I never actually believed in my body, my choice — not only because it was invented to dissect someone else's body, but because it was never legal to play with yourself in public.  I've seen people try, and it ends badly, whether or not the person is famous.

At most, the saying only applies to women.  For men, my body, my choice goes until a woman hears or sees you, and then it's over — for instance, until she hears you say let's make a baby at work when you're ugly.  Was her body affected?  No.  But then your body can't go back to Target.  

The truth is that my body, my choice can be a thing only when it really affects nobody, ever — which is never.  Like judge not, lest ye be judged, there were a whole lot of asterisks involved, and none of them made sense.  Whom were we supposed to not judge?  The only people worth judging — the people who did things we hate.  Whose body is his choice, and when?  When someone else decides to do something horrible, and somebody else has to put up with it or pay for it.  Thus, both maxims are about freedom — but only for one side.  The whole point is the other person ends up a pushover or a slave.  The question then is always, who?

The CDC admitted this week that 75% of people who die from COVID had four or more comorbidities — four, as in, they were already on the way out anyway, and COVID showed up and finished the job.  We already knew this two years ago, before people were locked out of their jobs for months, before we saddled posterity with astronomical debts to pay for locking people out of their jobs, before we forced healthy people to take an experimental vaccine that gave them heart attacks, before we allowed corporations to censor us on Facebook and Twitter over it, before doctors lost their jobs for telling us about their own practice, before medical professionals were fired en masse for not trusting the medicine, before neighbors began ratting each other out for birthday parties and Christmas, before we threatened the whole supply chain, and millions of people in Central and South America ended up starving.  

We already knew two years ago that COVID kills off the obese, but we locked gym rats out of gyms anyway.  We kept strong fathers out of their jobs because they were "inessential" to their own families, but it was essential to the survival of those who weighed more.  Staying true to the program, we kept the liquor stores and pot shops open because we didn't want to tell others what they couldn't do with their bodies — just what they couldn't do with their souls.  Church was thus closed, and the police targeted churches that didn't.  Getting high and choking down McDonald's and binge-watching garbage on Netflix were all my body, my choice.  Feeding your family?  Going to school?  Getting screened for a potentially dangerous non-COVID disease?  Verboten.  You could wear a thong at the beach, but you had to wear a face mask.  No — I take that back: the beaches, where there was more fresh air than anywhere else, were also banned.  You could get AIDS on Grindr, but you couldn't go sunning.  

So it turns out that the unhealthy forced their lifestyle on us.  We fought back a while and lost.  None of them — none of the people actually in danger — was locked out of Wendy's.  Nobody was told to hit the treadmill.  Cigarettes and marijuana, the things directly affecting our lungs, during a respiratory pandemic, were never banned where they were legal.  Twinkies were still sold at Walmart, and electric scooters still ferried the obese among the aisles to get them.

What did we build for ourselves?  A society where men are encouraged to trash themselves — and everyone else, from the fit to the unborn, is turned into a slave to support them.

Jeremy Egerer is the author of the troublesome essays on Letters to Hannah, and he welcomes followers on Twitter, and Facebook.

Image via Pixabay.