A Girl With a Sword

just recreation for the doctors and lawyers

So I keep using the word "hipster" and then people keep asking me to define it. And I can't. Who can? Someone tried. But really, it's hard to define a developing culture. It's something about the pumas and the vespas and the funky hair and skinny boys who smoke and girls with cute skirts and sweet, low voices. Since leaving my Covenant College, I've realized that hipster entails a lot of things that were counteracted by our own culture. Hipsters don't dance, don't make eye contact. It's a bad idea to try to talk to anyone at shows, you will immediately be branded anathema, which is exactly what everyone there is afraid of. There's a lot more insecurity, a lot more judging, a lot more introversion than I was aware of. I can identify with the snobbery and the elitism, that doesn't really bother me, but I don't like the pretension that goes along with that. Maybe Boston hipsters aren't the best example. They are the most over-educated of an over-educated subculture. They're cold, opinionated wasps who lose the humorous self-deprecation and flaunt the cynicism. Plus, they're all trying to compensate for the fact that they don't live in New York.

. . . but more on this has been said before.

I found this article last summer. It dubs these hipster men "Littleblue Smurfboys" (an endearing name really), and goes on to say they lack all that makes men great. I don't agree. I'm very fond of little blue smurf boys, even though I wasn't allowed to watch the smurfs as a child. And what makes the critique most interesting is how badly the author is trying to put down the less tough and violent men of today in order to champion his ideal "Big Bruiser" men and women, who, from the way he puts it, sound like they're doing what they can to damage the spirits of their fellow human beings.