Probably right to ease off of Britney and Lindsay, but your impluse to go after Angelina is sound.
I agree with you that though Angelina could readily be characterized as monster-superior, the press has wanted to imagine her more as MOTHER-superior. The reason for this, I think, is that the many of us who were born of mothers who used us as little playthings to ward off depression, and who interpreted our emerging desire to attend to our own needs rather than their own, as treachery, see in Angelina some version of the mother who must be praised and placated -- or else!
Did you know that there are cultures which encourage their kids to play with knives. Not for their own good -- Angelina's purported motivation -- but because kids aren't valued all that much once they focus on their own independence. Take New Guinea parenting, for instance:
"There are many ways New Guinea parents demonstrate that when the child cannot be used erotically, it is useless. One is that as soon as infants are not being nursed, they are paid no attention, and even when in danger are ignored. Anthropologists regularly notice that little children play with knives or fire and adults ignore them. Edgerton comments on the practice: 'Parents allowed their small children to play with very sharp knives, sometimes cutting themselves, and they permitted them to sleep unattended next to the fire. As a result, a number of children burned themselves seriously...it was not uncommon to see children who had lost a toe to burns, and some were crippled by even more severe burns.' Langness says in the Bena Bena 'it was not at all unusual to see even very small toddlers playing with sharp bush knives with no intervention on the part of caretakers.' But this is good, say the anthropologists, since when 'children as young as two or three are permitted to play with objects that Westerners consider dangerous, such as sharp knives or burning brands from the fire, [it] tends to produce assertive, confident, and competent children.' Children, they explain, are allowed to 'learn by observations...e.g., the pain of cutting oneself when playing carelessly with a knife.' As Whiting says, when he once saw a Kwoma baby 'with the blade of a twelve-inch bush knife in his mouth and the adults present paid no attention to him,' this was good for the infant, since in this way 'the child learns to discriminate between the edible and inedible.' Margaret Mead is particularly ecstatic about the wisdom of mothers making infants learn to swim early by allowing them to fall into the water under the hut when crawling and slipping through gaps in the floor or falling overboard into the sea because they were 'set in the bow of the canoe while the mother punts in the stern some ten feet away.'
(Lloyd DeMause, "Childhood and Cultural Evolution," Emotional Life of Nations
http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolution.html)
Link: The Tyee
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