<p>when those who are not part of the mainstream majority are coerced by societal pressure to conform to the mainstream majority, they are covering, i.e. presenting as something they are not.</p>
<p>catera: is that right?</p>
<p>[The</a> Pressure to Cover - New York Times](<a href=“The Pressure to Cover - The New York Times”>The Pressure to Cover - The New York Times)</p>
<p>in the author’s own words</p>
<p>For missypie:</p>
<p>[Delta</a> Spirit - “California” (Official Video) - YouTube](<a href=“Delta Spirit - "California" (Official Video) - YouTube”>Delta Spirit - "California" (Official Video) - YouTube)</p>
<p>Of course, we’ve reached the point where not to have some sort of outlier identity of which we are very vocal in espousing our grievances about is virtually to be without an identity in our society.</p>
<p>I feel societal pressure to “cover” my lack of an outlier identifier and thereby seek some deviance, any deviance, in order to fit in.</p>
<p>Kidding, sort of.</p>
<p>I’m kind of disappointed if that’s the gist of Yoshio’s thought. I am intrigued by the human urge to decorate ourselves, alter our appearance and I’m more apt to be sympathetic to the extreme tattoo-ist who is caught in a compulsion that is somehow manifesting within him or her in a way that we all feel but manifest more moderately. That urge to cover ourselves, I think, is really interesting.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You are parsing someone and getting a read on what they are about based on majority standards which are really rather arbitrary. Being dismissive of outlier identity may only be possible when you are secure in the majority. You are indeed voicing your grievances that minority groups don’t always conform to your majority norms and suggesting that conforming is a reasonable societal expectation … if I am reading your posts on this thread correctly?</p>
<p>If you read the book, we can discuss this more intelligently. Since you will undoubtedly understand it better than I do.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>to you outlier identity = deviance?</p>
<p>edit: sewhappy: Before reading this book, I probably would have agreed with most of your ideas on this topic. It really did change my world view.</p>
<p>Well, my brain is hurting from this high-level discourse because I generally hang-out on the Dressing Young and What’s For Dinner threads. </p>
<p>I would just point out that there’s really nothing more witheringly deflating than being told you are part of a mainstream majority. There is romance and grievance in being outlier. That, in my view, is the compulsion to tattoo and pierce in the extreme.</p>
<p>So if we take the “covering” hypothesis further, the covering in the form of tattoos and piercing is going on by those aspiring to fit into an outlier group.</p>
<p>Perhaps Yoshino gets into that. Arguably, some of the most overt cover pressure is exerted by a minority or outlier or deviant sub-population on it’s own members. The pressure to “cover” is not the exclusive sin of the majority by any means.</p>
<p>But I’m so interested in our innate need to festoon and alter ourselves physically. We’ve jousted on this before, haven’t we, alh. About women’s shoes?</p>
<p>An example of a deviant sub-population would be ________________ .</p>
<p>could you please fill in the blank?</p>
<p>I use deviant more from the self-reference perspective than from the status assigned by the status quo. Mormons probably see themselves as somewhat deviant. Atheists, no doubt. Catholics have at times. Racial minorities. Religious minorities. Disabled people, Rain Man, etc.</p>
<p>Here’s a question for you – how many black people do the extreme piercing and tattoos? </p>
<p>How many Seventh Day Adventists? Now there’s an outlier group!</p>
<p>My point (I think!) is that the extreme tattoo/piercing kids want to be outlier. They want to be in an outlier group. And the “covering” pressure exerted by that group is to . . . pierce and tattoo. So ironically, their behavior is quite conformist.</p>
<p>I think the only common ground here is we all want to belong to something – whether it’s “mainstream” or outlier or deviant or just distinctive. </p>
<p>I think it’s preposterous to think if you have a sexual preference difference or racial difference or religious difference that you are irrevocably “different” from the rest of society. All of society is seeking an identity. We all want to sub-identify into smaller populations and find a home. </p>
<p>So I distrust people that want to freeze their moment of presumed bias and run with it. </p>
<p>That’s really, ultimately the human condition.</p>
<p>
Most people would consider “deviant” to have an insulting connotation - it does not mean just “different than” but “offensively different and/or inferior”. There is a big gap between being “different in some way” and being “deviant”.</p>
<p>
More than you think.</p>
<p>
