My mother, Tricia, circa 1977.
In the mid 1990s, I could not find a publisher for my second novel, The Girlie Playhouse, because it “promoted the politically incorrect idea that woman are mere sex objects.” Why is it dehumanizing to women to portray them as sexually attractive? That’s an honest question.
I grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas where all the women and older girls donned dresses and high heels for church on Sunday. As a teen, I was greeted by the preacher’s wife on the church steps, “Now, don’t you look pretty, young lady!”
My mother was a devout Christian. According to her own lore, she was even destined to become a nun at one point, but she was also a sexpot: her dancer’s poise, her deep voice, and her cat-eye make-up. In my earliest memories, my mother and I leapt around the living room in our underwear while Tchaichovsky’s Swan Lake blared on the stereo. It seemed it never occurred to her that being sexy could be sinful.
“God created us naked,” she once said.
Imagine my confusion when I arrived in New York City at seventeen, in my high-heels and short skirts, to attend college where I was told that I thought of myself as object not a subject, as a thing not an agent.
Like most Texan females, I actually thought of myself as strong, independent, and whip smart. As far as I was concerned, my beauty broadcast the message that I was in control of the mate selection process. It seemed to me that studying on the East Coast meant that I was going to have to learn what kind of victim I was.
Instead, to understand sexuality better, I took courses in Anthropology, Biology, and evolution. I learned about reproductive fitness and hormones. But that didn’t quite explain taboos. I studied Religion. I read the Scarlet Letter. I learned about the Puritan revolution. I read a lot of Victorian novels about women whose lives were destroyed by pheromones.
These questions helped inspire my novel about feminine sexuality, set before the fall, as it were, in a strip club called The Girlie Playhouse, where nothing bad can ever happen, until it does. The heroine, Trixie, is inspired by my mother and the novel is dedicated to her.
Academic fashions change and in the last several years, the same professors who had shamed me for dressing “like a prostitute” began to praise transwomen traipsing around in stilettos and pole-dancing for pre-schoolers. Apparently, feminine sexuality is okay when people assigned male at birth express it.
Have we finally gotten over our biases against feminine sexuality? Or did this sudden reversal reveal the covert misogyny that energized the many waves of feminism in the 1990s?
The Girlie Playhouse has finally found a home at Heresy Press, which is dedicated to “unbounded creativity and fearless expression.” Publication date is April 2026. That’s a long time away so, while you wait, sign up for the HP newsletter and book club.
Fiction publishing goes by the numbers. Big publishers want books that will appeal to the largest number of people. When considering what to publish, they have a big pool to choose from. So, it’s usually arbitrary which few of those millions who submitted their work get selected to be marketed toward the millions at the reading end.
