wildlyparenthetical

I've been thinking a lot of late about how childhood is thought about in contemporary culture. My thoughts go in a thousand directions, including the erasure of childhood sexuality (and the parallels between the discursive construction of child sex abuse and rape of women, but that's a story for another time), the use made of the 'purity' of childhood in contemporary politics, and, related to all of these, the way that parenting is 'supposed' to work, these days.

I've been reading, most recently, Jo Tamar's take on perceptions of medical risk and birth, as well as Helen's consideration of risks men take and risks women take, as well as Lauredhel's interesting analysis of the obscuring of the safety of home birth in stats. But what I wanted to talk about here was the bizarre way that normalcy and good parenting go together. And all of this is of course related to Ariane's comment on my post over here, which I've been turning over and over in my head, trying to work out how to express my position.

( Moar here! )