Cruising For A Bruising

Saturday night was cruising night in Thatcherville, and I was
dressed for it. I was rather into the sixties baby-doll thing at the
time, so my gear was anything short and skimpy, lashings of mascara and
high, high heels; when I heard Helen ring the bell I could hardly
totter downstairs, but I hadn't planned on doing much walking that
night.

"Don't get yourself into any trouble!" yelled Mum, with an anxiety
that was to prove only too well founded, though what she had in mind
was probably traffic accidents rather than our subsequent
escapade.

Helen was designated driver for the evening, that is to say the one who
was supposed not to get off her head on any substances. Also she was
the wealthiest and oldest of our little gang, and owned the most
comfortable cruiser, an American job which was, as all newish motors,
very economical on the gas whilst still managing to take up half the
road space with its vast bulk. There was ample room for three to sit,
or even sprawl, in the back, which was to contribute to our undoing.
Helen does a lot of overseas business travel and has to wear a smart
suit during the working day, but that night she was clad in black
leather garments connected to each other with chains; her lips were
glossed purple to match the dye tones of her cropped hair, the whole
effect being crowned by the chauffeur's cap she always wore as des
driver which (allegedly) had once belonged to a Nazi commandant way
back in the last century. Her feet were covered in ugly clumpy black
shoes reminiscent (again, allegedly) of an old-style prison wardress;
not so much a style statement but good flat driving shoes. Helen's one
of the sweetest, most generous girls I know and my very best
friend.

We also collected Fay and Katie, two sisters who lived round the corner
on Golda Meir Drive. Fay, who was nineteen, was still at ballet school
at the time whilst Katie, three years older, taught maths at Boadicea
High. Fay, who is of course very lithe and supple, had a feline fetish
and loved her black bodysuit and her huge nail extensions whilst Katie,
who was expected to look more like a frumpy woman in her fifties during
the working week, was actually dressed in the school uniform her lower
school girls wore; she's much larger than Fay and her thighs bulged
from beneath her pleated skirt. But there was plenty of legroom in the
back as we cruised down Greer Boulevard looking for we knew not
what.

Now for those of you reading the Swedish or Norwegian translation of
this worthy article, I think I ought to warn you that shortly things
are going to get rather unpleasant and you might at this point wish to
dispose of what you are reading in case it falls into the hands of
impressionable fair-haired children....

You didn't, did you? I thought you Scandinavians wouldn't be as prudish
as you all make out with your equal opportunities and equal rights
verbiage! Well, here goes!
It wasn't long before Helen announced that she'd brought us all a
present from her latest trip to Stockholm; she asked me to open the
glove compartment and what did I find but a huge bagful of strawberry
snoot! Now, as you all know, snoot's no longer illegal in Britain, it's
just that Sweden produces the purest stuff, cut with the distillation
of alpine strawberries, and it sells over there at a fraction of the
price here. It's also whispered that this is because men are better at
chemistry and there are lots of them still working freely in
Scandinavia, not least in the snoot factories; the smart answer to
this, of course, is that if a certain Mr Nobel from that part of the
world had spent more time trying to invent things to make people happy
and less time trying to blow everybody up the world would be a lot
better place than it is today - though, of course, it's getting better
all the time now that most advanced nations are under female control.
Well, that's what my sociology tutor used to say!
Anyway, round goes the snoot, on top of the cherry brandy the three of
us passengers had been swigging, and we're soon out of our heads with
the iciest, fruitiest sensation known to womankind. Helen was still
driving in a straight line, although she could get high on just making
the three of us happy, when suddenly she swung to the kerb and slammed
on the brakes. Just ahead of us, creeping into a sleazy beer shop was a
man, a definitely muscular man.

"Hunk!" breathed Katie, suddenly sobered.

"Well, of course it's a Hunk," observed Fay, "it's hardly likely to be
a Geek, is it?"

For those critics who maintain that we've emasculated our entire
society, I have to point out as a sociologist that this isn't entirely
true; there are still some men around who have vital roles to play,
though we keep them well controlled and never allow them to get
together in groups. The Geeks we rarely see; they live pampered lives
in the Sperm Fortresses and are highly valued on account of their high
IQs and genetic wholesomeness which they pass on to our daughters.
Hunks, on the other hand, we see every day doing the heavy stuff which
still can't be mechanised, usually on building sites, where they're
subject to leers and whistles from cruisers like us. They're valued for
their strength and, for their owners, their sexual prowess - but no one
in their right mind would let their family genes get polluted by these
guys. And not many women would let them go down to beer shops by
themselves, especially after dark. But someone did...

