To unpack the contemporary conception and experience of risk, [Deborah] Lupton relies heavily on the work of Mary Douglas, not only her Risk and Blame: Essays in Cultural Theory and Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (with Aaron Wildavsky), but Douglas’s earlier classic Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo….
One of Lupton’s most interesting chapters (8) is an excursion into the pleasures of risk. “Edgework” like sky-diving and rock-climbing and fight-clubbing bolsters a sense of masculinity for desk-chained men, and represents an effort to escape the control and predictability of modernity. Sexual transgression and shock have the same effect, producing not anxiety and fear but the carnivalesque exhilaration of breaking through settled boundaries. – See more at: http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2013/11/14/risk/#sthash.qElp4YSO.dpuf