A diehard romantic, I routinely scroll through Netflix’s “New & Popular” tab looking for the next rom-com to swoon over—and often keep scrolling. This year alone, I’ve scrolled past The Royal Treatment; Love in the Villa; A Perfect Pairing; Hello, Goodbye, and Everything in Between; and Persuasion. The only films I found worth streaming were Wedding Season and Hulu’s Fire Island. Yet neither moved me as much as a single scene from the Korean drama, Extraordinary Attorney Woo—more law-procedural than romcom—where the two leads press their fingers together against a window pane.

Hollywood’s rom-com genre is letting out wilted sighs as it aches for filmmakers to rejuvenate its body of work. Some critics have declared the genre “dead.” However, Scott Meslow, culture critic and author of From Hollywood With Love: The Rise and Fall (and Rise Again) of the Romantic Comedy disagrees. He says of this past decade in Hollywood: “It was more like the decline of the mid-budget-studio-film era, and rom-coms were sort of scapegoated.”

If the appetite for romantic movies had truly fizzled, then 2022’s big releases in the genre, Marry Me, The Lost City, and Ticket to Paradise—starring rom-com veterans such as Jennifer Lopez, Sandra Bullock, and Julia Roberts—wouldn’t have performed so well at the box office. The Lost City grossed approximately $190 million worldwide against a budget of $68 million, and Marry Me amassed $50 million worldwide against a budget of $23 million.

But despite these successes, Hollywood is not investing in much beyond blockbuster superhero movies—or any intellectual property that has franchise potential. As culture writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud wrote earlier this year, Hollywood has “arrived at the nadir of original stories,” capitalizing on audience familiarity to ensure maximum profitability. In the meantime, rom-com fans have been turning to something that fulfills their desire to see two individuals overcome obstacles, against all odds, to find true love: Korean dramas.

For the uninitiated, Korean dramas (a.k.a. K-dramas) are limited-series romantic TV shows produced in South Korea. They are typically limited series—though some newer dramas have begun offering multiple seasons—and they range from around 10 to 30 episodes, sometimes as short as 25 minutes each, but typically lasting upwards of 40 minutes.

K-dramas, alongside other aspects of Korean pop culture like K-pop, have been making inroads in East Asia since the 1990s. They first gained prominence in North America, however, in the early 2010s— during what is now called the second Hallyu or Korean Wave—with rom-com series like Boys Over Flowers (2009), You’re Beautiful (2009), Playful Kiss (2010), and Secret Garden (2010). Their popularity was aided by websites such as Viki and the now-defunct Dramafever, which allowed North American viewers to watch episodes the day after they aired in Korea, with English subtitles, for free.

“[I first watched K-dramas] in university, four, five years ago,” says Mira Hajjar, a queer Lebanese-Canadian K-drama fan. Hajjar says what they enjoy most about the genre are “the little cute moments that make you kick your feet under the blanket,” like when the leads banter, do menial chores together, and make each other laugh.

Ziora Ajeroh, a university student, who has been a K-drama fan since 2015, loves the genre’s slow-burn. “You cannot pay me to watch a Hollywood romcom that came out this year,” they say. “They’re all garbage.” Ajeroh elaborates that newer Hollywood rom-coms can’t quite replicate the chemistry nor the well-written plots of rom-coms released in the 1990s and early 2000s—at least, to them. “I feel like I’ve seen every decent rom-com, at least in Hollywood.”

So what changed? For decades, the rom-com was a viable option for Hollywood studios. It was Nora Ephron’s When Harry Met Sally (1989)—the quintessential work in this genre—that sparked the heyday of lighthearted, love-centric, and high-quality films from the 1990s to the early 2000s, such as You’ve Got Mail (1998), Notting Hill (1999), and Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994), which was nominated for two Oscars and won 24 big industry awards. However, this boom had faded to a whimper by the 2010s. When films like When in Rome (2010), and Killers (2010) failed to kill it either at the box office or in audience’s hearts (both have an audience score below 45 percent), they helped kill off Hollywood’s desire to invest in rom-coms.

From 2012 onwards, one can count on the top 10 highest-grossing films each year to either be explosion-filled blockbusters, superhero movies, Disney animations, a sequel to any of the above—or even a combination of all of them, à la any Marvel film. Since these films have such a strong track record, film studios have been less inclined to take their chances on rom-coms, whose pull on audiences is much harder to predict.

