Owen’s old question—why that anonymous, paradigmatic woman had allowed herself to pose for the obscene depiction on the back of the playground-equipment shed—is still imperfectly answered. The question perhaps belongs to the unscientific order that deserves no answer, such as Why does anything exist? and What is gravity? Julia takes a jarringly hard-eyed view: women are the world’s slaves and in the end must do whatever men demand. As Alissa pointed out, the question Why do men fuck? is never asked. The question Why do women? perhaps arose in Owen’s mind from a childish over-estimation of the distance between women and men. He had no sisters; his mother’s heat frightened him; the macadam playground surrounding the Willow Elementary School had been gender-segregated by a broad central sidewalk. Decades later, Owen read that, in an experiment on white mice gender-segregated by an electric fence, the males back off at the first severe shock whereas the females continue to charge the fence until all are electrocuted.

Women’s natures are very large, he early sensed, to seek sex amid the world’s perils, in the face of so many wise societal discouragements. The force that parts their legs overrules modesty and prudence and common sense. Women fuck, his provisional conclusion was, because, like men, they are trapped in a biological universe where the species that do not propagate disappear; the traits the survivors harbor—lustiness, speed, canniness, camouflage—are soaked in these disappearances, these multitudinous deaths. Sex is a programmed delirium that rolls back death with death’s own substance; it is the black space between the stars given sweet substance in our veins and crevices. The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted. We are told that we shine, that we are splendid, and the naked bodies we were given in the bloody moment of birth hold all the answers that another, the other, desires, now and forever.