Bobos, metrosexuals, nouveau niches, retrosexuals, nişantaşettes... With all this categorization fetishism going around, none of us have been able to escape the scourge of fascist labeling which we all (and not least of all us, the media) like to perpetuate. Everyone’s become a caricature, everyone’s referenced to an easily recognizable generic type, everyone may as well have a barcode plastered across their foreheads and a serial number tatooed on their asses. And all for what? For our amusement of course! What can be better than to undermine the authenticity of those who are different than us by lopping them in with others, thus inflicting on them the most humiliating bitch-slap of all: the onus of... UNORIGINALITY! You’re not unique, you’re not special, you are never simply who you are (whatever that ever meant), and you are not one of a kind. Your mother is wrong, Hallmark is wrong, Paulo Coelho is wrong, and here’s why...
Bobos
Bourgeois Bohemians, or “bobos” as these thirty- and forty-something business-savvy and successful hipsters are affectionately known, are basically our new cosmopolitan elite, and despite the oxymoronic label, they’re essentially bourgeois but ashamed of it. They still have high-powered, high-paying jobs, but they’re also in tune with the world, with nature, with poverty and with different cultures. They have incorporated rebellious attitudes into their smug and safe urban lives. They generally live in places like Cihangir, sip on cafe lattes, go to concerts at Babylon, but only when they are not managing their advertising firm, their internet company, or making money off the stock market with their inheritance. They have the latest hi-tech gear, from SUVs and Apple iMacs to titanium mountain-climbing gear, for when they want to go to remote places for adventure getaways on weekends and holidays, feeling one with nature and acting as if they could live just as comfortably among ordinary villagers and peasant folk as they could shopping for Mexican talavera ceramic tiles in Nişantaşı or designer lemon squeezers at Akmerkez. They read the Economist and Radikal, they idolize Gandhi or the Dalai Lama, they declare that some accordion- and bongo-playing midget septet from Swaziland is their favorite band in the world – along with the Tuvinian throat-singers and Sting – and they are the ones that actually take vapid slogans like “Think global, act local” seriously, because they actually believe the world is a “Global Village.”
New Age Yoga Meisters
Half the women in Istanbul are probably yoga instructors by now. Many a living room around the city also serves as a yoga workshop, something that disturbingly resembles a cult meeting, albeit without the suicide pact. Yoga people basically treat themselves as if they were exotic pets: They only eat select food, they put themselves through special physical and spiritual exercises, and they pat themselves on the back everytime they do a good deed for a fellow living creature... oh, and they’re all rich enough to be able to say money doesn’t matter. Of course, perfection doesn’t come cheap, with yoga courses costing around 300-500 YTL.
Metrosexuals
These are the guys who think men should actually be beautiful (read: women), rather than the belching, farting, rough, hairy, smelly beings they naturally are. Of course, such a transformation takes a lot of work: it involves manicures and pedicures, dressing like a male model, using wrinkle creams and other useless expensive toiletries, taking care of your body (pilates, yoga), and eating white meat and salads... in other words, it involves everything short of a sex transplant. Thankfully, this trend seems to be waning in favor of the new fad: the Ubersexual, who’s basically someone who still carefully cultivates his image but without being too much of a sissy about it. Think George Clooney. There aren’t too many of these people around Istanbul just yet, but then people take to fads like flies take to... a honeypot.
Retrosexuals
Ok, these are the belching, farting, rough, hairy, smelly beings we mentioned above, who could otherwise just be called MEN. You know it’s bad news when just being a natural man who’s true to his y-chromosome is considered “retro,” like it was a thing of the past or something. It’s scary that all ladies have to look forward to as spouses in the future are basically other ladies with penises. Seriously, since when are guys who spend more time on their appearance than ladies considered sexy? So throw out the deodorant, take a nice big whiff of your armpit, and go bear hunting or something, because retro is back... again.
Technosexuals
Although you may think this term is just a euphemism to make gizmo geeks sound sexy, there seems to be a place for these overgrown whizkids who live their lives in virtual chat rooms writing under heroic pseudonyms, spending the better part of their nights trying to rip the heads off their opponents in Mortal Combat 6 on the Playstation, and salivating over the latest cellphone/camera/mp3/photocopier/fire-extinguisher gadget that’s the size of a beetle’s ass. I don’t know where the “sexual” bit comes in to it though... oh yeah, that must be courtesy of www.internetpornfordorks.com.
Generation C
Generation “Content Creation” is not about age, but about the generation of twenty- and thirty-something well-educated, well-traveled, technology-savvy and talented types who create multi-disciplinary content with their own means. This includes freelance articles with social critiques for various magazines, making clips with their hand-held digital camera and editing it with their Final Cut software, making movies with their iMovie, designing t-shirts or accessories on their Illustrator or Freehand software, belting out a few songs on GarageBand, and publishing their info on deviantart.com or maintaining a blog on which they’ll display all their writings, poems, photos, and other narcissistic virtual paraphernalia. They’re young, laid-back, worldly, cosmopolitan, at home in London, New York or Istanbul, both in touch with sub-cultures and also active in the realm of high culture, and are generally very aware of trends, since trends are the driving force for so much literary and audio-visual content. The old vertical, upwardly-mobile career model has been supplanted by horizontal, centrifugal project-based creativity. When it comes to Generation C, everyone’s an artist and everyone’s a minor celebrity looking for major name exposure.
Nouveau Niches
The mass market is out, commodity specialization is in... Everyday consumer items are now minor works of designer art, often with a designer’s name attached to it, and created for those with the sort of disposable income that can be spent on customized products. These Nouveau Niche types get the best of the best including customized cars, computers and cellphones, customized foods, even special bottled water. So next time you see someone wearing an “Ottoman Empire” brand t-shirt in an organic food store buying special Japanese rock salt while sipping on their luxury bottled mineral water before getting in their special edition Smart car to go home and relax on their Alberto SomeItalianGuy-o designed sofa, you may be tempted to think you just saw a pretentious prat, but really you actually saw a “Nouveau Niche.” It’s French, but I could spell it out for you if you like: D-O-U-C-H-E.
Club chicks
Their night actually starts the next day as they wake up from a late nap at 1am, put on their fluorescent stockings and lip gloss before they hit the clubs by 3am, where, with the help of some pharmaceuticals, they turn Crystal and Godet into their personal playpens as they fit their entire “night” into one massive, messy 48-hour weekend. Their crew includes two or three close friends, a couple of new friends (whom they have no idea where they met), one pharmacologist (who sells his wares and then hangs around with his clients, riding out the “good vibes” he has helped facilitate), and finally a big gay camp male friend who flares his nostrils and widens his eyes every time he makes a bitchy comment about someone’s clothes or pops out some sexual innuendo about something that’s “big and long.” The night degenerates (rather than proceeds) to other places, and finally ends at and afterparty in some strange house when our little club chick wakes up with a splitting headache, next to some half-naked stranger in a house that smells of cigarette butts and mint liqueur... The “night” finally ends when she does. Nobody really knows what these people do during the week, and nobody has ever seen them in daylight.
Pseudo-Grungies
These guys and girls like to dress and act like they’re NOT from wealthy, well-educated, upper middle class, white bread families, and rebel against all those yuppie, expensive wrist-watch wearing, upwardly mobile, go-getter, business-family-kids-status kids from other similarly upper middle class families which they juxtapose themselves against. They hang out at seedy bars, listen to seedy music, dress seedy, look seedy, and then go home to the comfort of their carpeted, air-conditioned, luxury pad where the maid has prepared his bed and mother has filled out his application to a masters program overseas.
