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by Melanie Fletcher
Science Fiction, 12 pages.
Originally Published in Fundamentally Challenged (ed. Jeffrey Turner), 2004
(1) Rate this Story Marty looked at the ad proofs again and sighed. The image of a beautiful woman stared back at him, as perfect as the retouching guys in the ArtDepartment could make it. Her flawless makeup accentuated an already gorgeous bone structure, making her lips look poutier and her eyes even wider (not to mention a deeper shade of cornflower blue). Her dress was something he remembered women wearing on warm spring days – light, flowery, with thin spaghetti straps and ending right above the knee. It curved over her breasts and hips, outlining shapes that he desperately wanted to touch.
And then he read the tag line.
Touché – When You Want to Feel Like a Woman
“Oh, God,” he whimpered.
“What’s wrong?”
Gwen, his office partner, looked up from her half of the desk. He tried not to wince at the faint moustache on her upper lip. “It’s just... the new ad.”
“Oh? Let me see.”
He handed over the proofs, and she examined the pictures. Her eyebrows were starting to touch over her nose, he noticed. “Huh. Composition’s great, light balance is good, and they even picked a decent font this time. So what’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing,” he mumbled. “Apart from the fact that it’s a picture of a gorgeous woman.”
“Ah.” She got that expression that so many women had when the subject of the Shift came up – embarrassed, irritated and complacent, all at the same time. “Um, I take it Thea isn’t... you know.”
Marty’s jaw muscles clenched. “Not for another three weeks,” he said.
“Oh. Sorry.”
He forced himself to shrug. The Shift wasn’t Gwen’s fault. It wasn’t his girlfriend Thea’s fault, either — in fact, nobody quite knew who or what to blame it on in the last year and a half since women throughout Western Civilization began to change.
The environmentalists claimed it was an evolutionary reaction to lowered sperm motility and rising infertility rates. The religious right said it was a judgment from God on the perversions of Western Civilization, and the women’s movement crowed from the rooftops that it was the cumulative effect of resentment at their second-class citizenhood finally emanating in physical form, freeing them from male oppression.
The cosmetics industry just called it a fucking disaster. For 27 days a month, give or take a day, women weren’t interested in being, well, women. Their breasts partially flattened, their voices dropped, and they lost their sex drive. In effect, women became gender-neutral (or neuts, as the media called it) for those 27 days — only reverting back to “fert” status during their three-day fertile cycle (now commonly referred to as the Three-Day Weekend).
The Shift also produced a marked psychological change; women in gender neutral mode weren’t interested in dressing up or looking pretty. Neat and presentable, yes — but not pretty. The social drive that persuaded women to apply MAC blusher and Touché lipstick had vanished with the sex drive. As a result, everything once masked by cosmetics — eyebags, grey hair, wrinkles, you name it — were now on vivid display.
The only time women wore makeup these days, they were either ovulating or required by their jobs to wear the stuff, and that wasn’t nearly enough usage to keep cosmetics companies afloat. Already a number of the smaller companies had folded or filed for Chapter 11. Touché itself was teetering on the edge; the company’s advertising head called up Godwin & Waite Associates a month ago and begged them to come up with a sure-fire ad campaign that would convince neuts to start wearing makeup again. G&W turned to their hottest ad executives, Marty Hallberg and Gwen Gunderson, and told them to pull Touché‘s sinking profits out of the fire.
The “or else” was implied, but fully understood nonetheless. After three weeks of non-stop work, Marty and Gwen came up with the Simpler Times campaign, which was supposed to remind neut women how much fun it was to play dress-up. Whether or not it would actually work was anyone’s guess, and that had Marty gulping Maalox at a geometrically expanding rate.
“It is a good ad, though,” Gwen offered.
“Yeah. Should make for great whack-off material.”
She pursed her non-pouty lips and shrugged. He remembered when that sort of comment would have produced a good-natured accusation of being a male chauvinist pig, or at least get a pen flung at him. Of course, he also remembered when she had pouty red lips.
And now, she was just another neut woman — good old Gwen, without the luscious wrapping. Unless it was that time of the month, when the Shift receded for three wonderful, exhausting days and women went back to normal. In all ways.
Marty shifted in his seat at the thought. That was the other little hitch of the Shift; in theory, you could still make love to a neut woman if she was willing to let you bounce up and down on her whi -- [End of Preview.]