No need to speculate. The answer will be obvious to any journalist who goes to a strip club that caters to women. The myth that only bachelorette parties go to strip clubs will soon fade away when you see the reality. You'll find the same kind of regulars as you'll find in a similar club for men: older, single women who have enough money to pay a guy to give them attention. If you go even further and pay for a table dance you may be surprised to find yourself turned on, wether you want to be or not.

I did this once with a fellow journalist and I've never thought about the sex industry the same way again. For most people male or female, buying anything is a high, whether it's a sports car, a pair of manolos, or sexual attention. I'm not saying that's the way it should be, just saying that it's generally the way it is.

There's always been a sex industry for women who could afford it, the main thing that's changing now I'd guess is that fewer middle class women are ashamed to use it, and more significantly, ashamed to let other women know they're using it...that's why a brothel that services women would without doubt be successful.

Sex toy parties replaced tupperware parties, why wouldn't brothels be next step from strip clubs?

That NYT was pretty distressing, not because of the incestuous overtones, but because this woman just didn't seem to have a clue about how to go about setting healthy boundaries--the kind of boundaries that would actually better enable her children to express deep affection and love towards her. Because she hasn't done thaw now she's veering towards the opposite extreme in a way that is clearly going to hurt and confuse them.

The issue here is not simply affection but the difficulty parents have in helping their kids negotiate between appropriate private and and appropriate public behaviour...and also the healthy need to mature with the equally healthy need to regress.

When my son was about three I explained to him that at some level he would always be my baby, but now that he was a big boy there were times and places where he could act like a baby and times and places where he couldn't.

I breastfed him until he was four, but he learned early on that we didn't breatfeed in public, and later that we only breastfed at nightime. This distinction made it easy for him to understand that certain behaviours are less tolerated outside the house, than inside the house. That doesn't mean they are shameful. Just that there's a time and place for them.

Tantrums at home wouldn't get him what he wanted, but they wouldn't be punished, since the full expression of anger was something that family members needed to do sometimes. Tantrums in the supermarket, restaurants, etc were not tolerated and did have consequences since raging in public is unpleasant and disruptive to people who have no obligation to be tolerant.

My son understood early on that there was a time and place where he should strive to be mature, and a time and place where he was more free to let go.

This doesn't mean to me that I'm teaching him that private pleasures are shameful. In fact by sparing the kind of shame he's likely to encounter when he indulges anger, sexual urges, whatever, I'd like to think he's less likely to feel ashamed or frightened of these impulses, and more free to explore them in places where it is safer to do so.

There's a great book by a Canadian Children's author, Robert Munsch, called Love You Forever, about a little boy who grows into a man, and at different stages of his life feels the need to crawl into his mother's lap. Even as a middle age man he sneaks into her house at night to do that. When the day comes that she's too old to take him into her lap, he takes her into his. It's a great starting point for talking with kids about the human need for deep affection and how just because we learn to control it, doesn't mean we ever have to lose or repress it.

Hope this woman gets a copy for Christmas.

I wrote a review of Leroy's first book, Sarah, when it came out for The Montreal Mirror. I liked it, even though I found it a little fantastic. When Leroy's second book came out, The Heart is Deceitful, another editor at the Mirror pulled me aside. After reading Sarah, she was so moved by it, she wrote to him/her/them. Leroy not only wrote back, but they struck up an intense enough correspondence that he included her in the acknowledgments of his second book.

This editor has since moved to Australia, but as far as I know they remain friends.

So there you go, Ayelet. Leroy wasn't only "conning" celebrities, she was also "conning" ordinary people. Actual ordinary people, not relatively ordinary people such as yourself. Or maybe she was just making friends. Novelists create fictional characters. So this novelist took that task a little too seriously. Does that really make everything about the friendship false? Does it make the work less compelling or more.

It all raises interesting questions, which I believe is supposed to be what writers do.