And every alternative status group creates binaries that highlight its own special criteria. “One is Hip or one is Square,” famously wrote Norman Mailer of American subculture in his controversial essay “The White Negro”; “one is a rebel or one conforms, one is a frontiersman in the Wild West of American nightlife, or else a Square cell, trapped in the totalitarian tissues of American society, doomed willy-nilly to conform if one is to succeed.”
