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0:00
Hello, there, students. This week, we're going to be looking at Chapter 3 and 4. The first reading we are going to go over will look at Howard Becker's relativism and labeling theory. The essence of this idea of labeling theory is that it's not about the behavior or the deviant act, but, rather, it's about society's reaction. And what we find is that similar acts, the response will be very, very different. So, to give you some examples,
0:38
think about how people look at homeless people setting up tents and living, like, on the street. Obviously, you know, we hear about that kind of stuff on the news all the time. It's considered such an issue, such a social problem, but when we look at people who are setting up tents to go shopping on Black Friday in front of Best Buy, that is totally fine and almost even fun. So, we look at, like, the same type behavior and, again, society's response to it.
1:13
Some other examples something, you know, like drinking in public. You can have, let's say, a homeless person who's, you know, drinking outside, you know, maybe even their drink is covered by a brown paper bag. So, you don't even really see it. It could be a bottle of water, right?
1:33
And, then, you have the same behavior happening inside a bar, you know, six feet away. And, so, we look at how, you know, the behavior of the homeless is criminalized, while, you know, rich people paying $12 a martini to drink inside this bar, that behavior is totally fine, condoned, you know? And, you know, you have to understand where this all comes from, you know, the idea that the person camping outside of Best Buy or drinking the $12 martini, they are, you know,
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participating in, you know, a certain amount of capitalism that we, you know, think is very important.
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So, we can look at how very -- you know, very similar acts, the response is what's more important in considering.
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We also might look, historically, at the way
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children born out of wedlock were looked at. So, for instance, you know, it's not until someone actually gets pregnant that people get upset.
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But, of course, the stigma for engaging in that act, for most of history the stigma has been a lot heavier for the woman than it is for the man, you know. Sometimes she's considered a social outcast for these types of things. But we can also look at how this has changed significantly. So, you know, across time and space -- I'll give you a story. I have a great aunt from Ireland. She actually died, you know, in the '90s, about five years ago.
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And there was a family secret that I found out about when I was in high school about this particular aunt had gotten pregnant at 14 in Ireland. And, again, we're talking about almost 100 years ago or, no, 80 years ago at this point. But she was actually put into a place that they called a "laundry," and it was, like, forced labor. And, you know, a lot of these laundries where these young girls were put in, it was like a boarding house for bad girls.
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And some of them had engaged in some deviance, but most of them were getting in there for getting pregnant out of wedlock, or not -- you know, being young and being -- of course, you know, the males who impregnated these women did not face the same types of consequences. And I would contend that, for this aunt, you know, this behavior, I would say, followed her for most of her life. You know, think about it, you know, I remember my grandmother telling me when I was in high
4:11
school that this all happened, and she was really ashamed that this had happened. And, so, this wasn't even her, coming from this family, she had a sense of shame. And, again, you have to understand the context. This is a very Catholic country. Later, they ended up finding that some of these laundries -- and Google it. It's insane -- but they ended up finding a bunch of bodies, babies in the back that had been buried at a couple of these laundries. So, the amount of shame
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associated with this even, you know, we can assume, you know, influenced people who were running these to engage in all types of other deviance, as well. And, so, you know, this idea of shame goes really, really far.
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And, you know, I think can impact someone for a life time. This particular aunt never got married. And I find that really interesting, you know, it wasn't that there weren't plenty of partners. She was, you know, attractive. And I really wonder how much of her getting pregnant at 14 ended up stigmatizing her for the rest of her life. And, you know, I could be making some assumptions. But, you know, she came from a family of 9 and there was only one other person who didn't get
5:29
married. Ironically, it was her sister, who ended up -- they ended up living together for most of their lives. And, so, I don't know if that was something she had done to, you know, help her sister, I don't know. I'm making a lot of assumptions, but it's something to think about and I don't think this falls outside of the patterns. And, so, labelling can be really, really powerful in terms of how one comes to look at their self-identity. So, you know, we can look at
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this from a macrolevel, where, you know, it's society's reaction to the behavior, but also how the individual comes to internalize or self-identify with that deviant label.
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We also know that there's a tendency for dominant groups to label minority groups as, you know, being deviant or criminal when, you know that, oftentimes, they're engaging in the same type of behavior. We can look at the war on drugs. And we know that, you know, this is one reason why our mass incarceration rates skyrocketed starting in the 1970s. But you know, if you look at this critically, you know, we look at the groups that were targeted in the war on drugs.
