by Joel Golby
*1 To clarify: This is an unpublished TED talk. The panel at TED has never approached me to give this TED talk, and I very much doubt they ever will. It is far too long, and it is exclusively about every movie in the Rocky franchise. This is not a real TED talk. But imagine…imagine if this was a real TED talk. Think about that.
*2 Assume that this is the first panel of a really slickly produced PowerPoint that is being projected huge behind me.
*3 You should know that in this imaginary TED talk, I came out and did this bit in a wireless microphone (nude-colored microphone windshield w/ wraparound apparatus), and I am wearing the uniform of every TED talk host, which is a white shirt, gray satin waistcoat for some reason, a load of bangles and bracelets? And ideally also a soul patch.
*4 [Two silver glitter cannons explode either side of the stage and a load of dry ice smoke comes out.]
*5 At this point the lights go down and every single Rocky movie is played, back to back for more than eight hours. If you are reading this at home, it would be really helpful if you could do that now. Or at least go watch the trailers.
*6 At this point I would have walked to the side of the stage to deliver this sotto voce, the way Shakespeare would have wanted me to talk about Rocky movies.
*7 You may erroneously be thinking that Apollo Creed acts as a sort of surrogate father to Rocky during this film, and you would be wrong. What they are actually engaged in is: the world’s horniest bromance.
*8 As and when HBO approaches me to pitch to them a miniseries, I am going to hit them with Rocky: Origins, my idea for a prequel bro-trip series where Young Rocky and Young Paulie meet, become firm friends, and explore the state of Pennsylvania in a beat-up Pontiac. I figure Rocky and Paulie met in a bar, where Rocky—passing by, thinking about turtles—sprinted in to break up a fight when Paulie was about to get his head kicked in, and they both became friends from there. Rocky: Origins explores why the fuck they stayed friends, and crucially, each episode pivots on Rocky learning a new nonboxing skill through the medium of montage. So okay: Rocky’s car breaks down, and there’s like an eight-minute montage of him reading books and ordering a new fan belt from a phone catalogue. Or: Paulie gets a pool cue broken over his head, and Rocky (thru montage) learns basic wound dressing. Rocky, his large, clumsy hands learning advanced sushi knife techniques thru a montage. Rocky learns to dance, &c. There will be an entire season-long arc about that little black rubber ball Rocky bounces in the first film and then never again until Creed. Where are Rocky’s parents? How did Rocky get involved in the low-level Philadelphia mafia? How did Rocky first piss off Mickey so he stopped working with him? Every question you have ever had about Rocky will be answered by me, over the course of like 120 episodes. I really feel like I can win an Emmy for this.
*9 Two oiled Rocky and Apollo look-alikes come onto the stage in trunks and lift me on their shoulders; crowd erupts into applause; president of TED gives me an oversized check for one million pounds; somehow my face is covered in a mush of blood and bruises?; I scream “ADRIAN!” until every light in the auditorium blows out; exeunt.
Eye Mask: A Review
The thing with personal grooming is it quickly becomes a slippery slope. I used to be like you, a naif, an innocent: I used to wash my face two times a day with St. Ives Apricot Scrub.*1 Then I realized I could have more control over my skin with moisturizers, unguents: I realized a way of upgrading myself from a 5-out-of-10 to a solid 6 is to get a special trimmer to do the edging on my beard. And suddenly I went from a bar-of-soap-in-the-shower man to a guy with flannels, with precise and expensive tweezers. A guy who says this: “£55 for a moisturizer? Hell fucking yes!” I have a three-step face-washing routine in the morning and a separate, two-step routine at night. They say you do not notice the moment your life changes forever, that you never know you’ve walked through a door you can never go back through until you’ve taken that first step through it. I can. It was the moment I figured out what toner is for.*2
The day after I turned thirty, I woke up and my eyes were sore, and I suppose that is me now, I am dying, cells are sloughing off me like a train and all that is left now is a long slow crawl to the grave. “My eyes hurt,” I said, to everyone around me, and they all said the same thing: “That is because you have been wearing contact lenses day in, day out, for like ten entire years, dipshit, and also sometimes you slept in them, the contact lenses, like that one night you went out and got shitfaced and woke up on the floor of somebody else’s flat and in front of you was a small shallow dish with water in it, and in that dish were floating your two monthly disposable contact lenses, which you then dipped two fingers into, monstrously, and inserted them back into your eyes so you could go home, which if you phoned up and asked an optician right now ‘What is the dictionary definition of the exact worst thing you could do to your eyes?’ they would detail that, they would say that exact scenario, that thing you did, in 2011.” And to that I said: “Huh, maybe you got a point.”
So anyway I bought an eye mask, from Amazon. The eye mask works like this: it is a Robin-from-Batman-shaped mask made of two sealed sheaths of plastic, and inside them is some sort of mass of bubble-tea-like beads and some clear blue unfreezable gel, and it attaches at the back with a strip of Velcro, and you keep it in the fridge and it is heaven, it is nirvana.
The first time I used it I did not come to this conclusion, because despite packet advice telling me I needed to keep it in the fridge, I put it in the freezer. There is something about this, some deep impatience in the male brain, the same mechanic that has caused every instance of a beer can getting put in a freezer and then forgotten about and then exploding and then someone (me) has to clean out all the beer slushie in amongst the frozen peas: the idea that fridge is cold, yes, but freezer is colder, therefore faster. I put the face mask on after a night on the ice cube shelf. Essentially what I had done at this point is create a machine designed to instantly and for absolutely no reason give me an ice cream headache.