Before streaming services existed, films made revenue through both the initial release of a movie as well as DVD sales. Having two streams of revenue, as Matt Damon explained during his recent appearance on Hot Ones, made it possible for studios to invest in riskier films—like rom-coms—because even if they underperformed at the box office, they could make up for it in DVD sales. Streaming services killed DVD sales and offered only low licensing fees in return, leading studios to stick with films guaranteed to make a profit when widely released in theatres.

Streaming services, especially Netflix, have tried producing and releasing their own rom-coms to combat the subsequent dearth of rom-coms. However, only a few of these movies ever cut through the overwhelming amount of content on these services to generate conversation—Can you quote a line from 2018 rom-com Set It Up? Me neither!—unless, that is, we’re referring to conversations that make fun of them (I’m looking at you, Persuasion and He’s All That!).

Ironically, the biggest force to push audiences toward K-dramas is the very force that led to the rom-com drought in Hollywood: Netflix. As K-pop’s visibility increased in American pop culture, so did Netflix’s K-drama offerings. The company began to exclusively distribute several K-dramas at the same time as they aired in Korea, beginning with One More Time (2016). It converted large swathes of unfulfilled romance fans all over the world—especially in the U.S., Canada, and India—into K-drama fans through Crash Landing on You (2019–2020), which ranked in Netflix’s Top 10 in several countries.

When the pandemic forced people into lockdown in 2020, many longed for escapism and the comfort that rom-coms brought, but quickly burned through any new ones worth watching. After hearing about Crash Landing through word of mouth, enough people watched it out of curiosity for the drama to become the sixth most-watched series on Netflix in the U.S. and to be recommended by media outlets from Variety to The Daily Beast to TIME magazine.

Hajjar recalls being introduced to K-dramas by a friend, while it was Ajeroh who pushed her friends toward K-dramas and now shares a Viki account with them. Journalist Sabra Ismath admits to casually playing Crash Landing on You—where a South Korean heiress crash lands in North Korea after a paragliding accident and must find her way back with the help of a handsome North Korean soldier— in the background when people visit, so she can casually get them hooked.

While initially some North American audience members may have looked to the K-drama as a Plan B, they quickly discovered it had certain advantages over the classic romantic flick and romantic sitcoms made in the U.S. and Canada. “Hollywood rom-coms are always on the time budget,” bemoans Ismath. “The storyline is rushed. One minute they’re talking and [the next] they’re already a couple.”

Fellow K-drama fan Hajjar loves how K-dramas deliver a fully fleshedout love story over a single season. “It also means I can watch more of them.” North American romantic TV shows tend to favour will-they-won’t-they arcs drawn out tortuously over several seasons (think: How I Met Your Mother, The Mindy Project, Jane the Virgin, Never Have I Ever) while their film counterparts can feel too short. K-dramas find the sweet spot of offering deep character development while keeping viewers engaged.

In Crash Landing on You, for example, in addition to working together to prevent the heroine Yoon Se-ri from being captured and imprisoned by the North Korean police, Yoon Se-ri also has to confront her strained relationship with her mother and brothers, while the lead male protagonist Ri Jeong-hyeok has to come to terms with the death of his older brother. Even after they overcome their individual struggles, the two still have to figure out how they can be together despite ongoing political tensions between their countries.

The leads’ family and friends tend to be more three-dimensional in K-dramas than in rom-coms, making K-dramas more relatable, especially to viewers who also come from collectivist cultures, like Avani Thakkar, a freelance writer who began watching K-dramas during the pandemic. “With Hollywood, you never get to see the family,” she says, unless the character is going home for the holidays. “But with K-dramas the family aspect is really intertwined and as a desi person, I relate to that more.”

And another reason why rom-com fans love K-dramas so much is the satisfyingly slow-burn of the romance. In the 16-episode drama Descendants of the Sun, for example, the leads don’t kiss until the fifth episode, don’t start dating until the ninth, and only get their happy-ever-after on the very last episode. There are countless memes poking fun at the speed with which Hollywood rom-com couples become intimate versus K-drama couples—and countless more memes illustrating the glee viewers experience when they do. K-drama couples build an emotional bond first by facing obstacles together. It makes their ultimate physical bond that much more rewarding for viewers, some of whom don’t rank physical affection as the only love language that matters. Aysha Akhtar, a grad student, for example, really appreciated the thoughtful things the Crash Landing on You romantic leads do for each other. “Acts of service is my love-language,” she explains. “It was just easier for me to relate to that.”