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And these were generally low-income Black people in urban areas. And, you know, if we look at the behavior of Whites at the time, you know, again, in the 1970s, there was also a lot of drug use happening. These were the disco days, the boogie nights and, you know, all this stuff, but we don't see Whites criminalized for their drug use in the same way. And in fact, you know, I would contend, at this time and you could watch plenty of the
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movies, but, you know, cocaine use in Hollywood was even glamorized. And of course, you know, how did this happen? You know, it was Blacks and people of color that were smoking crack, which is a derivative of cocaine. Cocaine's the purest form. And, then, it was, you know, the moral entrepreneurs or the people in power who were saying that crack is more dangerous and that's why we must criminalize these people. And there's really no evidence that crack is more dangerous
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than cocaine. Again, it just had to do with the people who were, you know, consuming it. We also saw that true -- you know, you saw the video of the history of drug laws and how they came to influence people of color. The same with opium. It wasn't until opium was being done by the Chinese that it became, you know, criminalized. We didn't see laudanum, which was another form of opium that Whites were primarily doing, being criminalized. And, so, when we're looking at
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this, we're looking at the stigma that's created by this type of labeling. What's also really important is that, again, it's not about the act. And, so,, you know, you don't even have to have committed this act. And, so, for Black men, especially, they are labeled as criminals without even have done anything to the point where, you know, people make assumptions. They might -- you know, we've seen plenty of examples where people call the police. Black men running down the
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street for recreation are assumed to be doing something deviant. And, you know, and we see why, you know, if everyone's calling every time you are running, we can see why they are more likely to get in trouble. And, then, again, with the war on drugs, we saw, you know, law enforcement targeting certain areas.
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And it creates an understanding as to why this becomes a self- -- kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, you know, they're being targeted at much higher rates than, you know, middle-class White communities. We also know low-income communities are more likely to have crime pushed out into the streets because they live in, you know, population-dense areas where there's a lot of people in the home. So, if you're selling drugs, for instance, you know, you're not
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going to do it in front of grandma.
9:29
Whites don't -- it's not the same, right, they don't live in the same kind of family -- familial units and things like that. And, so, we have a really famous sociologist named George Herbert Mead, and he looked into this a little bit more. And I talked a little bit about this in last week's lecture, but I want to reiterate. He coined the term "The Looking-Glass Self," and, again, this is the idea that we envision how other people see
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us, and we build a self-identity based on those ideas.
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And, you know, it comes to influence, you know, the way we see ourselves and the roles that we will play.
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So, just to give you an example of relativism and labeling, here we see a picture of Cyntoia Brown. She got a lot of media coverage, I'd say about a year ago. And the story Cyntoia Brown was that she was -- she was a child of a mother who, you know, had some major drug problems, pretty much kind of fended for herself, was -- ended up human -- you know, trafficked as a young girl
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to perform sexual acts for, you know, older individuals. And, again, she was a child at the time.
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At one point, while she was with one of these individuals, she was fearing for her life, and she shot that individual and he died.
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And, you know, in terms of looking at this case, they -- they thought that this was a criminal act, without considering the idea that, you know, this individual was preying on her and she was a child who had been trafficked, but she was still held responsible for her behavior. Now, you know, again, I'm making an assumption, but generally, the patterns that we see around cases like this is that Black and Brown girls aren't looked at an innocent.
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I would contend that if she was a White, blonde, blue-eyed girl that, you know, the reaction to this behavior would have looked very, very different. And the other thing to think about is that, you know, since I was talking about this last year in class, Cyntoia has actually -- they have decided to give her kind of clemency for this crime. And part of that is because Kim Kardashian brought attention to her case. And, so, it makes you think
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about, again, it wasn't until a person of power, you know, brought this up going, how is this possible?
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But, again, you know, we were looking at her as an assailant, not as a victim. And this goes around those ideas of labeling. And this is something that, historically, Black women have been labeled as overly sexual
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and, you know, they still carry the stigma as being criminal as, you know, black men do, as well. And, so, it's really, really interesting to kind of start to look at, you know, the differences in perception just based on who the individual is.
