Although our society constantly continues to grow and develop with more tolerance and acceptance, the expectation of conformity is something that is still prominent, and has been throughout history. When someone falls outside of a norm, or does not conform to the rest of society, they are recognized as being different, and even deviant. Unfortunately, the majority of the time, being different is not a good thing. Even worse in past times, being different from the rest of society was something considered so bad and so deviant, it was often punished. If a person fell outside of society's norms, extreme measures would be taken in order to fix whatever it was that made a person different. Even small children were expected to abide by the norms, and forced to if they would not. Even though the expectation of conformity still lingers in todays society, some forms of deviance have grown to be extinct, and society is no longer expected to conform from behaviors that were once considered deviant, into the expected norms that have now become extinct. .
For instance, in today's society, if someone were left-handed, they would not be punished or treated any differently than someone right-handed. It is now even believed by some that left-handed people may have some positive attributes that right-handers do not have, such as the upper hand in sports. There are even theories that left-handers are more creative, or have a higher intelligence than right-handed people. If anything, left-handed people are considered unique, since only "about 10% of the population is left-handed, and about 90% are still dominantly right handed" (Taylor 5). Therefore, in today's society, being left-handed is still something considered different, but is not actually regarded as deviant.
However, if someone in today's times would go back in time and see how left-handed people were regarded in past centuries, I believe they would be more than shocked to learn the stigmas that left-handedness held.
