The first step towards Dudism
Often, dudes have to define themselves against a folk upbringing, reassessing the values that have been passed down to them from their families, schools, churches, corporate environments, and so on.6 Folk-structures tend to promote conformity, which is not bad in itself. It is through elaborate folk structures that great traditions have been passed down, often in a non-hierarchical, organic way, and these traditions provide us with the cultural, symbolic “raw materials,” so to speak, which we dudes may rearrange as artists to produce our own dude-selves.
The strong influence of Folk upbringing compels Dudes to participate in Groups where individuals share a valued quality, activity or aspect of identity. There are innumerable examples of these subculture activities, from burlesque theater to knitting circles to community-supported agriculture to guerrilla bike-riding. Over a dude’s lifetime, a single group may come to express such dominance in its life that the dude may revert to a kind of faux-folk. The fine line between a Dude and a faux-folk is how able and willing that person is to continue interacting with Dudes and dude culture not associated with its favored group.
There are a couple of reasons for the fall into faux-folk. A dude might come into a Group before he has formed a substantial chunk of his own value system. The Group feels familiar and the ideas and attitudes he finds therein are more developed extensions of his own inklings. The dude might then personally espouse a kind of allegiance to and emulation of the Group that is Folk in character. In another case, a strong dude might be moved by social injustice to band together with other similarly oriented dudes in a Group that addresses and combats the perceived injustice. If the Group’s fellow members and goals take prominence in the dude’s life to the exclusion of others, then she, too, is moving from a Dude to a Faux-Folk lifestyle.7
Dudes tending toward Faux-Folkism:
CONVENTION HALL SOCIALITE
This is a Dude whose primary social group tends to gather in conventions – comics, anachronism societies, and furries are all representative of this social type. The individual bent of this dude is so contrary to the bent of general society that like types can only be found in the darkest, dustiest corridors of the culture, and said types are not likely to bump into flesh-and-blood like-minded fellows without the help of these large-scale encounter events. The internet widens these corridors, making them a lot less dusty, if only a little less dark.
NP-ARMY or BEIGE RACE
This type does not stand out in a crowd – she and he present themselves with an utterly sober comportment and fashion (often bespectacled). They tend to primarily value refined knowledge, or the air of education, which tends to remove them from passionate expression and urges to debauchery. Also called “enunciators”, these are avid subscribers to NPR and pack the house at a Spalding Grey concert, emitting muffled clouds of knowing laughter at his most oblique references.
Beyond Faux-Folk lies the hallowed realm of Babymaking, responsible for the transformation of dudes into Next Generation Folk, often unintentionally! Many a young, partnered Dude has had to abandon the full-time dude lifestyle for some combination of Dick and Folk (economic and familial) existence, faithfully if decreasingly retaining contact with some friend(s) or preoccupation from fondly regarded Dude years.
