"All of my life I was very angry, until one day I just talked like this. All of a sudden everybody was smilin' at me and I was only doing good on this earth. So I kept on doin' it."
Let's say that tomorrow, a postmodernist social critic deconstructs every religious, legal and folkloric text in the history of humanity, feeds them through a magic Derridecoder ring, and finds a common chain: all the world's ills have been caused by people with detached earlobes. The media immediately latch on to this sensational (and thoroughly scientific) finding. It becomes a catchphrase, a fad, a common gimmick for made-for-cable movies of the week to pin all villainy on monsters with dangling ear lobes. Politicians pour gas on the flames in search of public approval, swearing to bring equity via the newly formed attached earlobby. Laws begin to squirm their way into the books declaring those with dangling earlobes (let's call them "danglers" for short) suspicious and deserving of summary arrest whenever in conflict with their assuredly innocent victims with attached ear lobes.
Pretty soon, though danglers die younger and score lower in every metric of physical and mental well-being, though they do all the most dangerous or unhealthy jobs and can expect to be arrested and jailed far more often for the same crime than their angelic attached-lobe counterparts (let's call them attachés, or "ches" for short) they are only being vilified more and more as hoarding all of society's goods for themselves. Everything is the fault of the danglers and their fault only, from wars to economic downturns to religious repression and prejudice and anything bad that might happen to the attachés. Children grow up indoctrinated into considering danglers disgusting, innate criminals who can only be redeemed by a lifelong program of abuse by, and service to, their superiors in the natural order. Any attaché can point a finger at any dangler and claim to have rubbed ears unconsensually, and that dangler instantly gets ostracized with no chance to defend oneself. From cradle to grave, danglers hear nothing but their own vilification and the glorification of the ches, while still being expected to sacrifice themselves for the ches' benefit.
But wait! For the price of a small operation, a little nip and tuck and some hormone treatments, you can declare that you were never a dangler, that there was really a che inside you all along just waiting to be properly expressed. You're not one of the villains. You're one of the angelic elite! You can glue your earlobes to your head and convert to one of the righteous.
Would you do it?
Male-to-female transsexuals have consistently outnumbered female-to-male pretty much since recording began. The numbers I've seen usually range anywhere from 1.5:1 to 3:1 depending on definitions, place and time, but even the low end of that scale is off the charts to anyone familiar with male/female differences, which rarely break a 5-10% spread. Politically correct explanations tend to be formulated with the incentive to insult men at every turn, to declare this as proof that men really are defective in some fundamental way and the human ideal is female. In a way, yes, because in a species in which favors and sacrifice already flow naturally from men to women, from nuptial gifts to "with your shield or on your shield" the past half-century has only sweetened the deal further by constantly demonizing men and sanctifying women, by raising men to hate themselves and hold women up as deserving of all the world's good. We should remember that even the tropical fish everyone loves to cite as evidence of natural sex changes do so when socially favorable, and we have made femininity overwhelmingly favorable. Under such conditions, the surprise isn't the heavy skew away from dangling. It's that anyone would want to dangle at all.
And I hear you say "Werwolfe, you're pissing on the wrong bush! Ear lobes are one thing but I'd never dole my balls just to get out of a few traffic tickets! What kind of man do you think I am?" To flip an old joke though, we've already established that. Now we're just haggling.
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