The entry that I read from the Everyday
Sociology Blog for this assignment was about the recent case of Alex Rodriquez,
or as most people know him A-Rod and how society views the use of performance
enhancing drugs and when their use could be viewed as cheating. Most of the
blog talks about how deviance is socially constructed and why we deem some
actions unacceptable while other actions that are similar are acceptable in
other contexts. In this particular case the blog talked about how the use of
performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) in professional sports is viewed as deviant,
while the use of PEDs to help with anxiety for a performance is acceptable. The
article cites the reason for things being this way in sports is because we see
PEDs as giving an unfair advantage to players that use them compared to those
that don’t. It also compares surgeries, like corrective eye surgery, that can
help the performance of players to PEDs and questions why they are allowed in
sports.
After reading the post from the
Everyday Sociology Blog I looked at a blog post from an ESPN writer and another
from a writer on Deadspin. Both of the posts I found were focused mainly on whether
or not the PEDs actually give athletes an edge and why they are such a big deal
in baseball compared to other sports. Each of these articles almost takes a
sociological perspective in questioning the norms of society and why PEDs are
considered deviant in baseball. For example in the Deadspin post the writer
Scott Lemiuex points out that PEDs are more of a taboo in baseball because it
is America’s pastime and people think that it should remain drug free. This is
also mentioned in the ESPN post by writer David Schoenfield but he points out
that most people care more that it helps players hit homeruns more than
anything else. In his post he talks more about homeruns and the fact that the
records broken by players using PEDs are sullied by this fact. By the end each of these other posts ended up shifting
the focus more on something other than the sociological implications with the
ESPN article looking at the homerun data and the one from Deadspin becoming
more of an opinion piece. In the end looking at these articles they both
brought up sociological concerns even if they weren’t intending to do so or
thinking about sociology.The thing I learned from sociology about this issue is that everything that we do is done in a certain context and the norms we set can vary depending on the situation. In this situation PEDs and their use are unacceptable when it comes to baseball, America’s pastime. This is because most people see it as an institution that needs to remain PED free to retain its integrity. This integrity is something that most Americans value and when looking at a society from a sociological perspective we can learn a lot from the values a culture has and how those values fit with the norms of a society.
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