excerpted from Joey Comeau's Lockpick Pornography:
“True or false,” I say, “A man should never hit a woman.”
“True,” she says without hesitation. I pause a moment like I’m taking note of her answer. In reality, I’m sitting on the edge of Chris’ dining room table leaving smudge marks. He’s uptight about it. “Always use a coaster. Always use a coaster.”
“Wrong.” I say into the phone. “No. No. No. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that gender is an illusion? I mean, what if a pussy little faggot punched one of those chunked up body builder girls with a clit like a three foot cock? I mean, that right there is vaginal-dentata-night-terrors three feet from being realized, isn’t it?”
“Excuse me?” she says, but I’m getting into it. I wonder where Richard is, and whether we’ll fuck later. I picture the woman I’m talking to, sitting at her kitchen table while I push Richard down by the shoulder and pull open my belt. I picture her skinny botox face with a Desperate Housewives smile while she watches Richard take me in his mouth and she clucks her tongue. On the phone, she’s saying “Excuse me?” again.
“Gender isn’t a dichotomy,” I say. “Sometimes a baby’s born and it’s a boy, and sometimes it’s a girl, sure, but sometimes a doctor is in the background behind one of those pull-around curtains, flipping a coin. Sometimes the mother says “Is it a boy or a girl?” and the doctor really does say “Yes.” That isn’t the punchline to a joke, Mrs. Hubert, it’s the punchline to the whole misguided notion that the concept of boy or the concept of girl are anything more than constructions.”
There’s silence on the other end of the phone.
“How many loads of laundry would you say you did each week?” I ask, but she’s already hung up on me. It doesn’t matter. Outside, Richard is honking his horn. I hang up the phone and check my fly. She won’t think about what I said at all. Her husband will come home, and she won’t even remember to say “we got a crank call today.” I don’t know why I waste my time. It’s like writing letters. Fuck it.
I get all the way to the door and decide to call her back, give it one last try. Mrs. Hubert. I pick up the phone and press redial.
“Hello?” she answers, and I pause. I hate her for the fact that I know she’ll hang up, but I hate her more because there is a chance she won’t.
“When I pluck my eyebrows, I’m becoming more of a woman.” I say, “When you stop plucking yours, you become less of a woman. When I fuck a man, or his boyfriend,” I say, “and my chest is shaved, and my eyebrows are plucked, and his expensive underwear is pulled aside so that his cock springs free into my mouth, what do you have? Is gender really just tits?”
“Who is this?” the woman says.
“And women who develop breast cancer, who have their tits cut off, who wear the same breast form fakes as I do when I’m all dressed up, are they less than women?” She hangs up and my anger is confused because I don’t know what I believe anymore myself. If that’s what gender is, just an illusion, then why don’t I fuck women?
this is so good, and now i want to read the whole thing.