K-drama rom-coms also offer a variety of subgenres within the genre—medical, thriller, law procedural—as well as diverse settings and complex plots. Both Lawless Lawyer (2018) and I Hear Your Voice (2013) feature lawyers falling in love while working to solve a mystery connected to their pasts. I Hear Your Voice incorporates age-difference and co-habitation storylines, as well as a slight supernatural element, while Lawless Lawyer’s male lead is rougher around the edges and has a push-pull relationship with the female lead (he’s the one pulling), making the two dramas quite distinct. And even K-dramas that aren’t billed as romantic typically devote a sizable chunk of their plot to romances. But they can also be a conduit to discussing or processing topics stigmatized in many cultures across Asia, such as mental health, strained family relations, and divorce.

Though admittedly rom-com K-dramas predominantly feature heterosexual couples, there has been a slow increase in the number of queer love stories, like in the 2022 web drama Semantic Error starring former KNK K-pop band member Park Seo-ham and DKZ band member Park Jae-chan. The unexpected popularity of the drama (it was the most-watched series on streaming platforms in Korea when its finale aired earlier this year) boosted DKZ’s popularity and had their old songs charting anew.

K-dramas’ high production value—which viewers can glean from international shooting locations like Switzerland (Crash Landing on You) or Spain (Memories of the Alhambra) or Canada (Goblin), the long list of sponsors at the end which often includes names like Samsung, Swarovski, and good ‘ol Subway, and the expensive wardrobe, especially for historical dramas—also helps, if you’re seeking unapologetic escapism.

While fans have lots of material to marathon, many don’t limit themselves to K-dramas. It becomes a gateway of sorts, leading them to romantic TV series from other Asian countries like Taiwan and mainland China (C-dramas), Thailand (Lakorn), and to a lesser extent, Japan (J-dramas). A Google Trends inquiry shows interest in Chinese, Thai, and Japanese dramas gradually increasing—and in that order— in both the U.S. and Canada from 2016-onwards, mirroring the trajectory of K-dramas on a smaller scale.

Perhaps the best example of these cross-country adaptations is Boys Over Flowers (2009), a K-drama starring Lee Min-ho and Ku Hye-sun and based on Yoko Kamia’s manga series Hana Yori Dango. The manga had already been adapted into two Japanese dramas and films, a two-season Taiwanese drama, and an unofficial Indonesian drama before its Korean adaptation—which was a hit both domestically and abroad—and it went on to spawn two Chinese dramas (one a remake of the other) and another Indonesian drama. Its latest adaptation, a Thai drama called F4 Thailand, released earlier this year.

The popularity of K-dramas—and Asian dramas overall—is a welcome antidote, to many viewers, to the overwhelming whiteness of Hollywood rom-coms. K-dramas have helped combat internalized racism in diasporic Asians—developed from rarely seeing themselves represented positively in Hollywood. In one memoir piece that ran in Salon, second-generation Korean-Australian-American actress Alicia Hannah shares that getting into K-dramas prompted her to finally learn her parents’ language. In another, Chinese-American writer Christine Mah-Kellams confesses: “K-dramas cured my prejudice against Asian men.”

K-dramas are challenging the emasculation of Asian men in North American media, and, by extension, North America by presenting Asian men as viable romantic and sexual options. Although, in some instances, this borders on fetishization. Indiana University Bloomington researcher Min Joo Lee coined the phrase “the Netflix effect” to account for a surge in young Western women travelling to Seoul and staying in their hostels watching K-dramas all day, then hitting the town at night. According to a CTV report:

“The women Lee interviewed were fascinated with Korean men who were portrayed on TV as being in touch with their emotions and willing to embrace their ‘effeminate sides,’ Lee said. They considered Korean men cultured and romantic while complaining that men in their home countries often neglected their appearances and had one-track minds.”

