by K Pepper Upper Sixth
“NORMAL”. WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO YOU? The Cambridge English Dictionary defines it as ‘ordinary, usual; the same as would be as expected’. Google explains it is ‘conforming to a standard’. Dictionary.com describes it as the ‘natural’. However, to what extent can something truly be ‘natural’ if we have to conform to a standard, challenging the very idea of being born ‘normal’.
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The ‘Beauty Demand’ immediately highlights that normal is a ‘value judgement, not a descriptive term’, by professors Widdows and McHale and Drs. McCallum and Latham, and yet a US study carried about by Dr. Somolak in 2011 showed that 40-60% of elementary school girls (aged 6-12) were concerned about their weight or becoming too fat, emphasising the impact the term ‘normal’ has on society. Furthermore, out of 2,400 hospitalised patients for an eating disorder, 94% as a result had mood-disorders, most commonly depression because they felt that they weren’t ‘normal’. This is what the concept of ‘normal’ does to us. It shapes us into people that we don’t necessarily want to be, and it blinds us to the outside because it can’t be natural. Plan International Canada exhibits this ignorance through their campaign #DefyNormal, that ‘normal is turning a blind eye’. Nearly every two seconds a girl under the age of 18 is married. 263 million children and youth across the world are currently out of school. 15,000 children under the age of five die from preventable causes each day. 1.4 billion globally are still living in extreme poverty. To some, these statistics are horrifying, yet the fact that society often turns a blind eye to these issues cements their place as the unfortunate normality that millions of children face worldwide. I am not blaming these thoughts, I am not blaming those who feel like this because they have to deal with their own expectations - I am blaming ‘normal’. Who decided what my natural was? Who has the right to make me conform to their standard, to society’s
