We had family in town for a bit this weekend, and so naturally we headed to the big bookstore with the millions of books… because damn it, it’s cool. And also, I wanted to find Gloria Steinem’s book with the essay “I Was a Playboy Bunny.” (Which, by the way, I did find, and I can’t wait to read it. I’m sure there will be a post about that soon!)
Lo and behold, on the same aisle as “Feminism” and “Feminist Studies” there was also “The Sex Industry.” Gah, so many good books!! I couldn’t help myself. I also bought Candy Girl: A Year in the Life of an Unlikely Stripper by Diablo Cody, and Strip City by Lily Burana. I started the first this morning, and oh em gee is Cody hilarious. I am only twenty pages in and I already recommend it. It’s the book I wanted to write, if I was going to write one about stripping. She is fantastic and entertaining. I’ll write a full review once I am done, but basically it’s about her experiences at 24 stripping in Minnesota. The second book is about an ex-stripper who decides to make a year-long goodbye tour of the US, visiting clubs all across the country as a means of saying goodbye to dancing. I’ll blog about that one, too :)
I’m also trying to finish up Not Under My Roof by Amy Schalet, which I was trying to get J to blog about since he finished it like four months ago. Sociologist Schalet compared Dutch and American culture with regards to who parents treat the topic of sex with their teenagers. Spoiler alert: we are very different from the Dutch. It’s fascinating, and resonates so much with my experiences growing up (and J’s, too). And makes me want to move to the Netherlands, because they clearly have less hang-ups about sexuality.