One billion satisfied women can’t be wrong

BEAUTIFUL YOU

By Chuck Palahniuk

224 pages

Available at National Book Store

Chuck Palahniuk has a knack for outlandish premises that stir up reader buzz. There was his first novel Fight Club of course, which tackled male testosterone in a world of female-raised sons. That the movie by David Fincher was controversial due to its graphic violence no doubt added to the mystique: Palahniuk had to one-up himself with each new novel after that, delving into sex addiction and insurance scams (Choke), transgenders and facial reconstruction (Invisible Monsters), the porn industry (Snuff), and gross-out campfire horror stories (Haunted). It’s as though Palahniuk sits around patiently, sifting through outré Internet science feeds and weekly magazines until he comes up with his latest outrage and/or offbeat concept.

Beautiful You’s concept is a line of sexual toys for women that render them addicted to self-pleasure and, oddly, shopping. It’s like an episode of Sex and the City (the one where Charlotte discovers the perfect vibrator) combined with, well, just about any other episode of Sex and the City.

The controversy comes, as expected, with Palahniuk’s treatment of women in the book, i.e., his reduction of their interests down to two: “shopping and sex.” (That’s straight from the book.)

Our female protagonist, Penny Harrigan, is a legal assistant who has yet to pass her bar exams; all at once she’s whisked away by the “world’s richest man,” C. Linus Maxwell, who has a reputation for bedding the world’s most powerful women for a total of 136 days, then dumping them.

Strangely, this is all catnip to Penny, who after all, is no great beauty herself — she’s described as overweight, breasts too small, knockoff clothes, etc. Penny consents to a relationship with Maxwell, which leads to immediate perks — top designer dresses, for a start — plus endless rounds of ground-breaking, marathon sex with just about every instrument imaginable.

Every instrument except a penis, that is. You see, Maxwell is a sexual scientist in addition to being the world’s richest man, and he dutifully charts Penny’s sexual responses in a notebook and applies an endless array of gadgets and techniques, douches and oils, all designed to send Penny straight over the edge of sexual ecstasy, all the while remaining distant and anonymous himself.

So far, so Fifty Shades of Grey. The premise itself might actually appeal to readers of both sexes. But you can see how all this might be objectionable to, say, Emma Watson or plenty of other women on the planet.

As Maxwell submits Penny to 136 days of orgasmic bliss, he’s actually devising a new product line that will turn women into consumer slaves (shades of the latest iPhone, perhaps). Called Beautiful You, the devices are purportedly designed to enable women to release their deepest sexual beings. (Cue: Meg Ryan having an audible orgasm in a restaurant, times one billion.) The tagline in the ads is pretty straightforward: “A Billion Husbands Are About To Be Replaced.” Before you know it, women are shacking up with their Glassy Glide Creams and their Daisy Love Wands, and never coming out of the bedrooms, even to eat.

Or to cook dinner. Another rather regressive element of Beautiful You is that most of the men in the book are pissed off about the new product, mainly because the women aren’t “taking care” of them anymore, doing those activities essential to the male of the species — and apparently primary to most females — i.e., baking and cooking meals. The book actually predicts the social fallout after women start taking up butterfly-shaped dildos instead of spatulas and soup ladles.

There are several problems with this kind of approach, first of which is that Palahniuk seems to be playing it all for laughs. The humor is often of the caveman ‘70s variety though, which no doubt will rub feminists the wrong way (no pun intended). Certain ethnic stereotypes persist, such as Penny’s roommates, one a “fiery” Latina who actually does a Mexican hat dance when she’s drunk; and a quiet, inscrutable Asian roommate who offers up a string of pearls when Penny is dressing for her big date. Which century is this, Chuck?

There’s the usual gross-out stuff that goes on in Palahniuk’s work, and he’s clearly done his research on the velocity of female ejaculatory fluids, but it all seems kind of clinical, like reading The Kinsey Report. Penny goes from being an average Cinderella type (because, after all, don’t most women dream of being whisked off by a dashing rich man?) to a disciple of a wizened female sex guru living in Nepal named Baba Grey-Beard who teaches her all kinds of new sexual techniques. (She’s kind of the Yoda of Tantric sex.)

Maxwell, it turns out, is your typical evil scientist, devising ways to get women to buy, not only sex toys, but ugly boots and vampire romance novels at his bidding. (We know exactly who your targets are, Mr. Palahniuk!)

There are other things that make Beautiful You feel kind of slapdash and dated, such as the emphasis on battery replacement. When the world’s women start hoarding Beautiful You products, the economy quickly suffers a shortage of lithium batteries, among other things. But these are supposed to be sleek new state-of-the-art devices; surely they operate on plug-in chargers instead of old-fashioned Duracells?

The world’s women quickly become victims of “arousal addiction” — rarely eating, bathing or washing their hair, ditching all concerns except getting themselves off. In other words, they allow themselves to become “unattractive,” which in Palahniuk’s book is one of the worst sins imaginable.

Palahniuk has fun lampooning men as well as women, such as the Promise Keepers group — a bunch of guys who go on retreats to talk openly about how they screwed up their family lives and, amid copious weeping, vow to do better. But here the Promise Keepers, suddenly denied the company of wives, opt instead to create a massive bonfire of Beautiful You products in Yankee Stadium to protest the company.

Underlying the whole short exercise is a sort of slam against women disguised as science fiction, not unlike Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives (Palahnuik has praised Levin’s work in an earlier essay), but that ‘70s novel is a classic; this one isn’t likely to join it. 

But there is another theme going on here, which is Penny seeking to deliver women to a deeper kind of self-awareness than mere sexual pleasure: at one point, she wants the world’s women to evaluate their own bodies openly and honestly, and like what they see. If it’s a feminist message that seems sort of tacked on to a short novel that mostly shows women to be victims of their own impulses, well, at least the author arrived at a more uplifting message than “Pass the lube and the batteries.”