We're all teased or pressured into conforming to the all-levelling social norms of mediocrity.
H.M. ForesterTags: conformity mediocrity norms
What desire can be contrary to nature since it was given to man by nature itself?
Michel FoucaultWomen have married because it was necessary, in order to survive economically, in order to have children who would not suffer economic deprivation or social ostracism, in order to remain respectable, in order to do what was expected of women because coming out of "abnormal" childhoods they wanted to feel "normal," and because heterosexual romance has been represented as the great female adventure, duty, and fulfillment. We may faithfully or ambivalently have obeyed the institution, but our feelings - and our sensuality - have not been tamed
or contained within it.
Tags: marriage heterosexuality norms
Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found
Ulysses
indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce—to which in fact he was once taken.
Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne—who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked by the profusion of naked statues.
Tags: e-m-forster puritanism nathaniel-hawthorne norms lenny-bruce
Equally serious is the complaint that psychoanalysis as a medical practice is a form of oppressive social control, labelling individuals and forcing them to conform to arbitrary definitions of ‘normality’. This charge is in fact more usually aimed against psychiatric medicine as a whole: as far as Freud’s own views on ‘normality’ are concerned, the accusation is largely misdirected. Freud’s work showed, scandalously, just how ‘plastic’ and variable in its choice of objects libido really is, how so-called sexual perversions form part of what passes as normal sexuality, and how heterosexuality is by no means a natural or self-evident fact. It is true that Freudian psychoanalysis does usually work with some concept of a sexual ‘norm’; but this is in no sense given by Nature.
Terry EagletonTags: sexuality nature freud psychiatry heterosexuality norms libido
Law is error, you see. It's an attempt to write down a lot of things everyone ought to know anyway.
Nick HarkawayTags: society values law rules structure criminals norms
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