Teens use odd clothing styles, trendy dances, and slang (“groovy,” “doobie,” “cheugy”) to erect clear fences between young and old. “For the first time, kids didn’t want to look like their fathers,” writes the journalist Nik Cohn about British postwar youth culture. “In fact, whatever their fathers looked like, they wanted to look exactly opposite.” Youth culture enabled teens to flip the script and create criteria that made them superior to their prim parents. And as the newest members of society, they saw their parents’ norms as arbitrary anyway.
