you were on a college campus or a bigger city, it looked like all the young people came out of the same hipster factory.

Now, there's a hugely disproportional, seemingly coordinated campaign to promote various types of niche sexuality. It's actually pretty hard to explain how and why so many resources are devoted to that agenda.

For example, faggy makeup wearing boys are being promoted heavily on YouTube even though that seems to have very limited appeal. In real life, I've seen exactly one sad looking teenage boy with dyed hair and makeup. I live in a fairly conservative town/semi-rural area, so maybe that type is severely under-represented here. That said, back in the early 1990s, anywhere you went young people were wearing T-shirts and flannel, and prior to that, young people were wearing polo shirts. So this makeup femboy thing seems like a small niche.

Is it an actual "agenda" in the conspiracy theory sense of the word, or is it just a bunch of makeup corporations trying to create and exploit a new "market"? Even if there's just one boy out of 10,000 that buys some eyeliner and lipstick, that's a fairly significant chunk of change. It's probably a fad that will come and go like grunge flannel.

Maybe in the maturity of an economic system and associated culture, the society devolves to a million niche groups. The cost of reaching and exploiting each niche group is pretty small, now with social media and readily available video hosting and streaming.

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