Excerpt: Toofar, or the misfortunes of Justine, astronaut

“Say a girl is a chair, and she isn’t sat on. What use does she then have? Admittedly, one can use her, the chair that is, to kill an opponent by repeatedly hitting him over the head with her. Or one can chop her up and build a fire when it’s cold and the heating isn’t working. But if she doesn’t get sat on for an extended period of time, we may one day fail to recognize her. What is that? we will ask. A boat? The Danish flag? A summer breeze? A boy? With her original use now lost to us, we will also quickly forget her alternative uses, because she will no longer make any sense to us at all. This means we will not sit on her, nor smash our opponents’ skulls with her, nor reduce her to firewood and burn her. Finally, we will come to regard her as perfectly non-existent. This will be the end of her civil rights, too. Nothing that does not exist can lay claim to any rights. Imagine the dangers she would face! She’d be an outlaw. Caput gerat lupinum! Unprotected, and thus fair game for any scoundrel wishing to have his way with her. It follows that she’s better off making herself useful to begin with. And being useful, as a girl, implies, well…”
The professor halted. He was a civilized man.