Carina Pacheco
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Aug 2026
last heard 28 Aug
Carina Pacheco’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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This is associate editor Karina Pacheco, and this is my essay Have We No Shame.
I recently read a piece by the inimitable Kat Rosenfield examining the overuse of the word normalize, a largely online phenomenon that begs onlookers to validate or otherwise destigmatize things that would typically be considered unusual or unattractive or downright rude.
For example, normalize chewing with your mouth open, normalize going no contact with family, normalize never texting back.
Asking others to normalize something actually implies that the said thing is in fact weird.
Normalizing is a preemptive hedge against judgment or rejection.
By insisting people normalize, say, owning ten dogs, you're just acknowledging that owning that many animals is weird.
Because if it weren't weird, you wouldn't be calling for a chorus of affirmation to feel secure in your decision.
Are you with me?
Rosenfield makes an excellent point.
This phenomenon stunts individuality because eccentricities stop being eccentric if they're normalized.
When stylistic oddities like mismatched clothes or patchworked furniture become routinely accepted, the result is a strange cat twenty two, a monoculture of eccentric aesthetics where everyone is independently trying to look eccentric and creative, but ends up looking the same as the other guy.
I remember one summer where every trendy girl in New York was wearing cowboy boots or ballet flats with athletic shorts and a collared button down shirt.
You just had to be there.
It was not normal, but they tried to make it so.
Once something is normalized, it's socially and publicly validated and can no longer be wrong or weird.
Instead, it becomes wrong or weird to judge the normalized phenomenon.
So now not only can weird things not be considered weird, but it's morally wrong to pass judgment on something that was previously understood as bizarre or undesirable for no other reason than someone's need to feel validated in their peculiarities.
Are you still with me?
Calls to normalize have long been reasonable pushes for progress from tiny academic circles, like efforts to normalize breastfeeding in public in the late nineteen nineties and two thousands.
But in the 2010s and twenties, the idea exploded as an attempt to normalize just about everything, a trend I'm comfortable placing at the feet of millennials and Gen Z.
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