ABSTRACT
This defiant boast-spoken by a twenty-nine-year-old woman at a Christmas party in New York near the end of a millennium-equates a sterilized man with a castrated animal. In place of the intrusive and deliberately shocking “boyfriend,” the noun we expect is “dog” or “cat.” A household pet, loved, groomed, even spoiled, but also tamed, dependent, domesticated. Likewise, although the notorious refrain of a 1999 hit single by Christina Aguilera-
I’m a genie in a bottle gotta rub me the right way
—never implies that the female singer wants to be fixed up with someone who’s been “fixed,” it does demand of a lover what it doesn’t take a fully equipped man to supply. You don’t need testicles to rub your woman the right way.
