Fernita Chemise was out for revenge. The recently widowed Latin beauty wanted to teach selfish men a lesson.

From ages 20 to 47 she had been Fernita Bismol, the dutiful, beautiful, and yet entirely unsatisfied wife of Aldus Bismol, a pharmaceutical-industry titan. More than twenty years her senior, Aldus died of prostate cancer and left her with nearly $100 million. Although most women would have been grateful, Fernita saw it as a rather limp payoff—a dollar for every orgasm he’d failed to give her during their stifling and loveless marriage. Although Aldus had shot endless sloppy loads inside her like a baby bird vomiting in its nest, he’d never once given her an orgasm. What was worse, he didn’t seem to care. Sex between them had rarely lasted more than two minutes, with barely another two minutes before he’d roll over, fall asleep, and start snoring like a crocodile.

Aldus had plucked the pretty young virgin who’d been born Fernita Chemise from a small Mexican border town while he’d been celebrating on vacation after sealing a massive financial deal for developing a chewable flavored tablet to offset herpes outbreaks. He had wooed her with smiles and promises and money—so much money. But although she appreciated the attention and especially the creature comforts that had been unimaginable in the tiny peasant villa of her birth, she felt hollow inside. She sensed she was merely a trophy wife to him, something to hang on his arm and impress his absurdly wealthy yet romantically clueless cohorts.

He saw her beauty—one couldn’t miss it. What he failed to grasp was her intelligence—she had scored in the top percentile of every standardized test she’d ever taken. Aldus didn’t know that because he’d never bothered to ask. And as Fernita languished alone in their mansion during their nearly three decades of marriage, she pored over all of Aldus’s textbooks and research papers. Spurred on by her intense carnal dissatisfaction, she focused her energies on the physiology of female orgasm.

Her research led her to the Skene’s gland, the female analogue to the male prostate. She learned that some women tend to “squirt” during a particularly intense orgasm, releasing trace levels of prostate-specific antigens in the process.

While Aldus was away at medical conferences or making deals with manufacturers, Fernita used her vast imagination and an array of household appliances to learn that she was not only multi-orgasmic, she was also a “squirter.” Imagine a water balloon crashing to the ground after being dropped from a six-story building, and you’ll get an idea of how robust her orgasms were.

Toiling away in her husband’s basement laboratory year after year, Fernita meticulously hybridized existing bacterial STDs into a new and virulent infection that women could carry without symptoms but that had devastating effects upon men.

The symptoms would first appear about a week after infection—usually long enough for the male victim to be a safe distance from the female who’d infected him. Visually it looked like leprosy, but with lots of oozing pus.

Large scabby bumps would erupt on his penis that resembled aerial views of volcanic craters. Then came intense pain, leaking, itching, and irreversible cosmetic damage. The pain would go away—after about a year. But the shame would always remain. For the rest of his living days, his penis would be a twisted, mottled, misshapen lump. No woman would ever want to go near it again.

In honor of herself, she named the new STD “fernititis.” She made sure that the bacteria was tiny enough that it could even pass through latex condoms.

Just as Aldus had developed a chewable anti-herpes tablet that came flavored in peppermint and cherry, Fernita’s years of arduous labor yielded a banana-flavored wafer which, when orally dissolved within six hours of a sexual encounter, would release the antidote to fernititis through the prostate-specific antigens released in her vaginal secretions during orgasm. Her orgasmic fluids would swarm, isolate, and kill bacterium fernititum before it had a chance to infect the man’s penis.

If she came, he wouldn’t get fernititis. But if she didn’t, he’d be punished with a year of pain and a lifetime of shame.

Shortly after Aldus died, Fernita bought a weatherbeaten little beach bungalow in a tiny village on the southern tip of Baja California—about a fifteen-minute ride by taxi north of the tourist party town of Cabo San Lucas. It was far enough away from Cabo that she wasn’t bothered by noise and trash and drunks puking in the streets, but close enough for her to swoop down and pick up some hot young college boy for a night or two’s worth of heavy rutting.

In her late 40s and on the cusp of menopause, the slow rot had begun on Fernita’s body. But she intended to squeeze every last drop of pleasure out of it while she still had the chance. Every weekend she’d hail a taxi service down to Cabo, where she’d roam the local bars in pursuit of a young male sex partner.

There was only one condition—he had to make her cum. There was to be no negotiating of this condition, no plea-bargaining out of a criminal sentence if he didn’t get her to the gates of heaven. If he didn’t make her cum, he would be punished.

More sinister was the fact that she didn’t even bother to tell her hapless male prey that they needed to make her cum—she assumed it should be understood by every modern man that a woman’s pleasure was his responsibility. This, after all, was the meaning of equality—for every orgasm a man had, a woman should have one, too. At least one. And neither did she tell him what the punishment would be—he’d find that out soon enough if he failed to deliver the goods. She didn’t consider herself a cougar, but other people did. And this cougar bit back.

One sweltering late summer night she found herself at the Cabo Wabo Cantina, a nightclub and restaurant founded by former Van Halen singer Sammy Hagar. And that’s when he caught her eye. He was muscular and blond and handsome and as dumb as a cactus. His name was Greg—or Craig. She was drunk and wasn’t sure what he said his name was. He was studying business at UCLA, but he really didn’t need to, because he’d inherit his dad’s business and fortune the minute dad croaked.

After fish tacos and several rounds of tequila, Fernita and Greg/Craig headed back to her place on mopeds they’d rented at the beach.

His silhouetted body was beautiful in the Pacific moonlight. Or at least it was for the 90 seconds Fernita saw it before he emitted a pitiful squeal, went limp, and fell asleep so quickly it was as if he’d been shot to death. He hadn’t even attempted foreplay. Hell, he hadn’t even attempted oneplay.

In the morning after she fixed him an avocado omelet, Greg/Craig kissed Fernita on the cheek, mounted his moped, and was gone.

A week later back in West LA, Greg/Craig awoke, yawned, stretched, and then scratched his junk—only to shriek at a new and unfamiliar pain.

There would be no cure for his disease. But for Fernita Chemise and the rest of the world’s unsatisfied women, the disease itself was the cure.