"Always Daddy's Girl" by Jon Lewiston (berylg@teleport.com). This is an exceptionally well written story. A young girl has been kept from seeing her father by the mother who dumped him. The mother is essentially a bad parent, who runs around a lot with several boyfriends, and generally tries to poison the daughter's mind against her father. When the father finally gets the daughter (age 12) to stay with him for a prolonged time, he finds himself having a sexual relationship with her. The sex is not the leering type of incest story that often appears in the a.s.s. postings, but rather a description of a sensitive and mature relationship. If I didn't have an inherent bias against pedophile/incest stories, I would have said to myself that this is the way things should be. I *do* have such a bias, and I still wasn't upset by this story.

I firmly believe that if in real life you are having sexual relations with your children or if as a child this happened to you, you should seek professional help. The problem with a good story like this is that it gives a loophole for people who are involved in a less-than-idea relationship to ignore the possibility of exploitation and to rationalize that they are just like the characters in this story. Nothing bad happened to these people, they say, and so nothing bad will happen to us. Remember: the main reason nothing bad happens to the people in this story is because the author could act like God and write the story that way. All of this is not to say that this kind of story should be suppressed; I am merely urging you to distinguish between fantasy and real life.

Society needs its laws and there are good reasons to discourage and even prohibit fathers from bedding their daughters. That's because most parents in such relationships in real life are abusing their power over their children, and such stories usually have unhappy endings in real life. In the world of fiction, however, we can suspend reality and believe that it really is possible for policemen to chase criminals at high speeds along the sidewalks of major cities without hurting anyone. We don't even give a thought to the notion that some of the people John Wayne or Arnold Schwarznager kill would have children who would miss them. We can believe that it is possible to pull a pin out of a hand grenade with one's teeth and throw the projectile accurately fifty yards, destroying the enemy soldiers who could not slay that thrower with their obviously more powerful automatic weapons. We can even believe that Shoeless Joe Jackson can come back to life to play baseball on a field of dreams in Iowa. We can believe that demons can possess beautiful women on soap operas, while people around them are losing their memories and changing their personalities and engaging in serial polygamy at the drop of a dildo. If we can suspend reality enough to believe and enjoy all this, then surely we can without pangs of conscience enjoy a sensitive description of a relationship built upon what is normally taboo in real life.