Though many K-drama actors already enjoyed significant popularity both in Korea and across Asia, gaining a North American audience has meant more partnerships with international luxury brands, Hollywood movie offers, and a new demographic of people invested in the personal lives of K-drama stars—similar to how Hollywood rom-coms made stars out of Meg Ryan, Matthew McConaughey, and Hugh Grant, to name a few. When Crash Landing on You stars Son Ye-jin and Hyun Bin announced their relationship, marriage, then pregnancy, for example, fans of the show were ecstatic—like Ismath, who enthusiastically shared pictures of the couple’s wedding in her friend group chat. The enthusiasm over the BinJin couple illustrates that K-drama stars have begun to occupy a place once reserved for rom-com icons in North American audience’s hearts.

The heart-shaped cavity in my own head that craves romance since the romcom went into decline is filling up again thanks to K-dramas. Yet I still long for a particular brand of optimism that only old-fashioned rom-coms can inspire in me. I am hoping that the calibre of recent films like The Lost City and Ticket to Paradise is a sign of a resurgence in the genre, so I can have it all. Until my hopes come to fruition, however, I’m just a girl, sitting in front of a “New and Popular” tab packed with awesome K-drama options, asking Hollywood to step up its game.

What is colonially called Winnipeg, Manitoba, in Treaty 1 territory, might not be known for its drag scene. But as home to The Bannock Babes, one of the fiercest drag collectives in the country—and one of very few Indigenous drag troupes on this side of the border—perhaps it should be.

The Bannock Babes are an eclectic group of Indigiqueer performers who joined creative forces in response to the lack of Indigenous representation at drag shows.

“In the last six or seven years there’s obviously been a growth in the popularity of drag locally and internationally, but there wasn’t always space made for Indigenous performers,” says Bannock Babe Prairie Sky.

Working as colleagues at Sunshine House, a harm reduction-focused community resource and drop-in centre, Prairie Sky, Feather Talia, and Vida Lamour DeCosmo decided to create that space themselves by hosting a one-night-only event with an entirely Indigenous lineup. But that first show proved to be the spark that lit a larger fire. “We realized that it was something very special,” says Prairie Sky.

The collective, whose core members also include Local Honey, Buffy Lo, and “resident auntie” Anita Stallion, became an artistically liberating and highly supportive drag community—one that feels like family for Indigenous performers.

“It’s just people celebrating themselves and their experiences, and being honest about those in an artistic performance,” says Prairie Sky. “There’s just so much love and respect between us that radiates into the spaces that we get to occupy, and so I think that’s our impact.”

With shows that range from “very politically sombre kind of drag, to drag that’s just fun and ridiculous,” The Bannock Babes fuse performance with political statement. In some ways, they have no choice.

“As Indigenous queer people, our entire lives are political….We don’t often get the frivolity that non-Indigenous and white artists get. Like they can be frivolous … whereas all of our stuff is always going to be interpreted as being a political act. So, we kind of run with that,” says Prairie Sky. “It’s all resistance and it’s all survival.”

For non-Indigenous audiences, Prairie Sky says, “it’s just good drag. But for Indigenous audiences, it’s home”—which is what the troupe is going for.

Those looking to catch a Bannock Babes show in Winnipeg can look to queer bar, Club 200, where the drag collective usually hosts spring and fall performances. The group has also performed in many high-profile shows, from the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network’s APTN Indigenous Day Live to the 2-Spirit Ball in Ottawa. But it’s the Friendship Centre events and small-town performances—those like the Waywayseecappo First Nation’s Pride parade—that Prairie Sky feels have the greatest impact.

“I think for other people, they’d be like ‘Oh, going to Dryden, Ontario, isn’t that big of a deal.’ But for us, it’s a real big deal because, like, these are the towns and these are the places that we grew up,” says Prairie Sky. “Even though I’m not from Dryden, I know what this means to a queer person, a queer Indigenous kid in those towns.”

Do you hate consumer culture?

Angry about all that packaging? Irritated by all those commercials? Worried about the quality of the “mental environment”? Well, join the club. Anti-consumerism has become one of the most important cultural forces in millennial North American life, across every social class and demographic.

This might seem at odds with the economic facts of the 1990s—a decade that gave us the “extreme shopping” channel, the dot-com bubble, and an absurd orgy of indulgence in ever more luxurious consumer goods. But look at the non-fiction bestseller lists. For years they’ve been dominated by books that are deeply critical of consumerism: No Logo, Culture Jam, Luxury Fever and Fast Food Nation. You can now buy Adbusters at your neighbourhood music or clothing store. Two of the most popular and critically successful films in recent memory were Fight Club and American Beauty, which offer almost identical indictments of modern consumer society.

