From "Normal" to "Psycho" in one step?

Warning: This post may contain triggers for the spouse of an addict.

On any given month, week, day, you can find stories on the news about heinous crimes. Sexual assault, rape, violence, murder. It's becoming more and more common. 

And what do we, the general public, say? That the perpetrator is a "creep." A "psycho." We shake our heads in disgust, saying that their actions are evil. 

You can probably think of multiple cases where you yourself felt like this. That what you were hearing about the attacker is gut wrenching and twisted. How could someone get that far? How could someone cross those lines and do that to another human being? 

Pornography, bdsm, and all of their deep, twisted forms are excused away as "normal" until someone acts out on them and hurts someone. Then all of a sudden that person goes from being "normal" to a "creep."

You hear that a man is into a heavy bdsm fetish, or some of pornography's darker sides, and people describe that man as "just being a guy" "doing manly things" "expressing himself" "normal" "every body does it" "Free speech."

And then he acts out on what he's been looking at, he follows through with the things he's been saying, someone gets hurt, and then suddenly everyone says he's a "creep," "perp" "Sicko" "Psycho."

Make up your mind, society. Is it a problem or is it not? When someone goes out, rapes and kills someone it is described as "heinous." And it is, right? But people don't just get to that extreme automatically. There are steps to get there, paths that must be followed for someone to go that deep. We need to label those steps and actions as heinous as well. 

Simply put, you can't say that the first step is just "a man thing" and the next step is "evil."