I’ve been avoiding Dr. Mike lately, because life is short, and his shtick, while never original, has begun making me feel like that one guy at a Gallagher concert who forgot to bring a plastic poncho. However, a correspondent was kind and cruel enough to inform us that UNC-W’s most distinguished gun-fondling kolpophobe is lately so haunted by what we might delicately call “Aphrodite’s Aperture,” that he’s been gibbering on about The Vagina Monologues for the past two columns.
But Dr. Mike is not resting on his anti-vaginal laurels, because there pretty much isn’t a single part of a woman’s body he isn’t revolted by in some way, as witnessed by the fact that last week’s offering is a painstaking, 700-word build-up to a fart joke.
As our story opens, Dr. Mike is having another imaginary conversation with a “friend,” who we can be pretty sure is imaginary himself because he claims to have read Dr. Mike’s book, Feminists Say the Darnedest Things. On the bright side, he was so inspired by it that he filched a notice off the door of a women’s restroom.
He then took it into my office for my personal inspection
Ewww!
and not to mention my personal entertainment.
Ladies, please laminate your restroom signs, because Dr. Mike may secretly borrow and “entertain” himself with them behind closed doors. Also your shoes, probably, but I don’t know how you’d go about laminating those. Maybe just double up on the Scotch Guard.
The sign reads as follows:
BE AWARE! YOUR VOICE CAN CARRY INTO ADJACENT ROOMS. IT’S BEST TO CONDUCT PRIVATE CONVERSATIONS IN YOUR INDIVIDUAL OFFICES.
Well, that sounds like good advice; not particularly risible, really, and certainly not offensive. But apparently Dr. Mike’s familiar felt the need to fetch this announcement because it reminded him of that one time when Dr. Mike triumphed over over feminism because he talked to a secretary at school and she didn’t file a restraining order against him.
The secretary explained to the feminist that I was not calling anyone an “idiot” but that instead we were joking about the movie Napoleon Dynamite. So, of course, no complaint was filed. But, after I made light of the situation in my book, some feminists got angry. I suppose that the same right to privacy that allows a feminist to have an abortion allows her to encourage false accusations of “workplace harassment.”
Yes, but if that were the case, wouldn’t some feminist have had a Planned Parenthood physician collapse Dr. Mike’s skull and vacuum out his brain by now? Although I suppose it could have happened and I just didn’t notice.
Nonetheless, I am now thinking about posting the following sign on the women’s restroom just for fun: BE AWARE! YOUR VOICE CAN CARRY INTO ADJACENT ROOMS. IT’S BEST TO CONDUCT MCCARTHYITE WITCH HUNTS IN YOUR INDIVIDUAL OFFICES.
Wow. Dr. Mike is fun. I always forget how much fun he is, which I guess explains why he’s single. As Linda Cardellini says in Brokeback Mountain, “Girls don’t fall in love with fun!” And it’s so unfair. Anyway, in keeping with the toilet theme of today’s column, Drop Dead Fred makes a fart joke, and Dr. Mike feigns indignation so he can spend the next five paragraphs setting up a better fart joke. Which we’ll never see coming, because just when you think he’s taking us to the anus, he abruptly detours back to the vagina, like a porn star with a bad case of ADHD.
It may surprise my readers but I did not think Bob’s remarks were at all funny. I thought they were offensive. Such comments should be considered offensive not because they are crude but because they are actually sexist. Let me explain.
Why do I suspect that whenever Dr. Mike’s ex-wife asked to hear those “three little words,” these are the ones she got?
It is simply unimaginable that the same kind of remark would be directed towards a man. Men, while not necessarily expected to belch or break wind in public, certainly are given a pass when they so. However, a serious gender gap exists with regard to our tolerance of women who do exactly the same thing. And since women have achieved equality in nearly every other aspect of life it is not unreasonable to start tackling this issue. And I have a specific proposal.
Let me guess: It has something to do with the vagina?
When Eve Ensler first published The Vagina Monologues (TVM) she included a monologue called “Reclaiming (C-Word).” The idea behind the monologue was that a) the c-word had a nasty meaning and that b) by repeating the c-word over and over the negative stigma could be removed. The c-word could be reclaimed by those who wished to use it without offending anyone!
Amazingly, I think he may have missed the point here. Ensler’s use of “the c-word” — as anyone who isn’t Dr. Mike has known since, oh, the mid-90s — isn’t an attempt to make it acceptable to Gramps and Nana and whoever else is sitting around the Thanksgiving table. It’s like black folks’ use of the n-word, or gay peoples’ embrace of the q-word — the expropriation, through a kind of linguistic eminent domain, of a historically demeaning word, thus disarming one’s tormentor; or at least forcing him to scramble for a fresh insult. And let’s face it, that’s a lot of work. Jonah Goldberg spent an entire book repurposing the word “fascist” just because he was too lazy to rustle up a decent neologism.
Many feminists later added a similar monologue to TVM performances. This one involved having women get up on stage and simulate the noises they make when they have an orgasm.
At first, being unfamiliar with these sounds, Dr. Mike thought it was a demonstration of the Heimlich Maneuver.
The idea behind this was that women too should enjoy orgasms and that they should not be judged for doing so. I guess that closing the gender gap on this issue was the climax of the feminist movement.
You can tell Dr. Mike is so proud of that joke he was probably still snorting and tittering about it two hours later when he was hunkered down in the toilet stall. I just hope someone posted the appropriate sign on the Men’s Faculty Restroom door.
So, today, I propose that we add another monologue to TVM performances. This new monologue will be called “Reclaiming Toot.” It may sound unusual but it really isn’t.
It may also sound imbecilic, and really it is.
After all, feminists say the stigma associated with the c-word can be removed by simply saying the c-word over and over. So why not repeatedly break wind in front of a bunch of howling students until the toot loses its power to control women?
Because Dr. Mike finds it extremely unjust that anything — even flatulence — can control a woman when he can’t. He’s also in a bad mood, because while researching his proposal, he read a dirty limerick scratched into a toilet stall and found its complicated rhyme scheme “elitist.”
We don’t require dogs to leave the room before they break wind so why should women?
I don’t know, Dr. Mike…this whole thing seems like an awfully roundabout way to go, just to get to the point where you can yell BITCH!