Normal Does Not Mean Common

How society gaslights children on the topics of marriage and sexuality

Recently, I read an article by a young woman who was talking about the effect that her father's porn usage had on her young psyche. It seems that she was aware that her father was looking at pornography while she was very young, and felt then that he was cheating on her mother. Now, as an adult, she wonders why this “normal” behavior (to use her word) bothered her so much then, and especially why it still occasionally bothers her now that she is “mature” and understands that it's “normal” for men to watch porn.

I feel for this young woman. I experienced something similar with my parents’ divorce. What I, as a child, felt was deeply injurious, to my parents, to myself, to my brother, I was told was “normal.” I was forced over the course of about ten years to rationalize and to accept this “new normal,” with an immature brain and an unformed mind. I was 11 years old when they got divorced, and grappling with the loss of our home on account of a natural disaster only a few months prior. If my life were some novel, literary critics would interpret the destruction of my home by natural disaster as a kind of foreshadowing of the destruction of my family by divorce, all of it forcing my innocence to end abruptly, perhaps a metaphor for my experience of puberty which was just beginning. I was taught to fool myself into believing that what was good was actually evil, and that what was evil was, in fact, good. Or, at least, if it wasn’t good, it was at least tolerable. It had to be. After all, it was normal.

I've spent ten years of adulthood unlearning the gaslighting that took place during my adolescence. I was taught during my adolescence not how to express my anger at the divorce in a healthy manner, but that I must suppress that anger. I was taught that my righteous indignation at the destruction of my family was a problem with my way of thinking, a problem internal to me, rather than that the divorce itself was an external problem affecting me. I was taught to put on a mask and pretend that everything was okay when, really, I knew it never could be again. I have finally, in the last few years, reached a place where I understand that my eleven year old self was right all along: divorce is evil and an injustice. It isn’t normal; it’s just common.

The same is true of the sexual degeneracy we see all over our society. Our leaders push the narrative to our children that pornography and masturbation are normal and healthy. They are common. They are not normal. No young girl (or boy) should be subjected to the knowledge that her father is a chronic masturbator, a “connoisseur” of pornography, as many degenerate men describe themselves online. They push our children also into false gender identities and to explore homosexuality. All of these things, a child must accept from his parents, teachers, neighbors, and peers, or he will learn that he is hateful. He is the problem, according to them, for knowing what's normal. They say he doesn't know what's normal, and have the statistics to prove it. But all they know is what's common.

What is normal, then?

Normalcy refers to that which conforms to a predefined standard. In statistics, a normal distribution does not necessarily refer to the most common distribution of data points one finds, but rather to a strict adherence of data to a predefined curve. Normal distributions conform to what we expect to find, not what we actually discover. When the word is applied to culture and societal mores, then, it refers to the predefined standards set by society. In our society, the normal thing to do is to find a heterosexual spouse, settle down, have a couple of kids, and grow old together. Deviation from this life plan is common. It is also abnormal, to the degree that one deviates. If a citizen of our nation thinks of a normal life, he thinks of the scenario I've outlined above. The extent to which someone emphasizes the normalcy of deviations from this plan tells you just how abnormally they are living (or perhaps are their family or loved ones). And, because it is very common that people live in extremely abnormal ways, it is also very common that people call abnormal ways of living normal.

In doing so, we bring children up in a society which tells them that all kinds of contradictory things are normal. It's normal to watch porn. It's also normal to be upset that your spouse is watching porn. It's normal to commit your life to one person and grow old together. It's also normal to get divorced and remarried once or twice. It's normal to be gay, and it's normal to be straight. But normalcy requires a standard, such that inherently contradictory modes of living cannot be normal at the same time and place. When children's actually normal negative reactions to their parents’ or peers’ abnormal but common behaviors are expressed, those children are shamed. The normal ones are told that they are the only abnormal people there are. The only thing that's not considered normal in the modern world is the belief that people should be normal.