12:49
So, according to Becker, we'll notice that, in terms of degrees of variation, there are quite a few aspects that influence how we look at behavior. It varies across time. It varies across space. And, again, it depends on the social position of those who engage in the act, as well, who the victim is. So, we know, for instance, that when a Black man kills a White woman the punishments are a lot harsher.
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When Black people are the victims, we know that they are less likely to find the perpetrators, which is, you know, you never get that sense of justice. And even in talking about Cyntoia Brown in the previous slide, I mentioned that, you know, historically Black women were seen as stereotypes as being overly sexual. But one thing I wanted to include in that is that, historically, they were the ones who were sexually brutalized and
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exploited the most under systems of slavery and, you know, forced prostitution, human trafficking and things like that. So, you know, we see significant variation in terms of, you know, punishments. Middle-class boys don't face the same types of consequences and kind of -- they're -- you know, every junction of the criminal justice, they're more likely to be let off, right? They're less likely to be picked up by law enforcement. When White boys are picked up,
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you know, sometimes they'll just call their parents. They'll let them off with a warning. There's research that suggests that, you know, Black boys, are, you know, at every junction of the criminal justice system, they're facing much harsher punishment. We also might look at how at, you know, in certain spaces in your life, you might be allowed to engage in a little bit more deviance than, you know, what would be acceptable on in life.
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So, for instance, in college, there's kind of an understanding that maybe it's okay to experiment with a little bit of homosexuality, kind of the norm, you know, it's okay, right? Have fun, be wild. You know, but, again, you know, across space we know that people can be killed for that type of behavior. So, yeah, hopefully you're starting to see that there's significant variation. Here's you're going to watch a film on the Romani experience.
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And I bring them up because the Romani in Europe are very much kind of that lower status group in the same way that Black individuals are in the United States. And I want you to start seeing that, you know, there are patterns here. So, watch this video.
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So, hopefully, with that Romani video, you're able to kind of get a sense that you'll find these patterns in all places. And, generally, it's people who have the least amount of power who are most likely to be labeled and, again, labeled by those people in power. So, the consequences of this -- so, of course, not everybody will have these. This is a sociopsychological kind of aspect of it that some people will have a drastic change in their public identity.
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And a lot of this has to -- it depends on who kind of outs you in public. And, so, you know, if you think about you have official labeling by the criminal justice system. So, you know, are you caught stealing by your parents or are you caught stealing by law enforcement?
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You know, are you -- so it really depends on who outs you. Obviously, kind of that formal outing by law enforcement will carry a heavier stigma for that individual, right, you're, like, dang, I'm really in trouble. I have a story here, in terms of looking at kind of this from a different framework, but I had a friend who was a lesbian. And as teenager, I remember her sharing the story with me that, as a teenager, her mother was
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going through her stuff and read some letters and found out she was gay. And the mother was -- she was Mexican, she was Catholic. And she called the priest to come over, and this was how -- she came from a family of many siblings, and this is how the rest of her family found out she was a lesbian. And, again, there was a lot of stigma for her coming from this kind of culture and this kind of family. And, I mean, I remember her
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talking about how bad she felt. Because, now, it was, like, man, the priest is involved. Like, I must be doing something against God. And, so, you know, this is how people come to either accept a deviant identity or how these deviant identities are formed. We also find that the possession of one deviant trait may override all other kinds of statuses that you might hold or may have more of a generalized symbolic value. So, we talked about this. Here, there's a picture of Cardi B, right?
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So, when someone has, you know, this deviant trait, we make certain assumptions that, you know, they have these other characteristics and Cardi is really good at calling people out on this. And she talks about, hey, just because I'm a dancer doesn't mean I'm a prostitute. And, so, that's that idea of, like, the possession of one deviant identity assumes that there's other stuff about you,
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and that we also find that one master status, or the status in which is most solidified by the culture and internalized by the person will override all other master statuses. And, again, this looks at the social reaction, as well.
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And this happens a lot with race, in that, you know, race, oftentimes, overrides all different types of statuses. So, here in this video, we have a Black Harvard professor who was arrested in his home for -- you know, arrested for breaking into his own home, you know, as he's explaining to law enforcement that he is the owner of this home. So, we see that master, you know, status of being Black overriding all of these other -- you know, he's a Harvard
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professor. These are the people we hold up highest in terms of academia. And, so, you know, this really helps explain, you know, how society comes to look at certain individuals but also how they come to internalize those ideas.
