Who Owns Your Life?

Professor Stuart L’Chiam, M.D., J.D., PhD., & M.T.S.D.* walked calmly to the podium. The venue at which he was giving his talk – he hated the word speech and never read from a prepared text, preferring index cards inscribed with the ideas he hoped to cover – was the World Women’s Day gathering in Boston, Massachusetts. He scanned the audience of 5,000 hostile Feminists and smiled.

            “Good Morning!” Professor L’Chiam began. Not a sound came from the throng. “I shall begin my talk with a question, to be followed by a series of questions,” he said in a jovial tone.

            “Do women have the right to say “no” to sex?”
            The hall erupted.  It appeared with that one line, the professor would empty out the venue and be left talking to the custodians, but it only seemed that way as 500 or so women ran for the exits screaming and gnashing their teeth and gesticulating wildly with their hands, their middle finger raised at him in the universal sign of debasement and rage.

            After the enraged shouts died down Professor L’Chiam continued, “Of course women have the right to say “no” to sex! That was a silly question and I asked it so that I might get the silly response I have come to expect from the type of people that attend a “Women’s Day” gathering, as well as to remove the more insidious lunatics and goofballs among you. Now that they are gone, let us continue! 

            “So, of course women have the right to say no to sex! The explanation given by Feminists as to WHY women have that right is profoundly and deeply flawed. Ask any Feminist if she can refuse sex, or dismember a life growing within her, and the response will invariably be that it is “my body, my choice”. And that is a very, very unfortunate choice of words, for the rights that you possess are not limited to your body. The rights that you have are yours because you own your life! There is an important fundamental difference between ‘my body, my choice’ and ‘my life, my choice’, though thus far Feminists seem to be incapable of grasping the difference, or what deluded essay the phrase was coined in. I hope to lend them a hand intellectually”.

            The crowd had been quiet but was now starting to buzz.

            “What else do women have the right to say no, or yes, to?”

            The room went quiet again.

            “Do you have the right to eat what you wish?”

            Professor L’Chiam took a pregnant pause to let the audience fret over their individual weight. It didn’t take long. One woman stood up in the crowd and shrieked at the professor, “I do not exist to have my body judged by creeps like you!”

            “Ah, thank you for that, madam. Not the insult, mind you. That was highly improper. Of course you own your life and your emotions, but your right to your emotions ends where my emotional wellbeing begins. No, I thank you for pointing out that you own your life and with that comes the right to eat, or not eat, what you wish and that the use of force, of any kind and by any means, to govern your diet is improper and immoral. That would include government determining soda size at the local fast food restaurant, but let’s not get off track. We were doing so well.

            “Do men have the right to say ‘no’ ”?

            “ ‘No’ ” to what you slimy asshole?” exploded another member of the crowd. “We don’t have an appendage that we wish to penetrate and dominate you with!”

            “Oh, very well… I shall restate. Do men own their lives, as women do? Or is it only women that own their lives?”

            The hall went silent. Professor L’Chiam let the silence sink in. He looked around the room for several minutes, signaling to each woman that met his eyes to answer the question. Not one of the women in the audience responded to his prodding.

            “Well, since no one here is willing to state the obvious, I shall. Yes, men do own their lives. Now that I have made the critical assertion, are there any in attendance that wish to challenge that?”

            The hall went silent.

            “Well then, it seems that we have established that all human beings own their lives, and by extension they own their bodies. Your body does not own your life. Your life owns your body! But what does it mean to own your life? Do you own the air needed to sustain life? Or can some outside force, say the State, insist that this resource must be paid for – or else?”

            The silence in the hall was deafening. Professor L’Chiam was well known for stripping the bark off of silly and ill-considered belief systems, so the best cause of action was to say nothing for with him everything you said would certainly be used against your position.

            “No one has an opinion on this? Well, then it is good that I have an opinion. For the sake of brevity I shall try to keep it simple. Every single person in this room is consuming oxygen through the air. You are not taxed for the air. Presumably, because we all need the air we breathe to live.

            “What about food? Isn’t food the equivalent of air?”

            More silence. The women in this hall came together to encourage each other’s grievances against men, not to discuss food and air.

            “Since we seem to agree that each and every human being owns his or her life and that right is absolute, and that life is sacrosanct, it then follows that each and every person owns the results or production of his or her life. You know, the idea of private property? After all, if one does NOT own the production, efforts, and results of our lives how can we possibly believe that we own our own life? If we do not have the right to our work then we do not own our lives. If we do not own our lives then we do not have rights – including the right to say “No” to anything. The ownership of our own life is an absolute. Either you have it or you do not have it. Does anyone here wish to dispute this assertion?”

            “Can you get to the point, professor?” said one of the event’s organizers, as the crowd was clearly not appreciating having their feet tacked to the base of their positions.

            “Oh, yes, yes. I am getting there. We seem to have agreed that we, humanity, must have air to breathe, food to eat, and that we own our lives. Breathing the air, the consumption of which we have not made any effort to pay for, is not subject to confiscation by others. We have the right to our next breath without interference. And yet we do not have the right to our next meal. We know this because if you were to work at growing food our society would countenance the seizing - by force - of a certain portion of that food as “taxes”.

            “What the hell are you talking about?”

            “Oh, I think I have been more than clear. Every person here is breathing away and freely consuming the oxygen in this room without interference from other individuals or groups of individuals, such as governments. And this is so even though the air is not something that is a result of the efforts of the life you own. Yet everyone here, well, except me, is quite comfortable with the theft of the production of the lives of people that we have already determined own their individual life, and that society may employ force agents to seize the production of our lives, such as food that people have grown, food that people need to live just as much as the air they breathe, that the people have produced with the life that they own.”

            “What??!! What about hungry people?”

            “Are hungry people more deserving of food that they did not produce than are aroused men of sex they did not negotiate for?”

            “Are you comparing the right to food with the right to have sex, professor?”

            “Sharp as a tack! Yes. I am suggesting that other lives, lives that do not own your life, have no more right to the food you grew in your garden or the furniture you built in your workshop or the music you composed in your home than they have to your body - because you own your life, and this ownership of life is an absolute.”

            “Now let’s move on to the human male erection,” Professor L’Chiam tried to sneak in for effect while the crowd roared its disapproval. The more emotional and unstable of the audience, and there were many, were streaming for the exits.

           

           

To be continued…