ABSTRACT
For many young people, Britain in the fifties and sixties has been a society in transition, a society throwing out a number of confusing signals. Teenage culture is, in part, an authentic response to this situation, an area of common symbols and meanings, shared in part or in whole by a generation, in which they can work out or work through not an adolescent in our kind of society. Sometimes this response can be seen only the natural tensions of adolescence, but the special tensions of being in direct terms-kinds of radical political energy with certain clear-cut symbolic targets (the threat of nuclear weapons, political apathy, the bureaucratic quality of political life, all that is summed up in the term “the Establishment”). Sometimes, the response takes the form of a radical shift in social habits-for example, the slow but certain revolution in sexual morality among young people. In these and other ways the younger generation have acted as a creative minority, pioneering ahead of the puritan restraints so deeply built into English bourgeois morality, toward a code of behavior in our view more humane and civilized. Much of the active participation of the younger generation in their own subculture has this flavor about it-a spontaneous and generative response to a frequently bewildering and confused social situation. In these conditions the problems of the young seem important largely because they are symptomatic of the society as a whole. The shift in sexual attitudes, for example, draws attention to itself not only because it contrasts sharply with the code of behavior subscribed to by adult society (though rarely lived up to), but also because it illuminates in a striking way the confusion about these questions among people of all ages and all backgrounds. There is no common consensus any longer among adults about sexual attitudes or about the role of authority in society, or even about our expectations of how young people should behave. The young sense the absence of this consensus. And this stimulates the trend toward independence, self-reliance, and spontaneity, and exposes them as well to powerfully suggestive alternative models such as the media put forward.
