Your breaking family traditions!

This week in sociology, we learned about the word Deviance. Deviance applies to someone who is breaking the social norms of society. Some of the examples we learned in class were, getting a tattoo, two men kissing, someone talking to themselves in public, and balancing things on your head. What makes this so unusual that when someone does one of the four, they're considered breaking the norm? We watched an episode of Seinfeld and when one of the characters was scratching his nose, the girl he was recently seeing had caught him in a act of picking his nose. She then, avoided him and didn't plan on seeing him again. This is a perfect example of deviance. Because it's not socially acceptable to pick your nose, she had put him under the category as unacceptable. One time, my brother had come home and oddly went straight to his room. It was in the summer and seeing someone with a sweatshirt on wasn't too strange but when it's 90 degrees it's pretty shady. When my mom and I went into his room to go say hi, he had his music blasting which hadn't made it clear that we were in the room. As he was taking his sweatshirt off, my mom and I had our jaws dropped. There he was, standing in front of us with a huge tattoo across his back. Although it had meaning to it, it was shocking to the both of us because we weren't expecting it. Nowadays, tattoos are considered common and many individuals get them for purposeful meaning or for enjoyment. But in our family, tattoos weren't something so common. As soon as we saw my brother's tattoo, my mom had realized that this was unacceptable and far from it. As years went by, she had to get over it even though she knew he was breaking the family norm. It was that she just had to come to terms of being tolerant of him and his decisions.