Post No.: 0933
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Deviance, or diverging from commonly accepted norms, especially regarding social or sexual behaviour, is largely disparaged and discouraged in society. Most people try earnestly to fit in with the crowd and wish to appear ‘normal’.
Deviance is typically considered perturbing. But what’s truly disturbing is the amount of people who casually abuse the word ‘psycho’ for things like which way up people eat their chocolate digestives or whether they put their trousers or socks on first – naïvely thinking that they can judge people’s characters through such irrelevant things (cod psychology, which shouldn’t be confused with the branch of psychology that studies the minds and behaviours of fish – meow). It speaks more about the narrow minds of the judgers than anything about the judged.
Something like collecting and playing with – even dressing up as – dolls as an adult isn’t in any way a crime yet it’s one over-represented stereotypical cliché of psychopathic or sexually-deviant characters in fictional media. Decapitating or dismembering toys (or torturing animals) is far more concerning than cuddling and loving them.
The relatively more common and mainstream a hobby becomes though, the less people come to believe it’s only associated with ‘weirdos’ and psychopaths; but the less people know, the more they’ll over-generalise, invariably in the direction of threat detection. It happened before with assuming that everyone who’s queer and minces is going to ‘bum you’ if you’re not careful around them. Even many supposed liberals express intolerance to people’s private pastimes that don’t really harm others. Meanwhile, taking the **** out of those who enjoy innocent quirky hobbies definitely causes harm to others! The bullying would be where the un-empathic, and thus psychopathic or sociopathic, behaviour is.
When home computing and videogaming first became things decades ago, those who were interested in them were derided as ‘nerds’ by some, and females were especially stigmatised against these interests. Well look at how some of these ‘nerds’ have become the tech billionaires and inherited the Earth (for better or worse)!
If some adults play with toys, prefer to inhabit online virtual worlds or do other things out of loneliness or social anxieties then it’s even more reason to show compassion towards them. (It’s the responsible thing to do to not purchase a living pet if one doesn’t have the time or money to care for one properly too.) Society is logically a part of the problem if it ostracises lonely people. For abused or lonely children, toys can be their only trusted friends at home.
Even in the factual news, there are many cases of people committing murders but most won’t get widely reported or grab the top headlines except if there’s something salient like they had a strange quirk or mental health problem so that it makes for a more interesting ‘villain’ character and narrative. This is a reporting bias. Even if these traits were true of those particular individuals, it’s like HIV was once associated with some homosexual men – but this didn’t mean all homosexual men had HIV or full-on AIDS, or all heterosexual men did not.
As a brief tangent, UK Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher didn’t approve of publishing public health messages about the risks of HIV and AIDS because she feared that it would encourage risky sexual behaviours in the 1980s. But that was a mistake because hundreds of people were getting HIV without being aware of the risks or what it was they had contracted. Talking openly about suicide will likewise overall reduce the rate of suicide rather than increase it (one caveat though seems to be that suicides spike slightly after the reporting of one that involves a celebrity).
Unusual people come in all shapes and sizes – they’re not just one homogenous group. Diversity is in fact what defines them. This does pose the question though of what point does an innocent kink or deviance cross into an immoral perversion or deviance?
Our understanding needs to be far better refined rather than be reliant on broad clichés otherwise we’ll fear, and let our guards down for, the wrong individuals.
Some people know so little and thus generalise so much that they’ll put homosexuals, transsexuals and paedophiles into one single category of ‘sexual deviants’. (It’s like some people will call a Chinese person any one of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Thai or another Far Eastern Asian because ‘it doesn’t matter – they’re all the same’! Or it’s metaphorically like someone might make an ‘English dish’ by combining a cottage pie with custard because ‘they’re both English things’!)
For most of us, including myself – people who dress up as ‘furries’, have sex dolls, or even marry dolls or virtual characters, are extremely bizarre. But we’ve got to query if such deviance is actually doing any harm to anyone else? Is such deviance even truly doing harm to the participants themselves? If it is, then is this self-harm culturally acceptable like not eating healthily, or unacceptable like cutting oneself? And why are some self-harms like not regularly exercising deemed culturally acceptable?
These deviant individuals may appear dysfunctional as citizens in society, but more mainstream interests or behaviours that cause ecosystem pollution, spread fake news, vanity culture, firearms culture and vices like drinking, smoking or gambling, for instance, definitely cause or risk harm in society and therefore ought to be considered more dysfunctional or antisocial and less acceptable in society – if we are to be rational and fair.
Deviance and harm therefore aren’t correlated because some mainstream behaviours are far more harmful. The stigma is therefore only because some interests or behaviours are (presently culturally considered) niche rather than particularly noxious.
So we appear to often fear difference more than what actually (even knowingly) risks society harm. And picking on people just because they’re different is one definition of being a ****.
We can’t really reliably identify a child sex offender by the way they look. We wouldn’t need a register of offenders if we could just look at someone and tell.
