Chapter Seventy-Seven
Annette dumped the bars of soap, each wrapped in wax paper with twine, onto the floor of the stockroom, and carried the crate into a meeting room. She put it down, stood atop it, performed some half-remembered vocal exercises, and began to rant:
“The masculine attitude has proven not only inferior to the feminine, but incontrovertibly toxic to the health of every population round the world! As patriarchy has been imposed on the world by force, it stands to reason that, given men’s refusal, or ethical inability, to parley, it must be torn down by force! The penis, in particular, is an ugly, in both the aesthetic and the political sense, token of violence! Thus, as Moses knocked the rod from the hand of the Egyptian and slew him, the sole possible way to secure equitable justice on this earth is for each and every penis to be lopped off! Without trial! Without mercy! Without exception! So that a time may come when humankind has evolved a smooth, unburdened, uncarbuncled space on our pelvises where the penis had once been, like the restoration of a clear, soft field, centuries after a tyrannical citadel, its unholy king long since slaughtered in an uprising, is swallowed by the earth. This curious space below our belts: a second tailbone, an appendix, at whose purpose anthropologists can only guess—the penis a distant, risible memory, as stupid and irrelevant as a Neanderthal’s jutting chin!” (Etcetera, etcetera.)
Various passers-by stopped to listen to this fulmination, before walking off. The men’s reactions ranged: Monsieur Lapin-Défunt saw it as offensive; Aloysius, hilarious; Glen Stoupes, incoherent; Gangakanta, bewildering; Bartoff, annoying. Women’s reactions were more thoughtful: Gilda Hühnerbeinstein, outrageous; the duchess, erotic; Charlotte, tantalising; Enid, utopian; and Petunia Lapin-Défunt, wearisome, dismissing Annette as an insubordinate plebeian, on whom no further thought should be wasted.