If COVID affected something other than lungs

My Sunday column in the Arizona Daily Star this week touched a tiny bit of a nerve, if my in-box is accurate. Most readers thought the column – which wondered aloud about a new virus that made a certain percentage of men permanently incontinent and impotent – was spot-on. Yes, those emails said, if COVID attacked below the belt instead of above the diaphragm, it’s pretty much assured the general public would comply with whatever public health experts asked of them.

But there was one email that shook me down:

You must have had a really bad experience in your live (sic) to dream this up. Just imagine if women had brains instead of vaginas,  there might be a lot less dumb people in the world.

The first thing I thought when reading this was “it is fewer, not less” because I suffer from the grammatical correction tic most writers have. But then I thought, “Really? That’s your argument?”

That email was typical of what passes for discourse nowadays, where points aren’t argued, but rather persons attacked. I had another reader write in and say he agreed with the premise but thought it demeaned both writer and reader to have genitalia be in the column. That’s a different argument, and perhaps one to be considered. But the first email? Not so much.

If you want to read the column, and I hope you do, just go right here.