With stalking, it’s about the consistent patterns of behaviours, both offline and online. Dealing with the consequences, for the victims, perpetrators, and communities, is difficult. Jail time alone, no matter the duration, is largely ineffective since many will immediately go back to attempting to stalk their victims once released. We therefore have to somehow tackle the underlying root causes.
So should perpetrators be helped as well as punished? Well if it’s not coming from compassion for the perpetrator but for doing whatever helps to reduce the risk of them re-offending – then it’s ultimately for the sake of the victims, who are the most important here.
A perpetrator may have a personality disorder that gives them delusions? They may have reasons from either their troubled or over-privileged upbringing or history? Whenever we claim that someone is ‘ill and needs help’ – we should regard them as ill and compassionately give them help. It’s often difficult to say what’s evil or just tragic (see Post No.: 0922). Well science doesn’t have a view on what’s wicked or sad – just what is or isn’t, like what is or isn’t happening inside someone’s brain. And science concludes that all behaviours ultimately have underlying biological and/or developmental causes. The most ideal solution, as always, is prevention and lowering the risks, starting from when everyone is young.
Regarding any issue and context, the prevention or minimisation of harm should be the primary aim, although this mustn’t be heavy-handed. Freedoms should not be curbed if a behaviour isn’t going to risk harm towards others. But it can become dilemmatic because even if one apparently only causes harm to oneself – one could potentially influence others to copy one’s self-harming behaviour by simply doing or promoting it, or one may cause indirect harms to others like hurting those who have affective empathy for those who harm themselves.
There are positive (protective, beneficial) as well as negative (risk, vulnerability) genetic factors, as well as positive and negative environmental influences, that play a role in shaping people’s behaviours and outcomes. An impoverished environment limits the fulfilment of desirable traits (e.g. educational attainment), and a protective environment minimises the expression of undesirable traits (e.g. aggression or depression). A disadvantaged upbringing and/or lifestyle will hold one back from reaching one’s full genetic potential.
For many conditions, a stressor (an event, situation or environment, which can even sometimes be just a one-off event) can trigger a negative outcome for a genetically vulnerable person (diathesis-stress); whereas without the stressor, even a genetically vulnerable person won’t face any related negative consequences. Individuals have differing levels of neuroplasticity too (a differential susceptibility to environmental influences) – but although a resilient child may not be as affected by a negative environmental stressor, they won’t benefit as much from a positive environment either; and although a less resilient child may be more affected by a negative stressor in their environment, they’ll also benefit more from a positive environment (like a warm and caring upbringing, good social support mechanisms, and quality intervention programs).
If someone has a genetic risk for criminality then the solution isn’t to pre-emptively lock them up or put them under specific suspicion and surveillance before they’ve done anything wrong – we could pre-emptively raise them up better instead i.e. ensure they have sufficient protective environmental factors so that they’ll less likely become criminals down the line. (Besides, those aforementioned actions could make the pre-accused more vexed and vengeful against society – the opposite of what’s required! And automatically shunning whom we fear would just make us the bad guys.)
So all we think and do is partly genetically determined – but don’t forget the other, environmental, part that shapes us and affects our attitudes, behaviours and outcomes. Predispositions aren’t predeterminations or genetic fates. Eugenics isn’t necessary. Those with weaker genetic predispositions to criminality can become criminals if brought up wrong and/or put in the wrong crowd or culture, and vice-versa. So help people from birth – the earlier the better. Look at society and the wider environment and culture and not just individuals and their own personalities. Human brains are quite adaptable so make the most of this adaptability by helping to raise prosocial rather than antisocial people.
However, one problem with trying to prevent all presently-deemed forms of deviance or criminality is that it won’t allow for the possible evolution of culture – after all, behaviours like transgender acts we’re once deemed too deviant, at least in some cultures, and so if all transgender acts were prevented back then, they’d never have had a chance to become a culturally acceptable thing. It’s really quite extremely difficult or impossible to envision certain kinds of niche sexual preferences and acts ever becoming widely acceptable, but we never know? Again after all, even many people today, never mind in the past, cannot envision a world where homosexual or transsexual acts are socially acceptable things.
We can be too quick to admonish or castigate wrongdoers as if they were born to become criminals, gang members, terrorists or other outcasts or lawbreakers, but we’ve got to understand that if we were raised in the same circumstances and were exposed to the same environments as them then we’d also have had a heightened risk of falling down the same life paths. Something small could initially get us sucked into that sort of world, like petty crime, then we find we cannot get out, and it develops from there. Rich and privileged kids don’t feel the desire or need to steal as much as much poorer kids. Pets who are quick to defend through attack have usually had troubled past experiences too! It’s less about inherent moral compasses and far more about histories, current situations and (the lack of) opportunities. No one is born to inevitably commit what we consider as evil or sinful.
You can share your viewpoints on questions like when does an innocent deviance become an immoral deviance by using the Twitter comment button below.
Meow.
Comment on this post by replying to this tweet:
