"READING ROOM The problem with sex, with animals [by Laura Borrowdale. A complaint has been made to the Department of Internal Affairs against the author of a book of short stories.How do you know you’ve “made it” as a writer? Is it, as one friend recently commented on a photo of me holding my new book, when Facebook refuses to allow you to promote your work? Is it when your publisher has plastered Karangahape Road with posters of that new book, the title Sex, with animals in graphic black and white? Or, was it when you suddenly became best friends with Theresa from the Department of Internal Affairs?That’s a joke, we weren’t best friends. Theresa and I came into contact after someone made a complaint to the Department on Internal Affairs, feeling that I had breached public decency. Poor Theresa had to cope with my total millennial aversion to answering her phone calls, not because of Theresa, who was a particularly nice person to deal with, but because what we had to discuss was a complaint made by a woman with very little understanding of metaphors. The issue was really that, as well as being a writer, I’m also a teacher. A good one. The kind of one who is asked to present keynote speeches at totally rad conferences and to serve on the national council of English teachers. And for the complainant, the fact that I existed without shame in the public eye as a teacher and felt entitled to write about sex and sexuality as an author was intolerable. She felt I should not be allowed to do both, even though the audiences for these two streams of work are clearly different. Her complaint was that at the New Zealand Association of Teachers of English annual conference, I promoted sex with animals (no comma). What I’d actually done was deliver a keynote speech on LBGTQIA* issues and trans rights in the classroom. The problem (well, for the complainant) is that I’m not only a teacher, I’m also something of a tease. Not the smutty fun kind, but rather the kind who can be tempted to name her book as a joking reference to that complaint: Sex, with animals, a joke I’ve now made up and down K Road thanks to a poster run by Phantom Billstickers. I’m just hoping that her knowledge of punctuation is better than her concept of figurative imagery. But I’m sure my friend Theresa will ring me up to let me know if it isn’t".--www,newsroom.co.nz