What can we conclude from all this? For one thing, the market obviously does an extremely good job at responding to consumer demand for anti-consumerist products and literature. But isn’t that a contradiction? Doesn’t it suggest that we are in the grip of some massive, society-wide, bipolar disorder? How can we all denounce consumerism, and yet still find ourselves living in a consumer society?

The answer is simple. What we see in films like American Beauty and Fight Club is not actually a critique of consumerism; it’s merely a restatement of the “critique of mass society” that has been around since the 1950s. The two are not the same. In fact, the critique of mass society has been one of the most powerful forces driving consumerism for more than 40 years.

That last sentence is worth reading again. The idea is so foreign, so completely the opposite of what we are used to being told, that many people simply can’t get their head around it. It is a position that Thomas Frank, editor of The Baffler, has been trying to communicate for years. Strangely, all the authors of anti-consumerism books have read Frank—most even cite him approvingly—and yet not one of them seems to get the point. So here is Frank’s claim, simply put: books like No Logo, magazines like Adbusters, and movies like American Beauty do not undermine consumerism; they reinforce it.

This isn’t because the authors, directors or editors are hypocrites. It’s because they’ve failed to understand the true nature of consumer society.

One of the most talked-about cinematic set-pieces in recent memory is the scene in Fight Club where the nameless narrator (Ed Norton) pans his empty apartment, furnishing it piece by piece with Ikea furniture. The scene shimmers and pulses with prices, model numbers and product names, as if Norton’s gaze was drag-and-dropping straight out of a virtual catalogue. It is a great scene, driving the point home: the furniture of his world is mass-produced, branded, sterile. If we are what we buy, then the narrator is an Allen-key-wielding corporate-conformist drone.

In many ways, this scene is just a cgi-driven update of the opening pages of John Updike’s Rabbit, Run. After yet another numbing day selling the MagiPeel Kitchen Peeler, Harry Angstrom comes home to his pregnant and half-drunk wife whom he no longer loves. Harry takes off in his car, driving aimlessly south. As he tries to sort out his life, the music on the radio, the sports reports, the ads, the billboards, all merge in his consciousness into one monotonous, monolithic brandscape.

It may give us pause to consider that while Fight Club was hailed as “edgy” and “subversive” when it appeared in 1999, Rabbit, Run enjoyed enormous commercial success when it was first published—in 1960. If social criticism came with a “sell by” date, this one would have been removed from the shelf a long time ago. The fact that it is still around, and still provokes awe and acclaim, makes one wonder if it is really a criticism or, rather, a piece of modern mythology.

What Fight Club and Rabbit, Run present, in a user-friendly fashion, is the critique of mass society, which was developed in the late 1950s in classic works like William Whyte’s The Organization Man (1956), Vance Packard’s The Status Seekers (1959) and Paul Goodman’s Growing up Absurd (1960). The central idea is quite simple. Capitalism requires conformity to function correctly. As a result, the system is based upon a generalized system of repression. Individuals who resist the pressure to conform therefore subvert the system, and aid in its overthrow.

This theory acquired such a powerful grip on the imagination of the left during the 1960s that many people still have difficulty seeing it for what it is—a theory. Here are a few of its central postulates:

1. Capitalism requires conformity in the workers. Capitalism is one big machine; the workers are just parts. These parts need to be as simple, predictable, and interchangeable as possible. One need only look at an assembly line to see why. Like bees or ants, capitalist workers need to be organized into a limited number of homogeneous castes.

2. Capitalism requires conformity of education. Training these corporate drones begins in the schools, where their independence and creativity is beaten out of them—literally and figuratively. Call this the Pink Floyd theory of education.

3. Capitalism requires sexual repression. In its drive to stamp out individuality, capitalism denies the full range of human expression, which includes sexual freedom. Because sexuality is erratic and unpredictable, it is a threat to the established order. This is why some people thought the sexual revolution would undermine capitalism.

4. Capitalism requires conformity of consumption. The overriding goal of capitalism is to achieve ever-increasing profits through economies of scale. These are best achieved by having everyone consume the same limited range of standardized goods. Enter advertising, which tries to inculcate false or inauthentic desires. Consumerism is what emerges when we are duped into having desires that we would not normally have.

