In my book, I'm not thrashing out some insignificant private obsession, though I was whimsically amused to find myself perfectly serious about advancing tort reform, the prospects of which are low, and the practical import of which would also be low.

I wanted to attack the view that tort is public law, a kind of social regulation to promote Kaldor-Hicks efficiency or incentivize better conduct or some other such value. I wanted to attack consequentialism: I've never understood why consequentialists get to command the rhetoric of hard-boiled realism, when it seems to me that their views should be shelved in the science fiction and fantasy section of the bookstore. (Stow imagines that pragmatists should be consequentialists. That baffles me as much as it would to opine that surely people who love jazz should work out on elliptical machines.) And I wanted to defend the view that we have interests that survive our deaths. All of these larger matters ricochet around in disputes far weightier than whether dead persons (or their estates) should be able to sue for defamation. That relatively trivial question helps get these matters in focus. Theory goes badly when it's a conceptual shell game, with daunting abstractions whirling around on the page. We need examples, in all their rich, prickly, idiosyncratic splendor.

Finally, a bit on Stow’s closing salvo-cum-query. I do indeed explore cases of violence, some sexual and some graphic, against women. (Most are in a chapter on corpse desecration, my compare/contrast topic to defamation.) The woman(’s corpse) whose rape Stow thinks I have hypothesized was surely violated, maybe genitally at that. So, too, I explore plenty of cases—more, I suppose—of violence against men: decapitated soldiers whose heads lined the path to the head of the enemy troops; a Goya engraving with dead soldiers trussed and left in a tree, with their genitals slashed off; a man whose dead body was run over by multiple trains, body parts strewn far and wide; and more. I report Catherine Corless’s explosive revelation that nuns running an Irish home for unwed mothers had buried some 800 children in an abandoned septic tank, and I don't think there's much mileage for my purposes to be gotten by wondering whether the children were boys or girls and exploring how our reactions might differ accordingly, nor, for that matter, what difference it makes that nuns are (surprise!) women, or even women sworn to celibacy.

I am not so clueless about gender that I think being an equal-opportunity offender, if indeed offense is in the cards, gets me off the hook Stow worries I am impaled on (or perhaps wants to impale me on). But I am sure we do ourselves no favors by tiptoeing lightly or deploying anesthetizing jargon when sexualized violence against women is in play or, worse, by airbrushing it out of the record. Elsewhere I've written repeatedly and at length about the gender and other political dimensions of epistemology. Here I'll just say, with and without irony, that our examples should be penetrating.