Floggers

Before I went back to the US for a month in August, I noticed a lot of teens and twenty-somethings on Avenida Santa Fe wearing these really bright (and tight) jeans along with v-neck t-shirts, huge sunglasses and funky haircuts. They also tended to have a lot of facial piercings. So, I thought nothing of it until tonight when someone near my grocery store had a conflict with one of them on the street and called her a "flogger."

Well, it turns out that floggers are a phenomenon here. They are nicknamed that because they are addicted to their Fotolog website (a site in South America similar to MySpace or Facebook in the US). It's pretty fascinating to see how quickly this caught on here, and there are a bunch of videos on YouTube about them. When I first researched floggers, I typed in "flogger" into Google and the results were sites about whips (think "flog"). So, I typed in "flogger Argentina" and the results changed dramatically.

There are a few videos on YouTube that make fun of the floggers. Click here to watch my favorite. It's in castellano but you can get the point even if you don't speak the language. I wonder if this trend will ever make it to the US. To me, it appeared similar to the EMO movement in the US, but the floggers and EMOs here hate each other. There was even a huge fight (almost a riot) between them at Abasto Shopping a few months ago.

This Wikipedia description for Argentine floggers provides a bit more information. Wow. (PS: I didn't take this photo of them. Found it on Google.)