Caller 40: "Okay, well... As someone who would also prefer not to have a flesh prison, and who also doesn't like compliments on my body, I use fashion and style to express myself—because it's something I have agency over, it helps me counter the trauma of being forced into corporeal existence. I wondered if you felt the same?"

: “Now, there's an intriguing concept. But I’m hardly traumatized by my own body! It’s an inconvenience, but, as far as inconveniences go, not a horribly unpleasant one. It’s like being given a pet without your consent, but a particularly cute and talented one—maybe you didn’t want a pet, but if you’d had to choose one anyway, it would have been this one.

“There have been such philosophical debates over what decides the shape of one’s soul in the afterlife. Is it a punishment, is it random, is it a reflection of repressed psychic urges… I come down on the side of those who believe that our new postmortem shapes show who we really are. I believe this because mine reflects who I am. My body is the garment that best expresses myself. My body, silly little automaton though it is, is absolutely perfect. I enjoy my body. I even love my body.

"And it is mine.

"It belongs to me. Not to any of you. You don’t deserve it. If I could keep this wonderful little possession locked up somewhere safe while I go about my daily business so I could keep your eyes off of it, I would. You don’t have permission to admire it, to ogle it, or to fawn over it. It’s not your toy. It’s my toy. And when your mothers taught you that good little children should be nice and share their toys, they should also have taught you that good little children don’t beg to take toys from the hands of children who say they don’t want to share.

“You particularly look like fools when you fling tawdry compliments at my body and act like you’ve paid a compliment to me. You haven’t. You haven’t said a word about me. I am not my body. I just ride around on it.

“The clothes I wear—to finally loop back to your original question, terribly sorry for the digression!—they serve two purposes. One, they consistently identify me, like a uniform. Two, they keep your damn eyes off everything but my smile.”

Mic: "Next caller."