Fay and Katie made their plans with a decisiveness which, in hindsight,
made me wonder whether or not they'd pulled this kind of stunt before,
or least fantasised it. They detached the handcuffs from Helen's wide
belt, told her to kill the headlights and got ready. The beer shop
generated a small pool of light, but at this, the quieter end of town,
there were huge swathes of shadow between the sparse street lamps and
only the beer shop was still open for business, although the only
business it normally gets is from wealthy women buying their Hunks a
little late-night treat; we don't generally drink that sort of stuff
ourselves, of course! The Hunk dutifully left the beer shop with a
couple of bottles and stepped into the shadow. Fay opened the car door
silently and crept catlike towards him on her moccasins, with Katie a
few paces behind. The man heard Katie's clunkier steps and turned, but
by then Fay had hurled herself at his ankles and brought him down;
Katie lumbered up as quickly as she could and sat on him, whilst Fay
held her talons close to his throat and hissed at him to remain silent
- she wouldn't have seriously hurt him, of course, but the effect must
have been terrifying. Helen sat open-mouthed for a few seconds, then
recovered her wits, and drove the few yards towards them; the sisters
handcuffed him and bundled him into the back seat between them and we
sped away.

I don't think that the enormity of what we'd done hit us until much
later; at the time all we wanted to do was to get away and, like hungry
bitches with a juicy fresh steak, find somewhere away from public view
to enjoy our prize. Helen turned off the main road out of town and
drove along little-used tracks. There was an odd quietness in the car,
punctuated by occasional whimpers of fear from the Hulk, which unnerved
me so I passed the snoot round again and suggested that everybody had a
good strong dose, including our captive. This appeared to do the trick,
and matters in the back seat became more convivial:

"I'm a lonely pussy cat, and I need a nice long stroke," purred
Fay.

"I'm a very naughty schoolgirl, and I need ... something or other,"
countered Katie. Teaching maths doesn't require a prolific
imagination.

"Bad, bad pussy! Bad, bad schoolgirl!" chided the poor Hunk in a
peculiar giggle which didn't seem much akin to humour; he was obviously
more used to nasty watery beer than delicious snoot, it had smashed him
within five minutes. The back-seat passengers sank from view whilst
Helen and I stared fixedly ahead and drove on slowly; I started to feel
anxious again, so I fished around for the bag of snoot and took another
good, long sniff and passed it to Helen; being stoned in charge of a
vehicle was going to be the least of her worries tonight.

When Fay and Katie had finished with him we stopped the car; the
sisters moved to the front seats and ushered us round to the back. The
poor dishevelled guy was panting for breath but was now hemmed in
between a well-stoned hippie chick and a rather anxious-looking punk
goddess. I wasn't quite sure how to manage a real live man and looked
to Helen to give some kind of a lead.

"What the hell ... I do this all the time in Stockholm and Oslo,"
sighed Helen and began to undress.

On the way back even Fay seemed worried; all of us were used to getting
ourselves off on our fantasies, sex aids, each other, but never before
had we stolen and used someone else's fantasy object, and it rather
looked as though the Hunk wouldn't be of much service in this
department for a while; the effects of the snoot having worn off, he
was becoming deliriously tearful in a way I never thought would have
been possible in a male. Probably we had assumed that, although
protesting, he would have secretly enjoyed himself - wasn't this every
man's fantasy too?

"You liked it, really!" accused Katie in her best teacher's voice,
willing it to be so.

"No!" he gasped. "I'm ... the archbishop's husband ... and I love her.
I'd vowed to be faithful to her all my life!" he sobbed.

I swore softly. The archbishop had been running a revivalist crusade
against the practices of our society she found unbiblical, and had
proved her point by purchasing a Hunk and marrying him in a public
service, declaring that he no longer needed to obey her and that
whatever disadvantaged offspring they might produce would still be
pleasing to her God! There would be hell to pay for our little
escapade.
"She'll kill you!" warned the Hunk as we approached the city limits and
he began to calm down, realising that he at least was not going to be
Britain's first murder victim for over two generations, but that we had
no such assurance.