Some do. Some want to look different than “mainstream”, some want to offend your sensibilities. But most don’t care. I know a bunch of tattooed people, none of them have ever voiced a desire to be an “outlier” as motivation for getting tattoos or piercings. To the extent that they cared about anyone’s opinions at all, their interest was in simply letting people know something about them, the same motivation that everyone uses in getting dressed and picking a hairstyle, only in greater detail.</p>
<p>Well, cosmicfish, perhaps you should enroll in more social science classes:</p>
<p>World English Dictionary
deviant (ˈdiːvɪənt) </p>
<p>— adj
- deviating, as from what is considered acceptable behaviour</p>
<p>— n
2. a person whose behaviour, esp sexual behaviour, deviates from what is considered to be acceptable</p>
<p>Of course, this is what is being pursued by extreme tattooing or piercing. The desire to shock.</p>
<p>I would respect far more a person who just produces some work of art or scholarship to shock us. Not assault their own flesh to make uncomfortable the senior citizen next door.</p>
<p>
NOTHING is frozen by a tattoo or a piercing. They can be covered, changed, or in the worst case removed. And even if they aren’t, they freeze nothing, they just remember it. I have a date tattooed on my arm - I did not stop changing at that moment, but that date will never stop being extremely important to me and will also never define me as any kind of outlier that I will acknowledge.</p>
<p>
How is this not what I described? And how is this not an insulting connotation? You think Mormons consider themselves deviant? And Atheists? Not in my experience. Different, yes, deviant, no.</p>
<p>ahh . . . deviant, then, is some higher order of outlier category. Got it.</p>
<p>“Deviant” and “outlier” mean different things. An outlier is someone that is very different than the norm, a deviant is someone who is doing something unacceptable. Most outliers are not deviants, and surprisingly few deviants are outliers.</p>
<p>A gay man knows that he is an outlier (in most places), a gay Republican Congressman who rails against homosexuality is one of the few people I can imagine who would think of themselves as a deviant. Considering yourself a deviant implies that you need therapy to resolve your self-loathing. Caring that anyone else considers you a deviant implies that you honestly think society gets to determine what is right and wrong in your behavior, and while I wholeheartedly agree when the behavior harms others, I think it is absurd when it does not.</p>
<p>Put another way, I cannot and would not stop you from deciding that a visible tattoo or piercing is unacceptable for representing your business, but I will wholeheartedly protest any statement that a visible tattoo or piercing is unacceptable in society in general.</p>
<p>I think what I’m trying to say here is that to group the “majority mainstream” into some sort of block of fixed identity and views is woefully stupid and inept. </p>
<p>If you care to drill down into any human life, no matter how boringly “mainstream” it may seem, you will always, ALWAYS find deviance in some form. And so I find the kids tattooing and piercing themselves to express their outlier allegiance kind of ridiculous. </p>
<p>In all of our hearts, we are outliers and deviants somewhere, in some sense. That is exactly why we are so vulnerable to those who want to make us “cover” ourselves. But I think we need to recognize that it is increasingly the outlier groups who exert the strongest pressure for us to self-identify and declare our membership in their group. And that is because we are so atomized and fragmented. Now this is good in that it is perhaps less repressive in the traditional sense, but i think we are seeing a new and just as cruel form of repression emerge.</p>
<p>Ugh. I’m just riffing. Good night.</p>
<p>Again, “deviant” does not mean “different”. Your text continues to imply that it does.</p>
<p>
And I would argue that making an effort to conform when the degree of conformation is almost always going to be much higher is even more ridiculous. When a person chooses to be different, in the rare occasion when that is the actual motivation, it is as much about simply recognizing that other people don’t get to decide what you should look like. How many people do stupid, self-destructive things simply because they do not want to be perceived as “deviants”?</p>
<p>
And this is why I consider judging people by the presence of tattoos or piercings to be ridiculous. If you (for example) are such an outlier yourself, why do you get to judge someone else’s differences? What makes your differences superior to another’s, when neither of you are hurting anyone?</p>
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</p>
<p>I know quite a few <em>shrug</em>. Plenty of famous black people come to mind as well.</p>
<p>Well, there are some extremely conservative behaviors that seem odd to me, but why should that matter to anyone?</p>
<p>Deviant behavior, by connotation if not be se</p>
<p>conservo-devian?</p>