My partner holds the testicles out, moving aside the withered penis with the back of her hand. She cuts into the scrotum, dispassionately revealing nothing. We goggled a bit at the empty vessel, not understanding if this was, perhaps, the way the testicles were supposed to look. She tries the other one, again failing to discover anything remotely ball-like inhabiting the folds of skin. Snake was, at some point, the victim of testicular cancer. I finally felt, in that moment, the force of the myriad of postmortem humiliations that snake had experienced to be with us in that lab.
Throughout the entire anatomy lab, there was no region most of the male students were more loath to slice into than the genitals. In a moment of freudian solidarity, the vast majority of us passed on the honor of that dissection to our female classmates, a shared moment of 100 sympathetic pangs in our own equipment, 100 disturbing visions of emasculation. We got over it, as we were made to get over any number of hang ups, but it was a remarkably visceral experience in social psychology. For reasons both genetic and social, a cornerstone of male psyche rests squarely and oddly on the status of our genitals. The idea of emasculation seems the ultimate pain and humiliation, an injury with a scope beyond the biological damage entailed. When we sliced open Snake, revealing the damage done to his sex organs, I finally felt true empathy with the man we had sliced, fairly literally, into pieces.
How powerful is the force of depersonalization, that I, and all students, can literally take knife to flesh with barely the most fleeting of thoughts? We came out of lab each day, reeking of death, and complaining only of the smell. We dispassionately held up the things that made 50 fellow human beings exist, thinking only of the taxonomy. Yet, for myself, and 99 other guys in my class, this one region, this one more cut, one more dissection, was the one that hit home.
That, I must say, is bizarre.
No comments:
Post a Comment