Defining Deviancy

In sociological discourse, we encounter the term "defining deviancy down." This phrase refers to behavior that used to be condemned but now is tolerated. It's an academic way of grumbling, "Society is going to the dogs." Profanity and obscenity in what used to be called "mixed company," for example. Open sale of sexually explicit literature. "Four-letter-words," extreme gore, and onscreen sex in movies. Going to houses of worship or expensive restaurants without wearing a coat and tie or a dress (as appropriate). (In my childhood, it was frowned upon for a girl or woman to shop at an upscale department story without dressing up.) For boys, wearing a T-shirt to school (the crisis in one episode of LEAVE IT TO BEAVER centered around this transgression); for girls, going to school in pants instead of skirts. Individuals of opposite sexes living together outside of marriage. Unmarried women becoming pregnant and having babies openly instead of hiding their condition in shame. Ubiquitous gun violence in the inner cities—in WEST SIDE STORY, the introduction of a gun into the feud between the rival gangs was framed as a shocking escalation of the conflict.

In many respects, however, we've defined "deviancy" upward since what some people nostalgically recall as the good old days of the 1950s. Smoking, for example. In my childhood, most adults smoked cigarettes, and they did it anytime almost everywhere. In grocery stores! At the doctor's office! Air pollution by big-engined, gas-guzzling cars that used to be status symbols is now disapproved of. So are the racial slurs often heard in casual conversation back then. Dogs nowadays don't run loose in our communities like Lassie and Lady (my main sources of information on dogs until my parents acquired one, who didn't act nearly so intelligent as Lady, the Tramp, and their friends). Leash laws didn't become widespread until my teens. Alleged humor based on physical abuse of women by men used to be common in the media. Ralph on THE HONEYMOONERS regularly threatened to hit his wife ("to the moon, Alice!"), though he never did so on screen, and in THE QUIET MAN, John Wayne spanked Maureen O'Hara in the middle of the road. Public intoxication, including drunk driving, was also casually treated as funny, as in many of P. G. Wodehouse's Jeeves stories and the novels of Thorne Smith (author of TOPPER). Most adults seemed to regard bullying as a commonplace childhood rite of passage that kids had to learn to cope with, as long as it didn't cause significant injury. As far as safety features such as seat belts in cars were concerned, there was no law requiring passengers to wear them, because they didn't exist.

Where some societal changes are concerned, factions differ on whether they constitute improvement or deterioration. Some contemporary parents wouldn't think of letting their children visit friends, roam around the neighborhood, or ride a bus on their own at ages that were considered perfectly normal until recent decades. Conversely, if adults from the 1950s could witness today's trends, most of them would probably consider "helicopter parenting" harmful as well as ridiculous. Are the emergence of same-sex marriage, dual-career households, and legal access to abortion good or bad changes? The answer to that question depends on one's political philosophy. Does a decline in church and synagogue membership mean we've become a society of secularists and atheists, or does it simply mean that, because we no longer have so much social pressure to look "religious," for the most part only sincere believers join religious organizations? (C. S. Lewis noted that an alleged "decline" in chapel attendance among university students in fact reflected a sudden drop as soon as attendance became optional instead of compulsory.)

Whether you think current trends in behavior, customs, and morals are mainly positive or negative probably influences whether you believe Steven Pinker, for instance, is right or wrong when he claims in ENLIGHTENMENT NOW that we're living in the best of times rather than the worst.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Feeling a little alien?

Sooner or later, most of us will feel a little alien... and although this is an alien romance blog, I am not talking about sexually groping a diminutive being from Mars, or Europa, or Deneb.

I am talking about cultural dissonance. I make no apologies for using an ambiguous headline to make a point. The news media does it all the time.

Cultural dissonance is (IMHO) one of the most fertile and promising sources of internal and external conflict for heroes and heroines in alien/human romances, and we can all identify on some level with it. How far do we go in researching it?


What Is Cultural Dissonance?

Dissonance is a difference in point of view (or a lack of agreement) about how the world, or society, or a community works or how it ought to work.

We see it in politics, religion, the sciences, and probably in economics. Feelings run high, people feel uncomfortable, not least because they cannot understand why those who do not agree with them --apparently-- fail to see the superior good sense and fairness and reasonableness of their own position.

Cultures differ. If you live in a melting pot, you must expect the pot to boil over. That was a strength and a weakness in the Babylon 5 series. I particularly appreciated the point that there had been four Babylons before Babylon 5.

‘Cultural dissonance’ describes

a sense of discomfort, discord or disharmony arising from cultural differences or inconsistencies which are unexpected or unexplained and therefore difficult for individuals to negotiate. Dissonance can be experienced by all parties in the cultural interchange and attempts to resolve discordant issues can be bewildering or distressing.

Teachers know all about cultural dissonance, and how hard it is to teach children from different cultures and to make appropriate allowances for differences in the values, knowledge, skills, and learning styles that children bring to the classroom from their homes.

I suppose most people assume that their own views, habits, lifestyles, expectations are mainstream. Finding out that this is not the case can be deeply disturbing and infuriating.

How realistic are your favorite aliens when they visit Earth, or your humans when they are transported to another planet? Are they adequately angry, frightened, confused, baffled, outraged? Do they know when to keep quiet, and when (if at all) to hash out "where they are coming from"?

What sort of research do you do, or can you visualize your favorite alien romance author doing?

Possibly, this is not a propitious time to try going to a political meeting held by members of a party with whose policies you violently disagree for the sake of research. Safer might be to join a social networking group with whom you have nothing in common. Hang out with the nonogenarians subgroup on Eons, or with the young texting Haters on GoodReads, or the extremely sexually adventurous subgroup on TBD, or in a "pirates" chat room can be quite a good way to glimpse what it might be like to be an alien.


Happy researching.

Rowena Cherry