People Who Do Not Socially Distance Are Considered Deviant in the COVID 19 World Essay

Deviance

Currently, not social distancing is considered deviant. People will take pictures of others and put them on social media to shame them and they will call them names like “Covidiot” because they are not following the social distancing guidelines that the US government has put forward and that state governments are making mandatory in some cases. They are deviant because they are being labeled as such in the news media and on social media, and according to labeling theory labels are a way to ostracize, to marginalize and to prevent groups of people from being legitimized or from having any power in a system (Lumen, 2019).

Some things that were deviant 50 years ago were homosexuality and having children out of wedlock. Today these things are normalized and the change has occurred in large part thanks to the second wave, third wave and fourth wave feminism. The activism of feminism in the media and in universities has helped to make these formerly taboo issues more acceptable, and it has had something to do with the alteration of how sex is perceived and what the function or purpose of sex and marriage are. The politically correct standards have been applied and embraced by the upcoming culture so that there is a militancy about protecting these new values whereas the culture of 50 years ago was unable to sustain whatever rigidness it had in the face of the rising combination of media, politics and education about social mores and sexual values. Things that are deviant now—like smoking cigarettes in public—were not deviant 50 years ago, when everyone smoked in public. This change occurred because everyone is so scared for their own health and trusts health care authorities as though their word were gospel. It is a culturally-ingrained institutionalized form of trusting experts without critical thought.

References

Lumen. (2019). Theoretical perspectives on deviance. Retrieved from https://courses.lumenlearning.com/sociology/chapter/theoretical-perspectives-on-deviance/