The concept of beauty has all too frequently been seen in a binary opposition to that of usefulness, and thus the lucrative beauty industry has flourished with high exchange values and questionable use values. A combination of increasing amounts of both leisure time and disposable income within relatively unregulated economies has resulted in flourishing body-fixated industries. Consumer capitalism standardises bodies, while the state still attempts to control them by legislating reproductive choice and access to AIDS treatment drugs. Bodies apparently liberated by the egalitarian surface of permissive consumer capitalism are in fact under siege by both private and state interests. But communes are not necessarily communities or communistic.
Communities often identify their members through coded consumerist practices.
From the birth of the modern gay liberation movement came the formation of a visible community. Yet disco was hardly just a recording industry supply product for a burgeoning market. Disco, not unlike house and rave in the nineties, is arguably a more communitarian form of music than, say, classic rock. Under the disco light, gay men danced, cruised, flirted, met, and scored. This period of ecstasy could not be sustained.