Normal
Related: everyday - mainstream - reality - straight - vanilla
Compare: abnormal
Definition
Conforming with, adhering to, or constituting a norm, standard, pattern, level, or type; typical: normal room temperature; one's normal weight; normal diplomatic relations.In behavior, normal means not deviating very much from the average. "Not normal" is often used in a negative sense (improper, sick, etc.). Abnormality varies greatly in how pleasant or unpleasant this is for other people; somebody may half-jokingly be called "pleasantly disturbed". Examples of "normality" are mainstream, temperance, vanilla sex, equilibrium, stability, reality, peace, health, middle way; contrast these with eccentricity, perversion, paraphilia, intersexual, disease, disability, mental illness, addiction, war, crime, fantasy, dream, hallucination, illusion.
Some terms could fit in both lists, for example boredom: too much "normality" can be boring, but boredom is a kind of suffering, which can be considered "not normal".
--http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_%28behavior%29 [Jan 2006]Quote: It is dangerous to be right on a subject on which the established authorities are wrong. - Voltaire. (It is dangerous not to be "normal" even if you are right).
Quote: Keep it Real! (Stop being fixated by dreams of unachievable things, focus on the reality of the present situation.)
Norm (sociology)
In sociology, a norm, or social norm, is a rule that is socially enforced. Social sanctioning is what distinguishes norms from other cultural products or social constructions such as meaning and values. Norms and normlessness are thought to affect a wide variety of human behavior. --http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(sociology) [Mar 2006]
Warm Leatherette (1978) - The Normal
- Warm Leatherette (1978) - The Normal [Amazon US]
The Normal = one Daniel Miller, the eventual head of Mute Records. From this initial single sprang one of the most important labels in modern, trendsetting music from the late 1970s onward, one which gave us Depeche Mode, Soft Cell, Einsturzende Neubauten, and very much so on. This is a raw piece of work, bedroom-recorded, and very much a part of the industrial outgrowths of the UK punk scene, like similar efforts by Cabaret Voltaire, Throbbing Gristle, Robert Rental, Thomas Leer, and others. Imagine a garage-band Kraftwerk, and you'll get the idea. The sad thing about this meager single, though, is that there's more to the Daniel Miller oeuvre than this, and it's nigh-impossible to get, such as an intense and exposed-nerve-raw live set by Miller (as The Normal) and Robert Rental which was released on Rough Trade c. 1980. So, this gets five stars, both for content and historical import, but a full compilation of The Normal et al would likely get a theoretical six. --DAC Crowell for amazon.com
The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life (2000) - Michael Warner
- The Trouble With Normal: Sex, Politics, and the Ethics of Queer Life
(2000) - Michael Warner [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]
The Trouble with Normal argues passionately against same-sex marriage, but here's the twist: not because it denigrates the institution of marriage, but because it perpetuates the cultural shame attached to sex between consenting but unmarried adults. When gay men and lesbians try to claim that they're just like "normal folk," Michael Warner writes, they do a profound disservice to other queer folk who choose not to live in monogamous or matrimonial bliss and who believe that the solution to being stigmatized for your sexuality is not to pretend it doesn't exist. Same-sex marriage advocates, he continues, often seem to be willfully blind to the cultural ramifications of their position, viewing marriage as "an intensified and deindividuated form of coming out." They don't seem to realize that if society validates their relationships, other types of relationships will by necessity be invalidated. (He also makes a strong case for the fight against sexual shame's being more than a queer issue, citing 1998's presidential impeachment crisis: "[Bill] Clinton, certainly, was not the first to discover how hard it is in this culture to assert any dignity when you stand exposed as a sexual being.") Extending his analysis, Warner shows how the championing of married gays and lesbians as "normal" is part of the same cultural climate that leads to "quality of life" crackdowns against queercentric businesses--as is already underway in New York City--and a deliberate sabotage of safer-sex education that puts millions of Americans at continued risk of exposure to HIV. Warner's precise, straightforward argument is enlivened by numerous sharp zingers, as when he accuses Andrew Sullivan of "breath[ing] new and bitchy life into Jesuitical pieties" about sexual morality. The Trouble with Normal is a bold, provocative book that forces readers to reconsider what sexual liberation really means. --Ron Hogan for amazon.com - Tyranny of the Normal: Essays on Bioethics, Theology & Myth - Leslie Fiedler [Amazon US] [FR] [DE] [UK]
Leslie Fiedler, author of Fiedler on the Roof: Essays on Literature and Jewish Identity and the acclaimed Love and Death in the American Novel, is back with Tyranny of the Normal, a set of nine essays written during the previous quarter century that explore his iconoclastic views on the whole notion of normality--and by extrapolation political correctness--that plagues our modern discourse. This is not your typical view of the world. "Deep within the under-mind of all of us there persists a desire to murder the disabled," he avers in oneessay; in another he argues that the inevitable ambivalence we all feel over the birth of a child (love and hate) but are afraid to own up to, could be mitigated if we "reinstitute some form of permitted ritualized 'abuse' of the young." Still, his goal is less to shock and titillate than it is to point out that by pretending we no longer fear those things that are different, a tendency that is part and parcel of the human condition, we are only making matters worse. --Amazon.com
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