After the renovation, Townsend’s was filled with women and girls. It was funny to see images of semi-naked, sexed-up men. For women it was like being in a carnival funhouse, where nothing was as it was supposed to be. News reports claimed that men felt uncomfortable going into the shops, since the women were leering and laughing. Businessmen in Armani suits tried to conduct themselves with dignity, but it was difficult to do with all those perfect male butts in their faces, with those men staring at them with a look that said fuck me.
In London, images of men with fuck me looks were beginning to proliferate. Threats of kidnap and murder had spread, and images of female bodies were disappearing rapidly and being replaced with male ones. Men’s body parts were scattered around the city: men’s lips, torsos, legs, and buttocks. Pieces of men would flash by on the sides of buses, enough to brighten any girl’s day. Before, the covers of the men’s and women’s magazines alike had featured women, but now most of them featured men instead. London was being renovated, and the wallpaper covering every surface of the city was no longer decorated with women. The default Londoner, the implied viewer of everything, was no longer male.
Tourism increased, with women from many countries anxious to see what was happening firsthand, but there were also unforeseen consequences. London was scheduled to host the G8 Summit, but world leaders complained. The French president commented on a British television advert that featured a man washing his hair with a new floral-scented shampoo; the man was so excited by the shampooing experience that he made orgasm sounds as he massaged his head. “I cannot be taken seriously in such an environment,” the French president said. Other world leaders echoed his comments, and so the G8 Summit was moved from London to Berlin.
The imam of an East End mosque was taken hostage soon after that. While he was being held in captivity, a video was released to the media in which he ordered all good Muslim men to wear blindfolds. “It’s not right that women should cover themselves from our gaze. Who has the problem here: women, who have committed the heinous crime of merely existing, or men, who choose to objectify women? If the sight of uncovered women offends you, stay at home or wear a blindfold. Better yet, pour acid into your eyes. Then you’ll never have to see anything that offends you again.”
Was New York next? That’s what everyone wanted to know.
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VERENA AND I SAT ON A BENCH across the street from the Austen Tower, watching the workers set up concrete barricades. “That’s to prevent car bombs,” she said, biting into her sandwich. “They know something we don’t.”
The events in London had just started to unfold, and rumors were circulating that on this side of the Atlantic, Austen Media had also been threatened. I looked up at the glistening silver trunk. If Austen had been threatened, then it wasn’t a good idea to sit on a bench outside the building, but Verena wanted to see what was happening for herself and asked me to join her at lunchtime.
“Listen to this,” she said, and read to me from a copy of the New York Daily that had been left behind on the bench. “In an internal Austen Media memo leaked to several online sources, Stanley Austen instructs the editors of his nine women’s magazines to remove all references to blowjobs from upcoming issues, which he said is a ‘prudent cautionary measure in these volatile times.’ In response to this news, lingerie chain V— S— has threatened to withdraw their advertising from several Austen publications, including teen title Daisy Chain.” Verena laughed and ripped the article out of the paper, putting it in her pocket.
She had finished her sandwich, but mine was still wrapped in the white paper: tuna with lettuce and tomato on rye bread. I was hungry, having eaten my bowl of oatmeal (105) and green apple (53) hours before, but I was worried about the sandwich. It felt like a brick in my hand. The tuna was loaded with mayonnaise and the whole thing could have easily been packed with five hundred, even six hundred, calories.
“I shouldn’t be laughing about any of this,” Verena said. “I abhor violence and destruction. My parents died in a fireball of metal and glass.”
An image in my mind: Eulayla Baptist’s fat jeans, consumed with flame.
She set down the newspaper and saw that I hadn’t unwrapped my sandwich. “You’re not going to eat that, are you?”
“It’s not on my plan.”
“Must I remind you that you’re on the New Baptist Plan now? Repeat after me: No calorie counting and no weighing.”
For $20,000 I’d say whatever she wanted. “No calorie counting and no weighing.”
“That’s right. On the New Baptist Plan, absolutely everything is on your plan.”
“You won’t stay in business for long with that strategy.”
“The weight-loss industry is the most profitable failed industry in history, did you know that?”