Jay Fox - THE WALLS

“Of course.”

“Now, can you imagine a case in which the act of coitus is non-criminal? For example, in a country where prostitution is legal, if a woman enters into a contractual agreement with a man — let's call him Doug — to exchange her services for his money, then certainly the interaction is not criminal. She has offered her labor to a pimp, the pimp has taken her on as his employee, as this pimp owns the means of protection, and he has delivered her to Doug, unto whom she will perform whatever illicit acts Doug desires, so long as he is willing to pay for them. Doug then pays the prostitute for her work, she in turn pays the pimp the percentage due to him, and the process gets repeated again and again and again. This is okay to you?”

“No, but, you know, it's legal.”

“That's right. It is legal. No party, Doug included, has committed a crime.”

“None of them have done anything illegal.”

“So let's repeat our second premise: in all cases rape is criminal. Furthermore, if Doug has coitus, then he commits rape; and if he, Doug, commits rape, then he commits a crime. However, you have affirmed that Doug can have coitus without it being a crime. This presents a contradiction, which allows us to place a tilde in front of that second premise that we asserted at the beginning of this derivation, consequently meaning that we can end up with the following conclusion: It is not the case that rape is criminal.”

“Wait, what? I didn't fucking agree to that!”

“It's a perfectly valid argument.”

“You're fucking insane.”

“Okay, how about this: the introduction to a spoon as opposed to a nipple is the first, perhaps most, traumatic experience in a person's post-uterine life. Think about it: a cold, phallic piece of metal is forced into our reluctant mouths. Forced! Into! And to add to the degradation — to make the act all the more despicable and horrifying — the food, baby food, has the same consistency as shit — baby shit, too, the type that's been sat on and squished and molded into a foul paste. The act of eating, consequently, can be seen as an institution founded upon violence and humiliation. Jesus, where's a critical theorist when you need one? I think I have enough material for a book — all I need is a few irrelevant passages from Discipline and Punish and Being and Time .” He stared to me with contempt. “Look, man, sex can be violent, sure. There are entire cities in California dedicated to this freaky faction of the sex industry. But I just can't agree with you: it would make every heterosexual woman a masochist, and every man — unless he is a permanent catcher — Narcissus, asexual, or a sadist. And that, to me, is absolutely absurd. I can't accept it. One of the most fundamental aspects of life cannot be inherently cruel. Life cannot be inherently cruel.” I shook my head. “What you're saying is absurd.”

“Why? It's only absurd because you've never really thought about it,” he said with a fist upon the bar top. “You've been trained, brainwashed, to think the opposite — that it's somehow beautiful or tender or whatever. It's bullshit. We've been duped by the people in power, the patrimony [ sic .], who keep us blind to the truth — the hidden truth that men are violent creatures, and women are made to suffer because we're just these…these fucking brutes. Women are these beautiful creatures and we need to dominate them and dress them up and change them for our own sick pleasure. Do you know the John Lennon song, 'Woman is the N'—”

“—I know the song.”

“Don't you get it, though? You seem like a smart guy; why don't you get it? They are goddesses,” with his fist on the bar. “They are perfect,” again with the fist. “They are without violence, without hatred, without any of the disgusting habits of men. And I can't do it anymore,” he said as he raised his hand to catch Pam's attention. “Can I get another, please?”

“If I give you another round,” she began as she approached, “Will you quit bothering the kid?”

“I'm not bothering him,” he responded. “We're just having a conversation.”

“Is he bothering you?” she asked with high brows. Her tone was lighthearted, as though I was stuck in the midst of a joke. At the same time she knew she could not allow Tommy to feel as though I was humoring him without inspiring a more aggressive tirade. In other words, her act was one of civility. She knew that I would respond in the negative, that this show of compliance would be feigned, and that any vocalization of the truth on my part would shatter the dynamics of propriety that had been established long ago, thereby increasing the potential of Tommy acting in an undesirable fashion — because propriety is a lot like a game of Jenga (which is the word one utters during a game of the same name when a tower of bricks collapses, and, ironically enough, the root of the Swahili verb that means 'to build' (an ironic paronym perhaps?), which is essentially means, the tower falls and everyone yells the imperative “Build!”), only the collapse that takes place once all etiquette has been nullified can be anything from a cascade of tears to an inferno that envelops several city blocks. When I responded with the obvious, she asked the follow-up that always comes up in situations such as these: “Are you sure?” Yes, I was sure that I wanted to perpetuate civility.

I left after that one beer. I don't remember my stated reason for leaving. During the time I was stuck with Tommy, the chasm between our opinions was not bridged. He was suffering from castration envy; I was trying to promote the most basic tenets of humanism, arguing that having a child actually constitutes the last step in the process of a male's maturity, that only a man can be a father. I think I got this concept from a public service announcement that was frequently aired in the early- or mid-nineties, and I'm pretty sure Lawrence Fishburne was the one featured in it. Regardless, he, Tommy, was reluctant to award credence to it. He was living proof of my gender's inability to be responsible in terms of children. To him, this was because we lack empathetic instincts: We are biologically predisposed to be hunters; furthermore, a hunter can only have pity for his prey. And even that's rare. I simply saw him as a typical, albeit older, member of Generation X — too self-absorbed to take responsibility for the problems they create — the generation of overgrown and spoiled children (the generation that takes pride in its vanity, the generation that hated Reagan and Bush I so much that they rebelled via self-destruction, the generation that has killed the written word with books about how-I-made-my-money and why-I-became-a-heroin-addict and I-graduated-from-Yale-and-then-decided-to-become-a-stripper and listen-to-me-,-please-! and I-can't-write-real-fiction-so-I'll-just-fictionalize-my-life memoirs, the generation that never grew up, but sold out nonetheless, the generation of souls too intransigent to take on the part of Dante, so they instead play lion, she-wolf, and leopard to my own generation, my own generation for which I still — for whatever reason — have faith).

Tommy was slightly dejected when I stood to leave. While he obviously appreciated my company, he did not implore my continued presence; he just stared to me. I am fairly certain that he forgot all about our conversation, perhaps even my existence, as he was very close to (or already was) blackout drunk. I thought about him later, about his eventual departure from the bar, his arrival home to his sex-deprived wife — a devastated postpartum mess of hormones almost suicidal because she feels her husband has abandoned her. And, to a large degree, she's right. It's a shame that the future adulteress will feel guilty about the inevitable.