Shannon Bell’s 2010 book ”Fast Feminism” had me at the beginning of the second paragraph when she stated that she never writes about anything she hasn’t done. I really admire that desire to authentically experience things before forming and expressing opinions on them, especially coming from someone in academia.

Thirty-seven pages in, I realized that I had seen this woman’s writing before. I’d seen it in “Jane Sexes It Up” at 15 when I was still in the early stages of forming my own view of my self and body, separate from my second-wave feminist mother’s ideas of women and sexuality.

“Yes mom, I’m very happy that you fought for my rights to get an abortion if I need to and have access to various kinds of birth control. But, um, isn’t the point of all that to be able to have sex when I want and with whoever I want? Even if there’s a phallus involved sometimes? Maybe even a flesh and blood one that’s attached to a man?”

A couple of years later, Tony Ward (the man who took the photograph used on the cover of “Jane Sexes It Up”) and I met at a coffee shop in Philadelphia to discuss working together. He showed me some nicely lit photographs of pretty models, I declined saying I wasn’t sure how I felt about posing nude yet. If I’d known he was the person behind the cover of one of the most influential books of my adolescence, I’d have been naked before he could get the lighting gear set up - armpit hair and all.

Here I am, having gotten naked in front of lots of cameras, looking at the last chapter of “Fast Feminism” in which Shannon Bell says that she believes we get to choose our mothers and discusses her own. I don’t know if I chose my mother, but despite our differences over my career I wouldn’t trade mine for the world. She raised me in an environment where I could learn about and do anything I was interested in. Even if what I’m doing now involves lots of high heels and heated debates with her over the exploitation of women.