New reading just confirmed! I’m so excited to be on a panel with my friend Shira Tarrant, author of Men and Feminism (that’s just her latest) with friend and fellow author Cara Bruce, discussing what it means to be both anti-sexist and sex-positive…all in Baltimore at Red Emma’s Bookstore & Cafe–the hometown of John Waters, the “Pope of Trash.” It all happens on Moday October 20th. Can’t wait to see what happens!
22
Sep
09
Dear Mz Kenney
I have just had the pleasure of reading your book “I was a teenage dominatrix” so if there are more then I will have to catch up. It looks like I am a little bit behind with my literature.
I just wanted to say that throughout my life I always was such a tough guy even though of mild manner and I never allowed a dominant woman at work to get the better of me. They all thought I was an easy touch because I was so amiable and as you know the humilation can come at any moment. They always found that there was a sleeping lion that they were dealing with. They were always crushed, either immediately, or after the thing had built up to unmanageable proportions. They would not talk to me for a week but it passed. I always hated dominant women.I would be the same at work now.
Yet it is strange how a change can come over you and privately your feelings change this quite late in life as I always laughed at the scene and the descriptions would have had no effect on me. None of the descriptions in the book came as a surprise save the most extreme.Yet reading it now I found myself quite emotionally affected because I could easily be one of those middle aged blokes although I look very young and I am very fit so I would never fit the descriptions you gave of them which is only too typical and I had to laugh at the descriptions of the lawyers and their combovers and the generally unfit men.I am the totally opposite and I hated them just like you did, particularly as I was one of them and I did not like them and never felt I fitted in.
I was more suited to a media career.
I hope I have contacted you at the right forum. I do not know any other forum to write to unless you are on Facebook. The purpose in writing to you was to share some of the feelings I had in reading the book and I see I have not really said very much for fear of saying the wrong thing and putting it in writing but I just had that feeling because I could so easily have been one of the people you saw.
I hope that nothing I have said has caused any offence.
peter ellis
Thanks for your comment, Peter! Check out my other books, namely Imposters (released last year) and the new anthology I’m in (on the anthologies page of my site). Thanks for writing.
Dear Shawna Jean,
Fistly that is really a lovely name and I am so pleased that you are known by it. I have read a write-up on your book Imposters and so I am hot-footing it off to the booksellers to get it, and I am looking forward to it.
I wanted to tell you that I am writing a book on the legal profession, the inside story. Not the usual textbook but how these people act in their everyday lives. I think you will find it a hoot because it is written totally differently from how you would expect a lawyer to write it and it is so humorous I know you will love it. It even describes what these people get up to when no-one is looking which you know from experience, and there is a scene where a Judge phones up his local and keeps losing his nerve and puts the phone down whereupon they phone him back and cause him embarrassment in front of his staff who have just come into the room.I will let you know when it is published.
It is wonderful to find after all your growing up experiences that you found that you had this talent for writing and you are using this talent to help others. Sometimes I feel I need help myself but you are a lot younger than me and so I feel that I should know better and anyway I am in the uk, and to tell you the truth I never had a great deal of time for writers clubs/forums/workshops because I just wanted to get on with it because I like to get a result once I have made up my mind to do it.That may have been a serious mistake but I have set my course now.
With all best wishes
peter ellis
Oh hey! Men and Feminism looks great.
I’m using Feminism and Pop Culture as well as Body Outlaws for a course I’m teaching this semester on Sexism, Body Image, and Advertising.
Seal Press is full of win.