“They have my husband and child!” she screamed. “Give them all the cock they want!”
The CEO refused, despite her close relationship with her brother. She had a reputation in the business for being ruthless, which she couldn’t afford to lose now. It wasn’t easy being a woman in a man’s world. She and the police in London waited for further communication from the kidnappers. It came in the form of a blond scalp stuffed inside a Jiffy Pack, delivered by the postman. The whole family was blond, but forensics determined the scalp with the receding hairline was from the CEO’s twin brother rather than from her nephew.
The next day on page three of the Daily Sun there were no tits, but a naked man instead. Each day after that, a naked full-frontal man appeared in the newspaper, as directed by the kidnappers.
“Savages,” the CEO called these criminals. The scalping had convinced her they were American.
When the cocks started appearing on page three, there were immediate protests from media watchdog groups, from parents and government ministers, who claimed the photos were indecent. Many newsagents began to keep the Daily Sun behind the counter, lest anyone be offended. Some of them refused to sell it at all or even touch it. The circulation dropped by half during the first week. In media surveys, men said they were too embarrassed to read the paper. “I’m not gay,” said a man who was interviewed. The CEO knew cocks were bad for business. Breasts she could get away with. Women knew their place, but with men it wasn’t as simple.
As the cocks continued to roll off the presses, the hunt for the kidnappers intensified, as did the news coverage. Empire Media executives were well connected throughout the Metropolitan Police, Parliament, and MI5. All American Jennifers living in the United Kingdom fell under immediate suspicion.
One such Jennifer appeared on The Cheryl Crane-Murphy Report via satellite from London. Jennifer Chu, a thirty-two-year-old from Seattle, was studying for a master’s degree in international relations at the London School of Economics. She had been detained by the police for twenty-four hours and interrogated.
Cheryl Crane-Murphy was perched at her desk in New York, wearing an American flag pin on her lapel. “It’s not a good time for American Jennies, is it?”
Jennifer Chu nodded. “Talk about needles and haystacks. The name Jennifer is as close to a generic woman’s name as you can get. There are tons of us out there.”
“What I really want to know is—and I think I speak for all of my American viewers here—what the heck is going on over there in the U.K.? Are there pictures of naked ladies in the daily newspaper or what?”
“Not anymore,” said Jennifer Chu, trying to suppress a smile. She explained that when she first arrived in London, she was shocked to see topless models in the newspapers, to see the iconic red telephone booths filled with graphic advertisements for prostitutes, to walk into any corner shop or newsagent and be faced with explicit pornographic magazines. “This city is like one big red-light district. I know these kidnappers are, like, evil and stuff, but I think they’ve done a public service.”
The cocks continued to appear on page three of the Daily Sun and as they did, the kidnappers turned their attention to another target. Townsend’s was a chain of newspaper and magazine shops spread across Britain, popping up in every train station and shopping center and airport. The front of every shop was stocked with the usual fashion and home decorating magazines, the financial publications and gossip rags, but there were also myriad lads’ magazines, as they were called. The lads’ magazines weren’t on the top shelf, but were at eye-level for everyone to see. The graphic covers featured naked women, often in pairs or even in triplicate, rubbing their barely concealed nipples together, putting their tongues in each other’s mouths.
In the wake of the Empire Media scandal, the CEO of Townsend’s received a threatening note, which the police deemed to be credible. The note, signed Jennifer, demanded that the lads’ magazines be removed from every branch of Townsend’s and replaced with soft-core gay male porn. The CEO took immediate action. The lads’ magazines were exchanged for those that featured images of buff young men, hairless and muscled and bronzed, with bulging underpants (if they were wearing underpants). The men played with their nipples and flashed their man patches.