It had been impressed upon us from our girlhood that by curtailing the
malign influence of testosterone we were building a compassionate and
non-aggressive society in which every woman's potential could be
fulfilled, and men's very few physical advantages could be safely
controlled and channelled. In contrast the reactionary Scandinavian
countries, with their so-called equalities, were seen to be awash with
crime, vice, prisons, petty jealousies and angry divorces (although
Helen declared that on her business visits none of the men walking
around freely had ever actually threatened her). We realised that in a
night of drug-induced stupidity we had let down our country and our
womanhood; we tried to make the Hunk look presentable and drove slowly
back to meet the archbishop. When her Hunk failed to return from his
shopping treat she would have called out a law enforcement agency, had
there been one, so instead she called the local TV crew who were there
to film our arrival at her house and record our abject apologies. She
didn't kill us, in fact she publicly forgave us, but that wasn't the
end of it all by any means.

Thatcherville was horrified at our misdeeds, so the civic leaders
managed to find one or two elderly ladies who had served under the
long-defunct judicial system, and came up with something approximating
to a trial; the whole thing achieved national news headlines, in the
absence of any lost cats or poor weather conditions to report
nation-wide. They weren't sure what to charge us with, and eventually
selected something called abduction with threat of violence, to which
we all pleaded guilty, although we each tried to shoulder the blame and
exonerate the others. Fay immediately owned up to being the instigator,
but we three emphasised her youth and tendency to be easily led astray.
Katie declared that as a teacher she ought to have set an example of
moral leadership; we countered that this kind of thinking went out
generations ago and that she had the most stressful job and was
entitled to let her hair down at the weekend. Helen, dear Helen, said
that as driver and drug-purchaser she bore the whole responsibility,
but we told everyone that we all took advantage of her big car, her
bottomless purse and her biddability. I, for my part, admitted plying
the Hunk with snoot in order to have our evil ways with him, only to be
told by my friends that my evil way was frankly pathetic and I'd hardly
touched him! So we were all declared equally guilty and would all face
the same punishment, that is, when someone could think of one.

They weren't at all sure what to do with us; building a prison for us
to languish in whilst our work went unperformed was the sort of
economic and moral insanity society had long since grown out of. So
they sought the advice of the archbishop, who of course had suffered
the wrong. She agreed that whilst revenge was completely inappropriate
and unbiblical, deterrence was quite another matter; maybe for such
silly and wilful young women something simple and direct was called
for, something which would leave an impression in more ways than one.
We noticed, however, that she could not avoid licking her lips slightly
as she hesitantly made her suggestion.

So at nine o'clock on Monday morning we were all lined up outside the
TV studio dressed only in thin cotton pyjamas as requested, shivering
with cold and apprehension; Helen had offered to drive us all down in
her cruiser, but we had thought that this would be inappropriate in the
circumstances and walked. Although this was supposed to be a purely
local matter, the international media had caught wind of the situation
and we had to wend our way through a forest of cameras and microphone
stands to our appointment with justice, namely a public flogging.

The archbishop had declined to be involved in administering the
punishment, so the elderly judges had put the matter into the sturdy
hands of those trusted local community leaders, the Mothers' Union and
the Tradeswomen's Guild who had spent Sunday scouring the town for
suitable implements. The trouble was that in our all-female schools and
households sweet reason and the occasional sharp word had always
sufficed to discipline young girls, and no one knew what would be
appropriate. The doctor, who had been coerced to be on hand to monitor
proceedings, vetoed injurious objects such as bullwhips, cricket bats
and old chair legs, but had given the nod to a small pile of riding
crops, garden canes, table tennis bats, old straps and the like which
were heaped at one end of a long trestle table more commonly used for
Mothers' Union garden parties and produce competitions. Helen, in a
further act of contrition, had proffered her wide leather belt which
lay in pride of place, coiled black and malevolent, waiting to strike.
We were invited to stand in a line and bend down across the wide table;
the stern matrons of the town then made their choices of weapon and, in
full view of millions of incredulous TV viewers worldwide, proceeded to
line up and thrash the four of us again and again across our scarcely
covered buttocks and thighs.

I don't think any of us had even known such pain before and it didn't
take long before we were all howling and weeping, all, that is, except
for Fay; the little vixen remained ashen-faced but silent throughout,
although she was biting down hard on her lower lip. When the volunteers
had administered their punishment they rejoined the end of the line for
a second or third time round, and for once I envied Katie her flabby
bottom with its huge surface area.

