Every teen movie from the eighties onward has one: the lunchroom scene. The protagonist and his or her new best friend file through the crowded hallways to the lunchroom. The vista of folding tables opens before them and the social commentary begins. The hostile divisions revealed in these movies represent the new state of American culture. While the attention focused on diversity and multiculturalism seeks to rectify the problems caused by marginalization, it creates another monster.

Multiculturalism, while celebrating the values of marginalized groups, serves to highlight the past injustices of dominant society. This has caused an unfortunate backlash. No one wants to accept blame for oppressing others, instead they strive to be the oppressed, or at least misunderstood. There is a rejection of the mainstream and an aversion to the generic. Each of the cliques in lunchrooms across the nation strives to define a unique identity for themselves, distant from generic dominant culture. There is a refusal to openly embrace any universal values. Instead, each clique invents a subgroup for itself to provide a sense of uniqueness and avoid any guilt associated with traditional values.

Advertising and market strategies are eager to exploit this. The goal of any ad is to sell a product to the widest possible market. To effectively communicate with a large number of people, ads look for the common denominator: mass culture. It's encapsulated in slick packages and presented to the nation. The advertising geared to the younger generations of Americans presents a splintered society. Products are sold to demographic groups, not to the nation as a whole. In the past, products attempted to appeal to the nation by playing broad ideals. Products were marketed for their ability to help achieve the American dream: wealth, prosperity, and the two parent home in the suburbs. That universal ideal has been abandoned for "special markets", but the pervasive and oppressive values remain intact.

The Coca-Cola Company has marketed its sodas to the younger generation's drive for specialness. Mountain Dew with its exhortation to "Do the Dew" glorifies the extreme. The commercials for Mountain Dew portray young people competing with each other in extreme sports: snow boarding, skydiving, mountain biking. Yet the majority of these ads portray young males acting stereotypically male. Where are the female adventures or any extremes outside widely accepted activities? Certainly not selling any sodas.

Sprite commercials ruthlessly mock ads geared to appeal to the universal dreams of self-improvement or success. Instead you should obey your own special thirst. How unique Sprite's consumers must feel! Now they can buy a mass-produced soda made just for them. These ads present uniqueness as the norm, without realizing the inherent contradiction. In marketing uniqueness, the ads provide an entire population with a blueprint of false uniqueness. Completely omitted is the cost of truly subverting the norm. Instead, these ads spin the same old dominant values as though they are unique. Subgroup status is packaged, marketed, and selling quite well.

Yet, these subgroups are poor, clichèd imitations. Sociology defines subgroups as marginalized groups who are rejected by society and often embrace a cultural identity separate or even opposite from that of dominant culture. Cliques, while striving to be subgroups, cannot shake their roots; they are offshoots of the very dominant culture they seek to reject. The most egregious cliques are propagated at upper-middle-class, suburban high schools. This is the very group that has historically been the dominant culture. While these cliches may have helped suburbia change outfits, the underlying values remain the same.

The lunch room demographics of America's high schools run rampant with examples. There are thousands of teens in their special cliques, reveling in their false sense of rebellion and subcultural cache. Non-threatening pretenses at rebellion are highlighted and exaggerated in the search for safe minority status, preferably temporary.

Young girls claim to be lesbian and sit at tables holding hands. The daughters of upper-middle class suburbia, they are main stream America, but they are willing to claim queer status to deny it and take their proud place among the oppressed. But their lesbianism is a game. They date and kiss boys, but call themselves gay so long as they hold their best friend's hand at lunch. Lipstick lesbians are a relatively accepted subgroup and therefore "cool"; after all, they're only there to titillate the male gaze. There is no apparent dissonance in coyly claiming lesbianism within your circle of friends and hissing "dyke" at someone deemed too butch. Also oddly missing are the young men toying with homosexuality for attention. These rebellions never fall too far outside approved lines.

On the surface, society has been reversed. The clichèd subgroups are the mainstream now. A look at the music charts will only serve as further proof. Among the most popular music genres now are country, rap, and alternative. Part of the appeal of country, rap, and alternative is their anti-mainstream status. These genres are still considered counter-hegemonic despite dominating record sales. Rap, alternative, and country albums regularly top the charts. These are impressive sales for the supposed music of misunderstood minorities. Despite the obvious mass appeal of these genres, the marketing for this music does not highlight its broad appeal. Instead, they remain locked in genres and kept in discrete, obvious categories. This beg the question of what alternative music is an alternative to.

The answer is the imagined monolithic dominant culture. The invention of these cliques springs from good intentions. Dominant culture often equates with oppression and the cliques are a misguided attempt to reject discrimination and oppression. It is a failed attempt. Instead of uniting the nation against discrimination, these cliques have divided it into splinter groups clamoring for their status as the most misunderstood or the most special. The end result is that the modern understanding of oppression becomes as false as the invented subgroups.

The upper-middle class youth of suburbia consider their invented oppressed status to be real. They base their understanding of oppression on this experience. The girls holding hands in the lunchroom are convinced that the curious looks their classmates give them qualify as oppression. There is danger in this for oppressed groups. A lesbian will face a very different experience from the girls pretending to be gay. These young girls eventually stop being gay. They will marry and raise suburban families of their own, while a lesbian will carry the stigma of lesbianism for the rest of her life. It will not be a game played at lunchroom tables for a few years, but a life-long struggle for validity in a society that expects women to marry and raise families. Yet the girls pretending to be lesbians will remain convinced that they understand the plight of lesbians.

It is this assumed understanding that is dangerous. Legislation defending lesbian and gay rights has been rejected time and time again. Those young girls who pretended to be lesbian feel that lesbians and gays don't need protection. They were gay once and it wasn't so bad. The invented subgroups trivialize the real experiences of truly marginalized people. In the minds of many, oppression becomes a game played in high school, not the systematic repression and suffering endured by marginalized people on a daily basis.

Devondra McMillan [E-mail]

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