Today, I visited the Niet Normaal exposition with some writing buds of mine. The name translates to Not Normal, and asks questions about diversity, about what’s normal and what isn’t, and to what lengths some people go to be normal.

Sounded like my cup of tea, what can I say.

With a generally pro-diversity message – which was challenged even before the exposition opened to the public – I was pretty curious to see what they all came up with. Some of it was on the odd-but-interesting-I-suppose side…

Some of it was cute and subtle…

Some of it highly relevant to my interests…

And some of it very straight-forward, but no less effective for it. (Sorry for the awful quality of this; it was at a very weird angle, with a spotlight shining right at me.)

So, all in all, a laudable message… which the tour guides seem to have missed entirely.

I was studying two side-by-side photos of people’s faces shortly after plastic surgery, still bandaged and heavily swollen and discoloured. Next to me, a tour guide showed around a small group of women. Of the photos, she said, “Look at how young these people are – yet they felt pressured into taking such drastic measures. Of course, it’s different if you’re actually, like, disfigured, like if you have a really weird nose or something…”

…

Sigh.