Essay 2

I'm having a really hard time finding a direction with this paper, which is why I wrote the outline in the previous blog.
Last night I tried writing an intro, for example, and it was all over the place:

The concept of normality is tied to culture and personal experience. What is considered normal in one society may be considered incredibly unusual in another. For example, American culture has a different concept of what is normal in terms of beauty than the culture of the Kayan people in Thailand. American concepts of beauty rely on thinness, body structure, and often material enhancements to beauty such as make up. Kayan women, on the other hand, use neck rings to enhance their beauty. In their culture, long necks are considered desirable, so brass rings are placed around their necks at a young age and the number of rings increases with development. The end result is a woman with a stretched neck coiled in brass. While the necks of these women may appear freakish to us, to the Kayan people it is an ultimate sign of beauty and prestige.
There is an increasing press towards “normalizing” in our culture, where we suppress individual differences to strive to fit the standard for beauty.

I don't like it where it is now, but I think parts of it can be reworked into the essay later, so I'm saving the text here.