Will Self

And in order to underscore the satiric point of the chapter, which is to defang gender, there are two satiric chapters on gender where my objective is to make it perfectly clear how we assume gender and what the consequences might be.

So in the scene where all of the characters have assumed masculinity is their gender, it ends in a funeral that's a violent battle royale.

In the scene where they all assume that they're women, it ends equally unpleasantly.

So it's saying gender essentialism takes you nowhere.

Clearly we're all a bit of both.

Now how are we going to figure it out?

So there was a point to it, if you'll forgive the pun.

It wasn't just gratuitous.

And indeed, I think people just don't understand satire often.

You know, somebody said once, I was reading the quote yesterday, that there's a tendency among reviewers, for example, to say that something's a hilarious satire when they don't understand it.

But by the same token, it shows they don't really understand satire.

What is satire?

The purpose of satire is moral reform.

It's very uncomfortable to people.

We're not just bemerding everybody for the sake of it.

if we were doing that we really would have a different job we're doing it because we're oddly enough people who believe in people behaving properly i know that seems really outrageous and i think you know the telegraph interviewed me for this recent book and they put the headline that sort of they put on it was uh i used to be a junkie but that's why people should listen to me now

And actually, it's not as ridiculous a line as people might imagine.

The capacity to err and recover yourself suggests some idea of what normative behavior might be like.

As you were saying earlier about failure.

Exactly.