Both Fight Club and American Beauty are thoroughly soaked in the critique of mass society. Let’s look at Fight Club.

Here’s the narrator’s alter ego, Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), explaining the third thesis: “We’re designed to be hunters and we’re in a society of shopping. There’s nothing to kill anymore, there’s nothing to fight, nothing to overcome, nothing to explore. In that social emasculation this everyman is created.” And the fourth: “Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate, so we can buy shit we don’t need.” And here he is giving the narrator a scatological summary of the whole critique: “You’re not your job. You’re not how much money you have in the bank. You’re not the car you drive. You’re not the contents of your wallet. You’re not your fucking khakis. You’re the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.”

Fight Club is entirely orthodox in its Rousseauian rejection of the modern order. Less orthodox is its proffered solution, which in the middle and final acts moves swiftly from Iron John to the Trenchcoat Mafia.

A more conventional narrative arc, combined with a more didactic presentation of the critique, can be found in American Beauty, the Oscar-winning companion piece to Fight Club. The two films offer identical takes on
the homogenizing and emasculating effects of mass society, though the heroes differ in their strategies of resistance. Fight Club suggests that the only solution is to blow up the whole machine; in American Beauty, Lester (Kevin Spacey) decides to subvert it from within.

When Lester first starts to rebel against his grey-scale, cookie-cutter life, he begins by mocking his wife’s (Annette Bening) Martha Stewart materialism. Here’s Lester in a voice-over: “That’s my wife, Carolyn. See the way the handle on her pruning shears matches her gardening clogs? That’s not an accident.”

Later, Carolyn halts Lester’s sexual advances in order to prevent him from spilling beer on the couch. They fight. “It’s just a couch,” Lester says. Carolyn: “This is a $4,000 sofa upholstered in Italian silk. It is not just a couch.” Lester: “It’s just a couch!” Capitalism offers us consumer goods as a substitute for sexual gratification. Lester strains at the bit.

The relationship between sexual frustration and mass society is a general theme of the movie. Here is Lester giving his family theses one and three over dinner:

Carolyn: Your father and I were just discussing his day at work. Why don’t you tell our daughter about it, honey?

Lester: Janie, today I quit my job. And then I told my boss to go fuck himself, and then I blackmailed him for almost $60,000. Pass the asparagus.

Carolyn: Your father seems to think this type of behaviour is something to be proud of.

Lester: And your mother seems to prefer I go through life like a fucking prisoner while she keeps my dick in a mason jar under the sink.

So what does Lester do to reassert his individuality, his masculinity? He takes a new job. He starts working out. He lusts after, then seduces, his daughter’s friend. He starts smoking pot in the afternoon. In short, he rejects all of the demands that society makes on a man of his age. But does he stop consuming? Of course not. Consider the scene in which he buys a new car. Carolyn comes home and asks Lester whose car that is in the driveway. Lester: “Mine. 1970 Pontiac Firebird. The car I’ve always wanted and now I have it. I rule!”

Lester has thrown off the shackles of conformist culture. He’s grown a dick, become a man again. All because he bought a car. Carolyn’s couch may be “just a couch,” but his car is much more than “just a car.” Lester has become the ultimate consumer. Like a teenager, he consumes without guilt, without foresight, and without responsibility. Meanwhile, Carolyn’s questions about how he intends to make the mortgage payments are dismissed as merely one more symptom of her alienated existence. Lester is beyond all that. He is now what Thomas Frank calls “the rebel consumer.”

What American Beauty illustrates, with extraordinary clarity, is that rebelling against mass society is not the same thing as rebelling against consumer society. Through his rebellion, Lester goes from being right-angle square to dead cool. This is reflected in his consumption choices. Apart from the new car, he develops a taste for very expensive marijuana—$2,000 an ounce, we are told, and very good. “This is all I ever smoke,” his teenaged dealer assures him. Welcome to the club, where admission is restricted to clients with the most discriminating taste. How is this any different from Frasier and Niles at their wine club?

What we need to see is that consumption is not about conformity, it’s about distinction. People consume in order to set themselves apart from others. To show that they are cooler (Nike shoes), better connected (the latest nightclub), better informed (single-malt Scotch), morally superior (Guatemalan handcrafts), or just plain richer (bmws).

