First, Alison, thanks for your kind words. Avoiding the whole victimological
response--if I can coin a word--has been very important for me, especially
because there was a time when I tried very hard to exploit it, claiming what
I have come to call the "moral authority of suffering/victimhood" as
something that gave me the right to a whole range of claims and statements,
etc., in writing and otherwise, that I now wish I had never made.
(Thankfully, none of the writings ever went beyond the friends I showed them
to.) Connected to this, sort of, is the fact that the first part of My
Daughter's Vagina, the companion essay to My Son's Penis, the one you
published on Masthead, is now up on www.unlikelystories.org. Jonathan
Penton, the editor, is putting it up serially, in four parts, I think he
said. Anyway, it is a much longer essay dealing with abuse and all, but from
a different angle.
Richard
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