The New Normal

Fat, skinny, African American, Native American, and Asians are just some of the different kinds of ethnicities and types of people in today’s media.  In 1987 though, this was not the case.  The media often only showed one type of consumer in advertisements: healthy, trim Caucasians.

Nancy Mairs illustrates through her essay “Disability” her belief in the need for change in advertising policies.  She is troubled by the fact that she cannot find herself in media.  Nancy struggles with sclerosis-a disability where the organs begin to harden.  The one woman she does identify with in the media is portrayed as dependent on a young doctor.  Why will the media not portray people with sclerosis as independent?  Later, this troubling question is answered with how advertisers don’t want to give people the impression of only handicapped people being able to use the product.  Mairs uses satire to make fun of this answer because she realizes the deeper reality: disabilities do not want to be seen as “normal.”

 

The real question is what is normal.  Is normal twenty pounds underweight and hungry looking? Or is it a mulatto-Mexican?  There are too many people in this world for there to actually be a “normal.”  Mairs is right to argue for change, because advertisers should represent the world as a whole instead of their perceptions of “normalcy.”