The problem is that all of these comparative preferences generate competitive consumption. “Keeping up with the Joneses,” in today’s world, does not always mean buying a tract home in the suburbs. It means buying a loft downtown, eating at the right restaurants, listening to obscure bands, having a pile of Mountain Equipment Co-op gear and vacationing in Thailand. It doesn’t matter how much people spend on these things, what matters is the competitive structure of the consumption. Once too many people get on the bandwagon, it forces the early adopters to get off, in order to preserve their distinction. This is what generates the cycles of obsolescence and waste that we condemn as “consumerism.”

Many people who are, in their own minds, opposed to consumerism nevertheless actively participate in the sort of behaviour that drives it. Consider Naomi Klein. She starts out No Logo by decrying the recent conversion of factory buildings in her Toronto neighbourhood into “loft living” condominiums. She makes it absolutely clear to the reader that her place is the real deal, a genuine factory loft, steeped in working-class authenticity, yet throbbing with urban street culture and a “rock-video aesthetic.”

Now of course anyone who has a feel for how social class in this country works knows that, at the time Klein was writing, a genuine factory loft in the King-Spadina area was possibly the single most exclusive and desirable piece of real estate in Canada. Unlike merely expensive neighbourhoods in Toronto, like Rosedale and Forest Hill, where it is possible to buy your way in, genuine lofts could only be acquired by people with superior social connections. This is because they contravened zoning regulations and could not be bought on the open market. Only the most exclusive segment of the cultural elite could get access to them.

Unfortunately for Klein, zoning changes in Toronto (changes that were part of a very enlightened and successful strategy to slow urban sprawl) allowed yuppies to buy their way into her neighbourhood. This led to an erosion of her social status. Her complaints about commercialization are nothing but an expression of this loss of distinction. What she fails to observe is that this distinction is precisely what drives the real estate market, what creates the value in these dwellings. People buy these lofts because they want a piece of Klein’s social status. Naturally, she is not amused. They are, after all, her inferiors—an inferiority that they demonstrate through their willingness to accept mass-produced, commercialized facsimiles of the “genuine” article.

Klein claims these newcomers bring “a painful new self-consciousness” to the neighbourhood. But as the rest of her introduction demonstrates, she is also conscious—painfully so—of her surroundings. Her neighbourhood is one where “in the twenties and thirties Russian and Polish immigrants darted back and forth on these streets, ducking into delis to argue about Trotsky and the leadership of the international ladies’ garment workers’ union.” Emma Goldman, we are told, “the famed anarchist and labour organizer,” lived on her street! How exciting for Klein! What a tremendous source of distinction that must be.

Klein suggests that she may be forced to move out of her loft when the landlord decides to convert the building to condominiums. But wait a minute. If that happens, why doesn’t she just buy her loft? The problem, of course, is that a loft-living condominium doesn’t have quite the cachet of a “genuine” loft. It becomes, as Klein puts it, merely an apartment with “exceptionally high ceilings.” It is not her landlord, but her fear of losing social status that threatens to drive Klein from her neighbourhood.

Here we can see the forces driving competitive consumption in their purest and most unadulterated form.

Once we acknowledge the role that distinction plays in structuring consumption, it’s easy to see why people care about brands so much. Brands don’t bring us together, they set us apart. Of course, most sophisticated people claim that they don’t care about brands—a transparent falsehood. Most people who consider themselves “anti-consumerist” are extremely brand-conscious. They are able to fool themselves into believing that they don’t care because their preferences are primarily negative. They would never be caught dead driving a Chrysler or listening to Celine Dion. It is precisely by not buying these uncool items that they establish their social superiority. (It is also why, when they do consume “mass society” products, they must do so “ironically”—so as to preserve their distinction.)

As Pierre Bourdieu reminds us, taste is first and foremost distaste—disgust and “visceral intolerance” of the taste of others. This makes it easy to see how the critique of mass society could help drive consumerism. Take, for example, Volkswagen and Volvo advertising from the early 1960s. Both automakers used the critique of “planned obsolescence” quite prominently in their advertising campaigns. The message was clear: buy from the big Detroit automakers and show everyone that you’re a dupe, a victim of consumerism; buy our car and show people that you’re too smart to be duped by advertising, that you’re wise to the game.