The doctor called a halt when she spotted the first signs of bleeding;
she then came and hugged us each compassionately and drove us to the
surgery for a check-up and application of various creams and
disinfectants before taking us all home. We had also been ordered to
take the ensuing week out of our annual leave entitlements as recovery
time, and were each fined a month's salary, so there was to be no
comfort in snoot and shopping for a while.
My mother merely tutted and said that I had shown up the family (i.e.
herself) and, if anything, deserved worse, but the next day darling
Helen drove round (very slowly and carefully) and tenderly ministered
to my poor bruised, welted body.

There was an international outcry, from some quarters at least. Sweden
immediately granted the four of us asylum status on the grounds that we
had been fearfully abused by an oppressive regime; of course, by now it
was all over bar the healing, and on reflection our treatment was
probably better than the Swedes', who'd have put us in some impregnable
fortress hospital for years whilst bearded old Geeks gave us
psychological profiles and sought to define our relationships with our
non-existent fathers. The Muslim countries, whose culture hadn't
changed in centuries, couldn't see what all the fuss was about whilst
the Continentals (especially the Germans) considered that the video
recording of our suffering made the finest art-house film to come out
of Britain for half a century. American women whittled hickory sticks
and warned their daughters what would begin to happen if they took
liberties with their church leaders and prophetesses.

We all had to turn up for work a week later, although none of us were
fully recovered; Kay still couldn't dance, so had to study theory in
the ballet school library; Helen went on an overdue business visit to
Copenhagen (requesting extra cushions for the flight) to find that she
was suddenly a celebrity there; Katie could of course teach standing
up, so was not too inconvenienced, except by suddenly becoming the most
popular teacher in the school - the girls had been given the previous
Monday as a holiday to allow them to watch her being beaten, and now
considered her "zinky", the latest term of adolescent approval, and
maths to be a "stomping" subject. Nobody considered that becoming a
convicted criminal was in any way prejudicial to her employment. As for
me, I usually wrote lying facedown on my bed, so had already made
progress on my latest paper, "Crime and Punishment in a Matriarchal
Society".

Six months down the line and I can amazingly but safely say that
getting whacked has been good for the four of us; Muslims and
revivalists would doubtless concur, although maybe not for the same
reasons! Let me fill you in:
Fay is now living in Australia; The Aussies still admire a Pommie who
doesn't whinge and whine, and they offered her a place with the
Australian Republican Ballet as soon as they saw how she took her
lashes; ballerinas need to be both physically and mentally tough,
especially out there. She left on the first available transport. In her
latest letter she writes:

"I'm now dancing opposite such beautiful, real, free men whom I didn't
believe even existed; Geeks with physique, Hunks with spunk! They take
me to the cricket and we drink cold beer in bed; I'm one cool cat who's
just got the cream!" Little minx!
Katie is now head of department at Boadicea High and is saving up to
buy her own Hunk. Like her sister, once she's tasted cream she won't
settle for milk and on her newly-enhanced salary she won't have too
long to wait. But she's given up cruising, allegedly because of the
petrol prices, lost a stone in weight and got a new hairdo. Zinky, as
they say!
I must admit that I was a teeny bit cross with Helen when I heard of
her exploits with Scandinavian guys, but she made it up to me by
promising to take me with her on future trips; she's got a good heart
as well as a good brain, and her company's now offered her a seat on
the board - when I enquired as to whether it was a padded one I
received both a smack and a kiss!
That leaves me; I'm now the youngest-ever Dame of the Society of
Sociologists on account of two or three recently published papers which
were highly acclaimed, especially the Crime and Punishment one. So,
we've all done well, apart from the archbishop and her poor Hunk who
had done nothing amiss, but just happened to be in the wrong place at
the wrong time! Well, to everyone else the issues are now old news, but
for me the questions didn't go away with the bruises; it's the price I
pay for following my profession, I suppose.
Questions such as: Did we get off too lightly, or were the victims
asking for trouble? Should men be even more closely guarded, or should
we perhaps begin to give them a second chance to share responsibility?
And are we still moving forward as a society, or is the violence we
thought we'd eradicated by taming brutish men now coming to the surface
in women? Are we all, in fact, cruising for a bruising once again?