Alternative lifestyle
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Moi qui criait famine I, who screamed hunger --"La Bohème" (1966) by Charles Aznavour "I want to be different, like everybody else I want to be like. I want to be just like all the different people. I have no further interest in being the same, because I have seen difference all around, and now I know that that's what I want. I don't want to blend in and be indistinguishable. I want to be part of the different crowd, and assert my individuality along with others who are different like me."--"It's Saturday" (1992) by King Missile |
Illustration: Toulouse-Lautrec wearing Jane Avril's Feathered Hat and Boa (ca. 1892), photo Maurice Guibert.
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An alternative lifestyle is a lifestyle diverse in respect to mainstream ones, or generally perceived to be outside the cultural norm.
The word gained currency in 1968 (Ngram, 2020), reaching a peak towards the final years of the 1990s.
Usually, but not always, it implies an affinity or identification within some matching subculture (e.g. hippies, goths and punks). Some people with alternative lifestyles mix elements from various subcultures (grunge musicians were often influenced by a mixture of the punk, hippie, emo and heavy metal subcultures).
Not all minority lifestyles are held to be "alternative", so the term tends to apply to newer forms of lifestyle, often based upon enlarged freedoms (especially in the sphere of social styles), or a decision to substitute another approach, or to not follow the usual expected path in most societies.
History
Alternative lifestyles and subcultures originated in the 1920s with the "flapper" movement, when women cut their hair and skirts short (as a symbol of freedom from oppression and the old way of living). Women in the flapper age were the first large group of females to practice pre-marital sex, dancing, cursing, and driving in modern America without scandal following them.
See History of subcultures in the 19th century.
Examples
The following are examples of
- Alternative child-rearing, such as homeschooling, coparenting and home births
- Restrictive dieting, such as veganism, vegetarianism, freeganism, or raw foodism
- Living in unusual communities, such as communes, intentional communities, ecovillages, off-the-grid, or the tiny house movement
- Traveling subcultures, including lifestyle travellers, housetrucking, and New Age travelling
- Simple living, Bohemianism, Punk rock, Emo, antiquarian steampunk subculture and hippies.
- Body modification, including tattoos, body piercings, eye tattooing, scarification, non-surgical stretching like ears or genital stretching, and transdermal implants
- Cross dressing and transvestitism
- Nudism and clothing optional lifestyles
- Members of the LGBT community
- Non-normative sexual lifestyles, such as BDSM, polyamory, swinging, and certain types of sexual fetishism or paraphilia
- Alternative medicine and natural methods of medical care or herbal remedies as medication
- Adherents to alternative spiritual and religious practices, such as Ordo Templi Orientis, Thelemites, Neo-pagans, Satanists and New Age spiritual communities
- Certain religious minorities, such as the Amish who pursue a non-technological or anti-technology lifestyle
- Secular anti-technology community called Luddites
- Special interest groups into collecting
See also
- Alternative
- Alternative culture
- Bohemianism
- Intentional community
- Alternative society
- Intentional living
- Subculture
- Underground culture
- Counterculture
