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Individualism
It's always struck me as a bit odd that, in many supposedly tolerant subcultures, the decision to become a parent is often seen as a terrible breach of etiquette - the self-identified punks and goths who chant a "be yourself" mantra, only to recoil when that 'self' includes adding 'reproduction' to the 'sexual', are numerous.
Which makes the Future Generation: The Zine-Book for Subculture Parents, Kids, Friends and Others quite a handy corrective. It's a compilation of China Martens' The Future Generation zine, written over sixteen years as she raised her child and attempted to negotiate a world where "most punks weren't parents and most parents weren't punks".
There's more than one way to raise a child; this has to be a better village than the one Hilary had in mind.
6 comments:
Interestingly enough, someone recently posted to a childfree community I'm in about what was to them the impropriety of Hot Topic selling rock-themed baby merchandise, or at least the impropriety of people buying them.
A few of us argued that since one oft-voiced concern in there is about breeding friends having lost all interest in their hobbies before baby, it's silly to complain because someone wants to put their sprog in a "Mommy's Little Monster" Social Distortion onesie. Besides, it beats shopping at Wal-Mart.
What's improper about a childrens' clothing store selling childrens' clothes?
The targetted demographic is teens and twenty-something-year-olds; I worked for the company for two and a half years.
Love the sinner, hate the sin; love the merch, hate the mallrats. ;]
@Rachel
did Hot Topic shift their demographic at all, or was it society changed? When I first went to the states, the store was mainly full of older young goths (if you see what I mean); by last year, the median seemed to have shifted from about 22 to 15.
I'm also curious: do many people buy the CDs?
@Rachel- is it true that Hot Topic is owned by Gap?
The demographic's been the same for a while.
At my store, most of the money spent was by college kids, after that teens and their parents. The teen mallrats hanging out at the store (regardless of how much they actually spend) skew things a good bit--one of the annoying things about that job was all the breeders dropping off their kids to hang out at our store like it was their personal daycare.
Yep, sold quite a few CDs at my store--varies greatly by area though (as well as how well the CD area is maintained and updated--the one at my store was a disaster area till I cleaned it up and removed some of the stuff that wasn't selling). Not all stores carry CDs, however.
Olive: no, that urban legend's been around for a while now, mainly because like most stories of that nature no one bothers to do any research. Gap Inc does own several other stores like Banana Republic and Old Navy, but Hot Topic Inc are a separate company (HOTT on the NASDAQ) who own Hot Topic and Torrid stores.
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