Sociology

Danielle Polisseni Sociology 101 Extra Credit Being a deviant person in our American culture means being marked as an outsider. Labeling deviant behavior is a society’s attempt to regulate people’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors so each person falls within the “normative” range of things. According to our American values, your friend is deviant in some ways but some of the things he does wouldn’t be considered deviant. One of our culture’s values is individual achievement and personal success, we believe that a “successful” person is due respect and that we should work for what we want. The fact that your friend chose to not work for most of his life and depends on his wife to bring home “the bread”, we would consider him to be deviant. While it’s becoming increasingly common to see women in the work field and help bring home income, it’s still seen that the man of the house should be the provider, this is where your friend is deviant, at least in my eyes. Most people, like your friend, don’t like criticism, we tend to just let it go through us or ignore it because we know that we need to work to provide for ourselves. The fact that your friend won’t work or even work for himself because he can’t handle criticism also makes him deviant, in my opinion you just suck it up and deal with it. But then when you know that your friend had pretty much built their house himself and gardens to produce most of their food, you see him as self-sufficient and not so much as a deviant person. Knowing that if he were to sell his house and it would go for something around $250,000, you see him as less deviant because in our culture we value material things and tend to look past what people do to make them deviant when they have nicer things. The one thing that your does do that is seen completely deviant in our culture is smoke pot, and used to grow it. To him, he smokes to feel better and deal