This sort of “anti-advertising” was enormously successful in the 1960s, transforming the VW bug from a Nazi car into the symbol of the hippie counterculture and making the Volvo the car of choice for an entire generation of leftist academics. Similar advertising strategies are just as successful today, and are used to sell everything from breakfast cereal to clothing. Thus the kind of ad parodies that we find in Adbusters, far from being subversive, are indistinguishable from many genuine ad campaigns. Flipping through the magazine, one cannot avoid thinking back to Frank’s observation that “business is amassing great sums by charging admission to the ritual simulation of its own lynching.”

We find ourselves in an untenable situation  On the one hand, we criticize conformity and encourage individuality and rebellion. On the other hand, we lament the fact that our ever-increasing standard of material consumption is failing to generate any lasting increase in happiness. This is because it is rebellion, not conformity, that generates the competitive structure that drives the wedge between consumption and happiness. As long as we continue to prize individuality, and as long as we express that individuality through what we own and where we live, we can expect to live in a consumerist society.

It is tempting to think that we could just drop out of the race, become what Harvard professor Juliet Schor calls “downshifters.” That way we could avoid competitive consumption entirely. Unfortunately, this is wishful thinking. We can walk away from some competitions, take steps to mitigate the effects of others, but many more simply cannot be avoided.

In many cases, competition is an intrinsic feature of the goods that we consume. Economists call these “positional goods”—goods that one person can have only if many others do not. Examples include not only penthouse apartments, but also wilderness hikes and underground music. It is often claimed that a growing economy is like the rising tide that lifts all boats. But a growing economy does not create more antiques, more rare art, or more downtown real estate, it just makes them more expensive. Many of us fail to recognize how much of our consumption is devoted to these positional goods.

Furthermore, we are often forced into competitive consumption, just to defend ourselves against the nuisances generated by other people’s consumption. It is unreasonable, for example, for anyone living in a Canadian city to own anything other than a small, fuel-efficient car. At the same time, in many parts of the North America, the number of big SUVs on the road has reached the point where people are forced to think twice before buying a small car. The SUVs make the roads so dangerous for other drivers that everyone has to consider buying a larger car just to protect themselves.

This is why expecting people to opt out is often unrealistic; the cost to the individual is just too high. It’s all well and good to say that SUVs are a danger and shouldn’t be on the road. But saying so doesn’t change anything. The fact is that SUVs are on the road, and they’re not about to disappear anytime soon. So are you willing to endanger your children’s lives by buying a subcompact?

Because so much of our competitive consumption is defensive in nature, people feel justified in their choices. Unfortunately, everyone who participates contributes just as much to the problem, regardless of his or her intentions. It doesn’t matter that you bought the SUV to protect yourself and your children, you still bought it, and you still made it harder for other drivers to opt out of the automotive arms race. When it comes to consumerism, intentions are irrelevant. It is only consequences that count.

This is why a society-wide solution to the problem of consumerism is not going to occur through personal or cultural politics. At this stage of late consumerism, our best bet is legislative action. If we were really worried about advertising, for example, it would be easy to strike a devastating blow against the “brand bullies” with a simple change in the tax code. The government could stop treating advertising expenditures as a fully tax-deductible business expense (much as it did with entertainment expenses several years ago). Advertising is already a separately itemized expense category, so the change wouldn’t even generate any additional paperwork. But this little tweak to the tax code would have a greater impact than all of the culture jamming in the world.

Of course, tweaking the tax code is not quite as exciting as dropping a “meme bomb” into the world of advertising or heading off to the latest riot in all that cool mec gear. It may, however, prove to be a lot more useful. What we need to realize is that consumerism is not an ideology. It is not something that people get tricked into. Consumerism is something that we actively do to one another, and that we will continue to do as long as we have no incentive to stop. Rather than just posturing, we should start thinking a bit more carefully about how we’re going to provide those incentives.

The Rebel Sell will appear in book-length this September from HarperCollins. Click here to order a copy from Amazon.ca

You can also order this book from Amazon.com. The American title is Nation of Rebels.

Joseph Heath is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. He is the author of The Efficient Society: Why Canada is as Close to Utopia as it Gets, published by Penguin Canada in 2001.

Andrew Potter has taught philosophy at the University of Toronto and at Trent University in Peterborough. He is currently a visiting fellow at the Centre de Recherche en Ethique at the Universite de Montreal.