Beautiful You

by Chuck Palahniuk

Never in human history has there been a better time to be a woman.

Penny wanted something wildly beyond feminism itself!

she kept hoping that something would happen to rescue her from her own small-scale, predictable dreams.

But like any second-hand goal, it felt like a burden. It had already been fulfilled ten million times over by other women. Penny wanted a dream of her own, but she had no idea how that dream would look.

If you could believe what you read in the supermarket checkout line, it was the largest flawless sapphire in history, almost two hundred carats.

The weeping beauty framed in the small viewfinders of a hundred phones, documented from every direction and angle, lifted her elegant chin and said, “I will not be discarded.”

New York the cashiers were so slow and surly that you could read the National Enquirer from cover to cover while waiting to pay for your melting pint of Ben & Jerry’s butter brickle.

She repeatedly stabbed the button with her bejeweled thumb as if she were sending a distress signal in Morse code.

Penny had lived in the Big Apple for six months, and she had yet to see anyone press an elevator button fewer than twenty times.

“Omaha girl, you should let that poor boy put his slippery little tadpole inside you!”

There wasn’t room left on any of the stylish girl’s fingers for even one more glitzy ring. Monique pursed her lips, sporting three distinct shades of purple lip gloss, and said, “G’friend, I love your retro figure!” She tossed her beaded braids. “I love how you’re so okay with your big-girl thighs.”

Monique was a work friend, and that wasn’t the same as a real friend. Life here was different than in the Midwest. In New York City you had to settle.

In the city every gesture was calculated to dominate. Every detail of a woman’s appea...

It was obvious that some women had never gotten the memo about universal sisterhood.

“It’s you!” She squeaked, “You’re him! I mean, you’re you!”

It sounded as if he planned to have her flung from the roof.

No one here had ever expressed any interest in her, not in New York City. She’d gone from being her parents’ little miracle to being miserable and invisible.

Penny didn’t want what other women professed to want. They seemed possessed, the way they swarmed to the same mundane things. And that worried her; she felt shut out of some hive. If she didn’t crave the correct movie heartthrobs and scented candles, she worried that something was horribly wrong with her.

With his entire body, he seemed to lean forward with yearning. Something in his expression said that he’d been searching for her his entire life. Penny wanted this kind of attention from the world. She wanted people everywhere to know her name and to love her.

To be an object of pity in New York—the city without pity—that’s how far she had fallen.

Tad recited his curriculum vitae in its entirety, obviously insecure about how he’d compare with her recent billionaire beau.

During her coursework in gender studies she’d learned that roughly 30 percent of women are entirely nonorgasmic, and that seemed to be the case with her. Fortunately, there were other pleasures in life. Salsa music, for example. Ice cream. Tom Berenger movies. It made little sense to court herpes, venereal warts, viral hepatitis, HIV, and unwanted pregnancy in pursuit of unattainable sexual fulfillment.

What she told herself was that she enjoyed being with him. It was a hard sell. Especially to herself.

Pencil-thin supermodels sneered at Penny’s normal hips. They wagged their high-cheekboned heads in disbelief. The men leered at her. They assumed she had some erotic skill that bewitched Maxwell. Their lecherous stares suggested the scenes of unbridled sodomy and expert fellatio they envisioned.

In her experience every man thought he was a natural dancer, and every one thought he was good in bed.

“I have studied the infinitely finer points of the sensual realm. I’ve learned from physicians and anatomists. I’ve dissected many cadavers, both male and female, to understand the mechanics of pleasure.”

“Biologically speaking, men treasure such uniformity. The proportions of your genitalia are ideal.”

“Do not die while you have so much pleasure still awaiting you.…”

The voice was less hers than it was the howl of some animal in heat baying at a primordial moon.

A woman’s purpose, he claimed, was not to be a vessel, but to be a conduit. For her to survive, all things must pass through her.

All of the research and erotic training Maxwell had done with swamis and witch doctors and courtesans—all the sex secrets of the ancient world—he was about to market them to the modern woman.

She was grounded entirely in her body, in the present moment of glorious sensation.

“A billion husbands are about to be replaced!”

She’d come to assume that every eye was always on her, and she carried herself with a new relaxed poise.

Suddenly Penny envisioned a billion lonely wives or single women abusing themselves in isolated resignation. In ghetto tenements or tumbledown farmhouses. Not bothering to meet potential partners. Living and dying with no intimate companions beyond their Beautiful You gadgetry.

Instantly, the panting woman lying on her back, shoving her bare pubis at an audience of millions, was replaced by a new bevy of giggling twenty-somethings brandishing bright pink shopping bags.

Monique stumbled into the kitchen, squinting against the sunlight as if she’d been trapped for months in a collapsed coal mine.

As boyfriend material Tad had more moxie than skill.

It was the idea of combining ladies’ two greatest pleasures: shopping and sex.

“A Billion Husbands Are About to Be Replaced.”

“The mistakes we make in our youth,” she said solemnly, “we pay for with the rest of our lives.”

How did selling personal care products to 150 million women affect whole industries?

Captioning each photo were the words Missing: Beloved Wife or Cherished Daughter or Adored Mother. Treasured Sister.

To Penny they suggested tombstones, fields of headstones, as if the city were becoming a vast cemetery of women.

“This hunk of plastic is more of a man than you’ll ever be!”

“She’s a self-hating, body-hating antifeminist!”

The general culture had been blithely using sex to attack the brains of young males for so long that society had long ago accepted the evil practice.

Artificial overstimulation seemed like the perfect way to stifle a generation of young people who wanted more and more from a world where less and less was available.

Penny bridled. “Are you asking if I’m a slut?” “I’m inquiring,” Brillstein sneered, “whether you contributed any unique abilities to the research process.” He said unique as if it were a dirty word. “There were times I almost died,” Penny shot back. She tried not to fidget under his penetrating gaze. “From the pain?” Brillstein hated her. “Not exactly.” With eyes in every direction, the only safe place for Penny to look was the floor.

This is why God made me a woman!”