Greetings, Ladies --
According to The Gainesville Sun, the US Department of Justice shows 90-115 children were kidnapped by strangers in 2002.
The National Center for Child Death Review Policy and Practice shows that 12,035 children died from unintentional injury in 2003.
Are mothers being sold a big black basket of fear masquerading as maternal duty?
Please, discuss.
~Riot.Jane
In a word? YES. I think it goes so far beyond just us as mothers though. I think it's an issue of an entire culture of fear. We're afraid from the day we can process fear. Cancer, child molestors, kidnapping, calories, rejection, terrorists, additives, violence. We are absolutely conditioned to live in a constant state of fear. Some are warrented, some are not. As a mother, I worry about how much fear to expose my kids to more than I worry about the things I should fearful about.
ReplyDeleteThat "Sex Sells" is common knowledge. I think that might have been true in the early 1970s, when softer (by today's standards, anyway) porn played in normal movie theaters, an adventurous experience floating somewhere between art and perversion.
ReplyDeleteNow our culture is so saturated with sex that we don't even notice it anymore. Sex is so much not a cultural anomaly anymore, so much no longer a sign of the decline of Western civilization, that we've even discussed female ownership and enjoyment of pornography in this very forum.
Sex has become a commercialized, corporatized, commoditized background hum to our daily lives. As a result, sex no longer sells the way it once did.
I think this century's overriding sales tactic will be fear. "Fear Sells" doesn't have the same alliterative ring to it, but I'm afraid (pun intended) it will be overwhelming effective