The New York City Butt Exchange

The casual observer strolling through Manhattan cannot but be astounded by the legions of female joggers and exercise buffs sweeping through our city’s streets and parks. These ladies, outnumbering the male athletes by a ratio of about 10:1, are so fanatically devoted to their fitness regimes that any potential reportage on the phenomenon is rendered physically hazardous to the interviewer, who risks being steamrollered underfoot of zombie-like phalanxes of willowy runners, iPods jammed in their ears, racing glassy-eyed like herds of lemmings hell-bent on their rendezvous with destiny.

Where are the males, one is compelled to wonder! The answer is to be found by knocking on any apartment door, where the men are cloistered like digital age monks, a pizza in one hand, a Budweiser in the other, manipulating their little joysticks to direct Formula One race cars barreling around a virtual track.

Even as the men are thus manually occupied, the women are maniacally burning and firming. A peek inside any exercise class will reveal platoons, companies, even battalions of women with not a guy to be found anywhere on the premises. Why this disparity of gender distribution in the world of fitness? It would be admirable and marvelous to attribute it to the women’s desire to achieve peak performance in the spirit of excellence like unto the ancient Greek marathoners and javelin flingers of yore, to whom the human body was a temple of spirituality, muscular arms and legs stretching, reaching to the heavens in an effort to connect with the deities of Olympus and achieve singularity with the celestial constellations suspended in the cosmos.

Dismally, the answer is to be found rather closer to the earthbound realities of the marketplace. The whole time that these girls are sweating and straining, their consciousness is fixated on the Dow Jones Blue Chip Index and the latest Harvey Nichols sample sale, where Cash Is King and Jimmy Choo pumps are selling at astounding discounts. They are calculating the available credit left on their Mastercard and Visa, and what utility bill to leave fallow in order to pay their Diamond-Encrusted Platinum American Express cards.

Living in Manhattan is not cheap if you want to do it right, and these ladies are straining to the last drop of perspiration to transform themselves into a marketable commodity that will bring in the requisite income. All their calculations have led them to the same conclusion – snare a rich husband. But with the competition so evidently sharpened to a knife’s edge, and with the pool of rich guys drying up like a waterhole in the African veldt during the dry season, the women, whose instincts have been honed by millions of years of evolution to a fine point of survival, are now cornered like lionesses in a drought, compelling them to run and leap like a wildcat whose prey sits tantalizingly just out of reach on an overhead tree limb.

The men, like stupid kangaroos grazing in a pasture as the girls zoom past, are blissfully unaware that they are the intended target of all this frenzied activity, until they are snagged and sucked dry like male spiders who are devoured by their mates after a breeding session.

Since the laws of finance and economics are driven by the same base compulsions that have defined animal motivations since the beginning of life on this terrestrial orb, a new kind of economic activity has evolved to broker these transactions, The New York City Butt Exchange. Closely modeled after the real estate market, this exchange defines the value of women’s backsides according to neighborhood, quality of accommodations and square footage, to achieve for the participants the best value for the dollar.

Unbelievably, women’s butts are most highly valued in the Bowery area below Houston Street, where just a few years ago a woman’s backside could be acquired for $20 per square foot. Now, the rate has skyrocketed to $500,000 to $1million as a new crop of Vassar and Bryn Mawr graduates have recently migrated to an area previously populated by crackheads and hookers, rather like the 10th century transmigration of the Uigur people from the frontier of China to what is modern Uzbekistan.

At the same time, values on the Upper West Side have been dropping due to the aging of the population and the decline of fashion boutiques along previously fashionable Columbus Avenue, which has contributed to a diminution of the exterior façades adorning the women’s backsides.

The Upper East Side has been experiencing a surge in the value of women’s butts due to the easy availability of gym facilities, which has led to a regression of cellulite, and the resurgence of Spandex butt coverings in the neighborhood. Conversely, the market has become more competitive, as men are able to better evaluate the true state of women’s backsides through the Spandex when they bend over to tie the laces on their $200 Nike running shoes.

Naturally, all these values ultimately depend on the state of the stock market. The decline of the dollar and uncertainty over the market’s firmness have recently led smart women to hedge their butts.

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Posted on 7/22/2007 ( Permanent Link )
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