#oneaday Day 564: Cliquety Clique

Watch any kind of American teen “coming of age” movie (or indeed play Bully) and you’ll come across some combination of the same old cliques. The jocks, the nerds, the preppies, the plastics, the goths and the “normal” people.

There are many, many subcultures out there, particularly among the more youthful members of society. But I don’t remember there being cliques that were quite so clearly defined back when I was at school — and yet when I talk to other people, it often becomes clear that they did exist.

I’m not sure if this is because I went to school in a relatively out-of-the-way place where, if we were playing Civ, there would not be a particularly high flow of Culture points. But the fact remains that so far as cliques went, there wasn’t anything anywhere near as obvious as the typical subdivisions we’re conditioned to “expect” from the media nowadays.

There were a few cliques, sure, but these were mostly friendship groups. There were the guys who were into football, the people who were into music, the people who did stuff in the school plays, the people who always went on trips. But no-one tended to let their clique define who they were — and in fact, given the amount of bleed-through between the different groups, it’s questionable whether they really were “cliques” after all.

The closest I came to any kind of clique membership back at school was my involvement in music groups. That meant I often tended to hang out with the same people when doing school activities — but outside of that I had other friends, too. Those other friends didn’t particularly belong to any subculture — they were just “friends”. Or at least that’s the way I saw them — I never looked at person X and thought “well, he’s clearly a [whatever]”. The only exception to this was one guy in sixth form who was very much into paganism, tarot card reading and all manner of other things and he was branded, in that inimitable high school way, as “the weird one”. And, of course, the kids from the local special school who joined us in sixth form and formed their own little clique — which, being politically incorrect highschoolers, most of us were quite happy to let them do.

Technically speaking, if I was a member of a high school clique these days I’d probably be a nerd. I like Dungeons and Dragons, I like video games and I know how to use big words. Oddly enough, though, these days nerds wear their nerdiness as a badge of pride. After all, the nerds are the ones who are making all the money by building the websites that everyone takes for granted these days. So perhaps it’s not such a bad clique to be a part of.

In some ways, I feel like I missed out a bit by going to a school that didn’t have such clearly-defined subcultures. But then I wonder how accurate the movies really have it, anyway — is it really so obvious from looking at people and observing their attitudes what subculture they belong to?