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All right, hello, there. We're going to be looking at Hendershott's reading entitled "Natural Law and the Sociology of Deviance" found in Chapter 4. So, I want to start off this part of the lecture by getting you to consider that this reading is going to maybe be a little bit hard for you if you find that, you know, you're more of a constructionist in the way you look at deviance or relativist. Now, this reading's going to be analyzing deviance from more of
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that absolutist model, again, that really black and white model, either, you know, a particular act is immoral or it's not. And Hendershott thought this was really important in order to maintain the social order.
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You know, so, again, this is based on religion, morality.
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And she really believed that we needed to condemn immoral behavior because it was a threat to the social order. And she also mentioned that, you know, many early sociologists had the same kind of ideas that we needed a moral order or a common world view that would bind people to their families, to their communities, and to the larger economic and political institutions. And, so, for instance, if we looked at something like homosexuality that,
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historically, had been looked at as deviance, from Hendershott's perspective, we can understand how homosexuality would be a threat to the sanctity of marriage, from a religious perspective, and like, the social order in terms of family -- familial makeup and things like that. So, again, she's looking at this from more of the religious perspective or looking at it from a moral perspective. She would also contend that we needed to use moral relativism
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in terms of looking at other cultures. So, oftentimes, it's really easy for us to be looking at other cultures from, like, that White Westernized perspective of, oh, the way you do things is so weird or backwards or whatever, but they would say that we need to take our own morality on the back burner to evaluate their community standards in terms of how it maintains the social order. So, for instance, looking at something like machismo in
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Mexican culture or female genital mutilation, it's easy for Westernized feminists for interest -- for example to kind of look at this and kind of go, oh, you guys are so bad. I can't believe you practice machismo or FGM. But, of course, if we're objective about it, we understand that, you know, female genital mutilation has deeper symbolic meaning and, you know -- you know, contributes to the existing social order of patriarchy, same with machismo.
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So, it's really important to consider the, you know, we look at this from a moral relativist approach.
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All right, so in continuation of talking about Hendershott's reading, we would also really want to look at our father of sociology and kind of a history of sociology, Émile Durkheim, and, again, he believed that moral order was really important, that we needed a lot of shared common values to maintain social order. And that if everybody was kind of doing their own thing, we wouldn't be able to maintain these structures. And what they came to find or
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think about is that, you know, the more you start to categorize historically deviant behavior and become tolerant of it, so, for instance, things like drug use, promiscuity, abortion, right? These were all examples of defining deviance down or taking away the stigma associated with these types of behavior. And you see a lot of this under rugged individualism, which is our configuration that we use in America, right? The individual comes first,
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things like, hey, sex should be your choice on your terms. You get to decide the number of partners or who you're having sex with, you know, if you want to be with same-sex people, that's okay. Let women have ownership of their sexuality. And this would be a way of defining deviance down. And Hendershott thought that this was really a threat to the social order. And if we break it down like we saw with, you know, the example of homosexuality, that'd be a threat to, you know, the
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heterosexual, you know, order of things or marriage. Things like the number of partners might make it hard to define who is the father, like we saw historically. So, a lot of these ideas kind of go back, way back, right? But she really felt that as, you know, we define deviance down, it was really a threat to the social order.
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They also looked at the idea of defining deviance up, which is where you would actually make things more stigmatizing. We've seen examples of that with groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, where they really work to give, you know, people who have engaged in this type of behavior some understanding in terms of, you know, the harm that they've caused. So, really, making -- you know, stigmatizing it. Also things like, you know, we've seen civil rights groups
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draw attention to racism and really trying to stigmatize that stuff, and that's kind of an interesting one because it ebbs and flows back and forth where we're, like, oh, are you being politically correct? Oh, it's too politically correct. We've seen that over and over and over, right? And, so, you know, a lot of these shifts in definitions of deviance could really, you know, work against the social order of society and what some people
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believe would start eroding those, you know, aspects of it, right? Like, you let single mothers, you know, do -- do whatever they want, you know, the family will be falling apart, things like that.
