Well, it's been a lot of fun, actually. The kind of people I hang out with all share my political sensibility and my feminism, and very few of them have children. And the women friends that I have tend to be professional. Actually they all are; most of them are academics and feminists. Only two of my close friends have children, and they each only have one child whom they had either very early in life and decided never to do it again or very late in life after kind of putting it off and having a lot of ambivalence about parenting. So they think it's great that I have this carefree sex life.

You're making the same mistake Gary did. I'm not talking about his vasectomy, but that he has become the world's expert on castration.

The two tend to -- I guess the two differentiate slightly. The book is a source of comedy -- and actually a lot of interest. It's just hilarious. People come up with a lot of good wisecracks. It's been very positive and fun.

It's a serious subject, but one's first response is to make a joke -- how many castrated men does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Hello. [Taylor has picked up another phone.] I just wanted to say that Celia is the one who spoke the first words of the book: "My boyfriend has been fixed." I don't know if you want to tell him how that came up.

[Daileader] Yeah. I was going in that direction. I don't know if that's relevant.

How did that come up?

I said, "My boyfriend has been fixed," in front of my whole family at a Christmas party, and it was a real effective way to get my father to stop badgering me about having children.

I already said this to Gary -- he is not really "fixed." Getting fixed is about chopping the balls off.

Yeah, yeah, that's true. They could make a vasectomy for dogs. As Gary's book says, the first vasectomy was done to a dog. Most people don't want to go through the trouble of making it more precise. That's a whole different question: Why do we care so little about our animals that we just --

Chop it.

I did think my comment was quite tasteless. There was probably all sorts of unconscious stuff going on there, getting back at my father. This had always been an issue for me because I was raised under his thumb and he's an archsexist, very traditional. This is one of the reasons I'm a feminist. So it had been this ongoing struggle with him. I think I was driven to an outrageous statement like that in public because I just didn't know how else to feel safe about the subject of children and pregnancy. I was really pushing his buttons. I totally shocked him and a lot of other people in the room. My father scolded me for it the next day. And I said, "Dad, you were pushing my buttons. I pushed your buttons right back."

Does your father have a copy of this book?

Not yet. I think Gary wanted to give him one, and I've been telling him to hold off. It's the sort of book -- my father is a Catholic Italian-American patriarch, and I don't think he's going to agree with a lot of the stuff in there. But that's just a guess. I've been trying to keep my own book out of my father's hands for years and he finally ordered it through Amazon. Fortunately he didn't have the patience to read beyond the first four pages.

What's your book?

My book is called "Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage." The subtitle is "Transcendence, Desire and the Limits of the Visible." From his point of view it's a book about sex.

Don't you and Gary get sick of talking about castration?

We have other things to talk about!

So what has the book done for your sex life?

Things are as great as they've ever been. The difference it's made for me is I'm a little worried about women coming on to him. He's kind of a perfect male -- risk-free in so many important ways. I don't even know if I've shared that with him.

What I was getting at is that I can't imagine working on, say, a chapter about a man getting his balls chopped off and then saying, "Hey, honey, feel like having wild sex?"

I guess if I were writing about clitoridectomies -- I see your point. Anticipating what his answer would be, when you throw yourself intellectually into a project it just -- I don't know -- it changes. Anything that I'm doing that's satisfying intellectually will always boost my sexual self-esteem.

[Taylor returns to the phone.] I suppose you have to have a certain amount of sexual self-confidence to write a book like this. But given that I'm an arrogant son of a bitch, it hasn't bothered me that way. The curious thing is that the response to this book has sexualized me publicly. I got sent a piece from an Italian magazine where the writer describes me as having "loose hair down to my nipples" and an "ambivalently predatory smile." I've never posed for a photograph where my nipples are showing, so the writer chose to imagine me that way. Reactions to the book have been very personal, whether they are negative or positive. They all want to say something about me sexually. This is like the sexual allure of the eunuch.

Oh, my God, now you've started a new trend: eunuch chic.

I suspect not!

I mean, I'm thinking about getting clipped [a joke].

If one of the responses to the book is that more men think about getting a vasectomy [that would be a good thing]. The male response to vasectomy seems to me quite ridiculous. It's such a very simple operation and so safe.

We haven't been on the same wavelength in this interview at all. You regard vasectomy as a good thing -- it's castration chic. For me, when a dog gets clipped, the scrotum is completely made missing.

One of the things that I became quite interested in when working on the book -- which I hadn't anticipated at all -- was how human beings treat their animals. We learned how to castrate ourselves by doing it to animals. The history of castration is tied to the domestication of animals, which is the beginning of civilization. The last person I quote in the book is bioethicist Peter Singer, who talks about other species being human, and how our definition of what counts as human we should clearly be applying to other species. This is how Freud got it completely wrong: He didn't see any connection between human and animal experience. It makes perfect sense to me that your response to castration is partly based on your relationship with your dog. The book begins with "My boyfriend has been fixed" and it ends with Singer's statements about the nature of humanity. I'm not sure you and I are on a different wavelength.

I just can't think of you as a castrated man.

The reason I insist on the connection is my point that castration originated from a desire to limit reproduction -- it was just a clumsy way of doing it. So the vasectomy obtains the same biological purpose without so much damage to the biological organism. There are important differences between the two, but there is that connection about reproduction. I want to insist on that because that was the thing that Freud didn't talk about at all. In both cases, it's all about testicles.

Ha! Consider putting this on your tombstone: "It's all about the testicles."

As I was saying to someone, "Castration: It's only your balls that you lose."

Private Life Romance, relationships, and the personal side of Table Talk