WATCH: Chris Belcher and Chloe Cooper-Jones Discuss Desire, Class, and Power
Hosted by Greenlight Bookstore
“The dominatrix is the id of American femininity. She says the words that we all wish we could say when we find ourselves frozen in the presence of men. No is principal among them.”
In her utterly profound and thought-provoking debut memoir and companion to her viral 2018 Salon article “What a Dominatrix Knows about #MeToo,” writer, professor, and former sex worker Chris Belcher dissects male desire and its effect on women. Belcher retraces her journey from infant beauty pageant winner to rebellious queer cheerleader in Appalachia to a broke gender studies PhD student in Los Angeles who remakes herself as LA’s Renowned Lesbian Dominatrix, specializing in male clients who want a domme to make them feel worthless, shameful, and weak—all the abuse regularly heaped upon women for free.
Pretty Baby upends our ideas about desire, class, and power. Carmen Maria Machado (In the Dream House) praises it as a “muscular, canny memoir… [that] shimmers with rage and insight.” Belcher is joined by award-winning author of Easy Beauty Chloe Cooper-Jones.
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