This part—I don’t know what this part is. It probably is not important to the woman, whose body is a big Pandora’s box full of mysteries and ghosts. It looks sort of like a lung but I don’t THINK girls have those—or if they do they are probably decorative pink lungs as opposed to the functional salmon-colored lungs possessed by men.
Very little is understood about what mechanism powers the woman. Steam? Coal? White wine? Humors? The important thing is that there is this—sort of—place for a baby, and amazingly, through some sort of miracle, beneath it are legs to help this empty vessel walk around on the land. And, proteins, I think?
So, uh. Processes. Ovulation is a very convoluted process which it is not necessary to understand. It takes no time, or perhaps a lot of time? Anyway, in this process the egg promenades lustfully along a stretch of uterus to see if she will catch the eye of any venturesome and praiseworthy sperm. It happens either monthly, annually, or never, and it makes women irrational and causes their sanguine humors to predominate, which is what gives them the ability to control the tides, become werewolves, and make cats their familiars.
The woman is full of eggs. This can be confusing. Where does the shell go? What does she do with the shell? Is that why she is always so upset when you try to explain to her how she is doing something wrong? Because there are little bits of shell inside her? Science cannot explain this.
The beginning of life is the result of two people performing a sacred act that is usually reserved for marriage, or if the president of the United States has become acquainted with an adult film performer and formed a special bond. Don’t worry, the female body has ways of shutting the whole thing down. Or is that ducks? I might be thinking of ducks. It doesn’t matter.
So uh you see here this sort of eggplant thing, that is . . . gross and we need not give it a name! Probably it is either the uterus, the cervix, fallopian tubes, or the clitoris?
The female body, like the Internet, is a series of tubes. Fallopian tubes are some tubes that are there; sometimes an egg will be careless and get itself fertilized in one of them because it has not been taking proper precautions (the egg ought to take precautions!), and in that case you can just kind of grab it and put it where it is supposed to go, but first you should give it a stern talking to. This is science, and we are trying to make it law, also.
The clitoris is like the Northwest Passage: Many men perished searching for it in vain; it does not exist, and never has. Do not go looking for it; you will surely die, and first you will have to see your dogs die.
This thing that looks sort of like a carrot that is having some problems is just—icky, and we need not discuss it, I think. It is a great mystery of the sort Man Was Not Meant to Know. It stores witchcraft and secrets and the ability to knit and perform emotional labor.
You might mistake this anatomy for a person, but actually it is just something that could contain a person; the moment the thingy is implanted in the whatsit by the you-know-what in a process that I fully understand—that is the moment there is a person. And the thing around it, that featherless biped which erroneously felt maybe that it was in possession of a soul—ceases to exist or to be of any interest to science. I am pretty sure. It can be discarded like a Whopper wrapper, to which, indeed, it is analogous—it is no longer important.
Again, these are not people. Indeed, as a special treat, I have brought one of these fantastic vessels for you to dissect and legislate upon to your heart’s content today.
Do not worry. No matter what she says, it will not hurt her; she is not real like you.
May 11, 2019
Male Authors Describe Men in Literature Right
I am not alone in noticing that male authors sometimes fall short—that is, they spend so much of their ammunition in their glorious and perfect descriptions of female characters that they sometimes, I fear, do not take quite the same care with their men. Imagine if we lived in a world where they did! Well, you need imagine no longer. I have fixed it.
RAYMOND CHANDLER
Marlowe was the kind of brunette who would make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window, and only half the hole would be from heterosexual panic. The other half would be that look he gave you, under his hat brim, the kind of look you thought you could cash in later in a cheap hotel room, before you saw the headache sticking out of his hip pocket.
LEO TOLSTOY
Vronsky had once been beautiful. His hands, once white and soft, were thin and wasted from the labors of child-rearing, and his face appeared pinched and unattractive. His voice had acquired a querulous tone. His arms, once the right shape, were now the wrong shape, because of the passage of time and the moral degradation that came with it. There was a horse who suffered an awful accident, and Vronsky was like that in a way.
HOMER
White-thighed Odysseus emerged from the water freshly bathed and glistening with oil
His skin glowed like the dawn sweeping in on his swiftly sandaled feet
The goddess beheld him with rapture
GEORGE R. R. MARTIN
Jon Snow’s abs moved imperceptibly beneath his tunic, firm and hard and pale like winter apples that had been harvested, sliced carefully, and arrayed in rows.
JOHN UPDIKE
He peed, but he had no idea how, because inside his body was anatomy that was impossible to
