Social Normalization Quotes

I used to go over to Gene Kelly's house and play volleyball, and Paul Newman and Marlon Brando were always there. You kind of took it for granted because I was 20, 21, 22, and they were a bit older - well, Gene certainly was. But it was just part of daily living. They were in the same profession, and you didn't think that much about it.

At school he had done things which had formerly seemed to him very horrid and made him feel disgusted with himself when he did them; but when later on he saw that such actions were done by people of good position and that they did not regard them as wrong, he was able not exactly to regard them as right, but to forget about them entirely or not be at all troubled at remembering them.

So ubiquitous is Western influence that most of the time it is no longer seen as an alien element intruding into non-Western societies. It is an influence that has become integrated into the mind and body, the heart and soul of the non-Western human being. Western dominance, in other words, has become normal, it has become natural. By making it so natural and so normal to be 'Western', the centres of power in the West have achieved their ultimate triumph.

The freakish is no longer a private zone, difficult of access. People who are bizarre, in sexual disgrace, emotionally violent areseen daily on the newsstands, on TV, in the subways. Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.

I think it's going to take three or four generations of gay people being able to get married before it starts feeling less like we're going through these motions, that we're aping a heterosexual institution.

Much more than our other needs and endeavors, it is sexuality that puts us on an even footing with our kind: the more we practice it, the more we become like everyone else: it is in the performance of a reputedly bestial function that we prove our status as citizens: nothing is more public than the sexual act.

If parents snicker at racial and gender jokes, another generation will pass on the poison adults still have not had the courage to snuff out.

It's what the mainstream does - they absorb things and they blunt the power of it. And so the next generation and the next generation has to become more shocking and more provocative in order to get any rise out of anybody.

What they have done in Japan, which I find so inspirational, is they've brought the toilet out from behind the locked door. They've made it conversational. People go out and upgrade their toilet. They talk about it. They've sanitized it.

Nothing surprises me. After Donald Trump, nothing matters, does it?

We're all already aware of boobies; it is the general state of most people in North America! THANKS, MEDIA AND THE MALE GAZE

I worry about younger generations who were born to view their country trampling on humanity of everyone that comes in its way, as the 'normal state of affairs" - because they knew no other. We know how easy it is to shed, under such circumstances, the thin and frail veneer of civilization, not to mention the moral standards of which the Jews were presumed to be the world's teachers.

It's amazing that people still feel, 'Oh my gosh, it's a black guy.' We've been here for a long time; let's get used to it. Let's get used to other cultures.

Someday every woman will have orgasms- like every family has color TV- and we can all get on with the business of life.

Fat is mainstream, which is why everyone has become complacent. What used to be considered pudgy before isn't even worthy of a comment today.

While television can help normalize the lives of marginalized people, it also can exploit their hardships and reinforce stereotypes, reducing their lives to mere entertainment.

Every established order tends to produce the naturalization of its own arbitrariness.

Disability in the Middle East is viewed through a different lens because you're in wartime countries where it's much more mainstream, so I was just never 'other'd.

Even quicker than the development of super-technology is the human adaptation to taking it for granted. We live in a world where regular people converse publicly with an inanimate object and escape Bedlam or a dunking.

I would definitely love to see a queer rom-com because representation matters. It does so much to help normalize things in the mind of society.

We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

I don't think many people stare at people in wheelchairs because we see it regularly. I suppose if you see more in the media it will take away the curiosity.

Las Vegas is a major family destination. Nevada casinos have become American family values now. It's considered just fine to go into one of these windowless scary gambling-malls, drink yourself silly, lose your ass at roulette, and then go ogle showgirls with breast implants. Republicans do this now. Working-class folks do it in polyester stretch pants. It's normal.

We have all of us to some extent become inured to a culture where viciousness and depravity are simply taken for granted, like some hideous wallpaper we have lived with for years.

So many people's parents separate and for my generation it is very normal. But I remember feeling as though nobody ever spoke about it.