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So, again, Hendershott was really concerned with this idea of redefining deviance and, like, lessening the stigma that is associated with some of these deviant behaviors. She thought the process of redefining this happened kind of subtly through the use of experts. We talked about the influence that psychology and the DSM and medical experts have in kind of medicalizing that idea. And, you know, her main argument is, you know, if we're moving from morals -- like, morals
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serve a certain purpose, right? They keep people -- they make people feel guilty. And if we're medicalizing it, it's taking the blame off of the individual. So, for instance, you know, if it's not simple to commit adultery, sex -- calling it sex addiction might actually allow people to rationalize their behavior. And, so, she really saw an issue with this, as that it didn't work to reaffirm the cultural values and, thus, would really
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lead to kind of an unraveling of the existing moral social order.
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All right, so kind of continuing on these ideas, and, you know, just to pull in some -- more of our traditional sociology,
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Durkheim believed that individuals really needed moral limits, as it affirmed our boundaries, right? Remember that line in the sand, you know, it was really even functional in this way, that things like stigmatizing single mothers preserves the social order by pushing people into marriage. This would also be true for homosexual, from kind of a more -- homosexuality from more of a religious idea. And, you know, to kind of break this down for you, Durkheim coined the term anomie.
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And anomie was known as a sense of normlessness. And, oftentimes, anomie happens during a time of transition for cultures, right, when things are changing significantly. So, think about what we experienced during the pandemic, right? Norms were changing really fast, right? And it left us -- many of us with a sense of uncertainty. I couldn't really put my finger on it, right, but it was anomie, so I should've. But I -- you know, the way I've been feeling the last few months
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living through this pandemic, I wouldn't call it depression, because there are some times -- there were some times I was depressed, but there were also some times I just felt uneasy. And that would be a better way to kind of describe how I've been feeling, because, you know, the anomie comes with not knowing what's next, right? If everyone said, oh, the pandemic will be done by January we'll just go back to normal, but it was that unknowing, right? So, that's what I mean by that
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sense of normallessness. What is normal? I don't even know, right? And, so, Hendershott and, so, many of these other theorists that work on this stuff, they really believe that, you know, as we medicalize this stuff and take away kind of that personal responsibility, that sense of, oh, I feel bad morally for what I've done, it would allow for more deviance, right? You know, because, generally, these were things that were stigmatized. And it kept the social order, right?
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Like, you know, this would keep young women from -- the idea was, you know, this would keep young women from getting pregnant before marriage, you know, things like the laundries like I was talking about in Ireland.
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You know, yeah, I'm sure it kept some people because they were petrified. And I'm trying not to influence you, you know, in terms of my own ideas, but, again, you know, this helps us really understand kind of more of where the religious person is coming from. And, you know, in the reading, they said when norms are changing swiftly, there is an unwellness to make moral judgments about the behavior, thus creating kind of cultural revolutions, right?
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In that, again, we're not looking at this from a Christian man type perspective, but more of it's the psychological man, that there's no real value as morals tie us and bind us together and maintain that social -- that social order that was so important. So, hopefully, this week's reading got you kind of thinking and bending your brain a little bit. I know this one's always a little bit harder for me to explain because it goes so kind
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of deep against how I feel. But on the same time, I think Hendershott actually makes really good sense. It helps us -- you know, I think there is something to say about people feeling bad about what they've done or feel like they've done something immoral, because, you know, there's that whole idea of, even if no one knows what you did, you know what you did. And you have to live with it, which is why so many of us don't engage in this behavior. You know, we could probably get
31:24
away with cheating sometimes or stealing or whatever, but why don't we, right? Because we want to be seen as a good person, and that's sort of, like, your development of self and, you know, that's an important thing. So, you know, don't throw Hendershott away. She's got some really good ideas, and I think it makes a lot, a lot of sense, especially if you're trying to understand kind of where other groups are coming from in terms of how they
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come to look at deviance, because we still see these ideas, right? We still see things like, you know, you shouldn't have abortion. It's black and white, you know? And, so, creating this understanding as to, you know, where certain people are coming from. It reminds me of during the women's revolution or movement in the 1970s, we had a woman named Phyllis Schlafly, and she was a woman who really fought against the women's movement, because she really saw it as a
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threat to the traditional family, right? That, you know, women will not get married, and we saw it really amplified in the media. But she really fought against the equal rights amendment. She was one of the biggest
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proponents -- or people against it. And, so, I think this gives us a lot of understanding as to where that's coming from. And I think there are a lot of people who align with these beliefs. And, so, kind of a fun one for this week. So, anyways, reach out if you have any questions, concerns, or thoughts. Have a great week.
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