The Extent to my Deviance

Hello everyone, thanks for visiting my blog. For the blog post regarding deviance this week, I will be splitting my post up into two different yet related parts. First, I will provide a brief overview and background of who I am, how I was raised, where I was raised, and other necessary information to assess whether I am to be considered a deviant in society or not. I will then submit two theories discussed in class (Strain and Differential Association) to explain why I am or am not deviant. In part two of my blog post, I will convey to all of you a social experiment of sorts that I conducted in which I acted as a social deviant in a small way. Let’s dig in.
PART 1:
I was born on January 17, 1991 in Vancouver, WA. My immediate family consists of five people, including myself. My first 6 years of life were spent in Vancouver, WA near Andresen Rd. However, when I was 6 our family moved out into the country on 5 acres between Yacolt and Amboy, WA. Both of my parents were college graduates from the University of Portland. My mother Ronda has been a critical intensive care nurse for 25 years, and my dad owns a small tax firm. By most people I would be considered upper-middle class and in middle school and especially high school many of my friends would refer to me as rich or spoiled.
I played soccer competitively from the time I was 4 years old, and started premier soccer at age 12. I then injured my foot permanently my sophomore year in high school and had to hang up the cleats. After this I largely strayed away from my athletic or “jock” high school friends and began hanging out with people I perceived as intellectuals. It was at this time where I began to become incredibly political and began trying new things, hanging around people much different than I, and ultimately led me to starting the debate team at my high school.
Throughout my adolescence I had always questioned society’s expectations and the reasons for many of them, however most of my life, and even now is spent towing the line of society’s expectations. After all, I grew up in an upper-middle class family, am Caucasian, graduated high school, attending college, working a job, and in large part chasing after that “American Dream” that we are fed so much about in high school. However, I could also make the argument that from the time I stopped playing sports, I was deviant in many ways, since many of my friends in high school after that were intellectuals who smoked pot, were atheists or agnostics, liberal, rebellious, and took pride in their roles as deviants (although they didn’t necessarily see themselves that way). I was undoubtedly influenced rather highly by these individuals, which brings me to the first theory that may explain my subtle deviance in my senior year in high school.
The first theory that I will use to assess my degree of deviance is called Differential Association Theory.
Before using Differential Association Theory to classify my deviance though, I will first explain what the theory says. According to our text, Differential Association Theory rests on the premise that criminal or deviant behavior is not inherited—we are not simply born criminals or conformists—instead it is something that becomes learned by individuals through exposure and intimate, tightly-knit relationships with people who partake in criminal or deviant behavior. This is the case for several reasons; the greatest asset to humans is the mind, which happens to be able to justify its own actions very well. “When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime, which are sometimes very complicated, sometimes very simple; and (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes” (Thio, Calhoun & Conyers, 27).
Therefore, Differential Association theory would argue that due to my exposure to people that are definitely considered deviant, and the fact that many of them are close friends of mine, I am much more susceptible to criminal behavior; because I have been exposed, and in many ways immersed into that subculture. Now, discounting that period at the end of high school DA theory would also argue that by in large most of my life has been spent with law abiding, non-deviant individuals, and therefore I haven’t been exposed to that subculture and therefore am not susceptible to becoming criminal, at least not for that reason.
The next theory I will discuss is Merton’s Strain Theory. This theory by Merton is my personal favorite out of all of the sociology classes I have taken. The concept of Strain theory is rather elementary, yet the causes and agencies of it are much more complex and are still speculated upon by professionals to this day. Strain theory states that “social structures exert a definite pressure upon certain persons in the society to engage in nonconforming rather than conforming conduct” (Thio, Calhoun & Conyers, 21). Based on this societal pressure—which is different for every individual in society based on race, religion, socioeconomic status, education and countless other factors—individuals are either pushed toward deviance or away from it.
Merton demonstrates in his theory how people can react to this phenomenon in several different ways depending on whether they accept societal goals and means or not. However for the purpose of this post I will just need to classify where I fit. And according to strain theory, the closest adaptation to me that Merton describes is Conformity: I agree with the cultural goals and institutionalized means. I play the game of life legally, so to speak. In the case of myself, strain theory would argue that I have not been pushed towards criminal activity due to the fact that I am not a demographic that gets very much pressure towards criminal activity. (Caucasian, upper-middle class, male, attending college, have health insurance, etc..)
PART II:
For my deviant act, I simply did what I had done before. Hung around individuals that are perceived deviant by society and doing my small part towards contributing to my small part of deviance. One could argue that I was deviant by association. So me and a couple friends (no names) went to the Vancouver Mall dressed in worn out, old, raggedy clothes. I know that smoking cigarettes is definitely considered deviant in society now, so we made sure to smell like Marlboro Reds and body odor that was not conducive to ever getting a date—with anyone. Furthermore, while we were in the mall going through the various stores, we would converse with each other with little discretion for what we were saying; talking about illegal activities intentionally while people were around, laughing inside as they would bee-line to the opposite direction when they overheard us.
However, the most significant and profound part of our social experiment occurred when we went into the jewelers at the mall, as well as upper-scale stores like Nordstroms. The minute we walked in, the three of us looked as out of place as I had ever experienced. Immediately clerks were looking at us and at one point even appeared to be following us. I went up to the woman in jewelry and she had a customer. She focused solely on the well dressed, middle aged woman at the counter without even giving me a greeting. She saw me since I was right in front of her, but the second she glanced at me—without a greeting or any form of communication—she turned quickly back to the woman, occasionally looking at me from the corner of her eye.
It was at this point that I knew I had accomplished what I set out to do—feel ostracized by nearly everyone around me based on my appearance, smell, and stigma. We went to a couple more expensive stores—a customer at the sunglass store tried to hold back his laugh as I glanced at a $200 pair of Oakleys. Once again, everyone in the store seemed to stop what they were doing and make a point to look at me, probably wondering why on earth someone dressed like me was in a place like that, when a simple accessory pair of sunglasses was worth more than 5 times of what I was currently wearing.
The experience was sobering. It made me think back to Shaming theory that we read for class in the text. At that moment, I felt rejected by my peers, businesses, and the society at the mall in general. Most people dress up or make an effort to look good while going to the mall because there is that judgment factor. Even though I instigated it, I still felt excluded. “Shaming that is stigmatizing, in contrast, makes criminal subcultures more attractive because these are in some sense subcultures which reject the rejecors” (Thio, Calhoun & Conyers, 35).

Word Count 1498.

Works Cited:

Thio, Alex, and Thomas C. Calhoun. Readings in Deviant Behavior. 6th ed. Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 2001. Print.