Anyway, I figured out the eye mask thing (use fridge! read instructions!), and now it’s this sort of face-cooling addition to my entire morning routine: ten minutes in the mask while I eat some porridge, sitting still damp from the shower on the edge of my bed. Am I wearing the ice mask right now? Yes. Do I look like a murderer? Also yes. But you have to ask yourself, sometimes: Do we not all, in some way, look like murderers? Murderers quite often just look like you, or me. Yes, yes: sometimes you get the odd crazed murderer, the one with eyes going in different directions, tufts of murderer hair, a cold dead smile, &c. But for every three Dahmers, you get one Bundy, and that’s the danger. Bundy looked like he had a very undersubscribed liberal arts podcast and he had to read Blue Apron adverts in a flat voice in between stories about women in literature, but instead he did a ton of murders and got annihilated for it. American Psycho did a lot for culture, and a lot for Phil Collins, and it did a lot for eye masks, too: it gave them a rep. I am here to claim that back.
“Augh,” my sister says, every morning, when I get up to make tea and wear my electric-blue fridge-cold murderer eye mask. “Fucking: Christ. Can—Jesus.” And to her I say: this is grooming, now. This is how I groom. After ten minutes in this thing my eyebags puff right out and look baby-smooth all day long. That purple tinge of exhaustion has worn off me. Ten minutes here, in the ice cave, and I can wear contacts all I like (until in ten years, when an optician gravely tells me I have abused my eyes for nigh on two decades now, and if I don’t just switch to glasses, my eyes will rot out of my head and I will die). Come over here, to where I am, the Grooming Man. Dive down this slippery ice slope here with me.
*1 If you do not recognize this sentence to be the kind that you should react to with a sharp inhale, then you are not a grooming person, I am sorry. St. Ives Apricot Scrub is a widely reviled physical exfoliator that straight up assaults your skin because it is essentially a handful of grit dumped into some ap
ricot yogurt, and if you do use it (which is a bad idea!), you are meant to, at most, do so once a week. It is literally so bad two women launched a class-action lawsuit against the brand because the walnut shell exfoliator pieces are hard and sharp enough to cause microtears in the skin. Face wash, as a rule, should not emulate a BMX graze. To reiterate: twice a day.
*2 It’s for toning, I think. If you still don’t know what that means (and, logistically, I actually don’t, but I know when I stop doing it, my skin suffers): Paula’s Choice 2 percent BPA, try it once and never look back, thankings and blessings to you, Paula, whoever you are. Amen.
I Went to Barcelona and All I Got Was This Handjob from a Sex Robot
There’s a scene in the documentary My Sex Robot (2010) where two robots fuck. I have to tell you something about the sex robot industry, and it is: it is not as developed as you think. Think about it: when humanity as a whole works together, we can put a man on the moon, a car in space, we can develop the iPhone and we can take HD photos of the inside of stars. You’re telling me, with all the technology on earth, we can’t make a robot that can fuck? Of course we can make a robot that can fuck. It’s just we don’t want to make a robot that can fuck. If you gave the R&D department at, like, Peugeot a bunch of hard-core porn and a billion dollars, they’d give you a sex robot that would make your head spin. But they don’t want to. The market isn’t there.
This, then, is why the sex robot industry is ruled by a number of intense hobbyists who do want to develop a sex robot because they personally want to fuck it. A motivation that horny cannot possibly lead to success. We’re back in My Sex Robot (2010), in a West Virginia backyard, two robots rutting together in the saccharine light of the midday sun. On top: a monstrously dicked male robot, his penis wiggling out of him like a long beige power cord, longer than a horse’s is, longer than a hose: after being carefully bent into the position of the traditional doggy-style thruster, his hips are rutting and his mannequin head is making soft digital grunting sounds. Below: a fembot with cold dead blue eyes and pneumatic upright tits and absolutely no pubic hair at all gets semierotically blasted by the monster dong. She, too, is groaning. Two (human) men watch on, and, through the glassy screen, me. “Good, right?” says the beaming inventor of these two fuck monsters, Scott McClain. “It’s not what I expected,” says the man who came to peruse one of these robots to buy, like you would a particularly horny used car. They fuck until the grass glows yellow around them. They fuck until the earth melts. It looks like something, sure, but it doesn’t look like the future.
If you had asked me in any year preceding 2017, the year I first encountered a sex robot, whether I would like to have sex with a sex robot, I would have said: Hell yes, fuck yes. This is for two reasons:
I did not ever truly expect sex robot technology to advance enough in my lifetime that I would ever have to really interrogate the moral ramifications (sorry) (sorry to say “ram” like that) of having sex with a listless, consent-vacant robot and—
If you asked me to have sex with most things where it would make a good story, I would say “yes.” A lamp. A Ferrari. Two sofa cushions pressed firm over a microwaved melon. Would I fuck a hot, wet towel? Honestly, I think I would. I’m not proud to say this, but listen: I like fucking.
Then I came to Barcelona and saw a sex robot, and that changed my mind on fucking, both digital and real. For whatever reasons—the universe works in mysterious ways—Barcelona has become a sort of unofficial locus point for sex roboteering: to the west of the city, in a closely guarded location near the Camp Nou, Europe’s first sex doll brothel has just opened. (Subsequent ones would open in Germany; there is already a thriving industry for them in Japan. Soon we will look at sex doll brothels with the cold detachment we save for branches of Pret, but for now they are still considered wild and insane.) Then, out there in the hills, we were going to meet the inventor who was paving the way in terms of sex robot engineering—the one man I was convinced could splice tits and AI enough to make the world cum about it—Sergi Santos.
We should take a moment to define the difference between a sex doll and a sex robot, because one spawns the other. A sex doll is your traditional stag-party inflatable fuck doll made, sort of, of flesh: advancements in demand and technology mean they are a little more sophisticated than that these days, with real-feel skin and moldable joints. They are imported from China, largely: metal wire-frame skeletons with flesh-colored silicone pulled over the top of them. (To touch the flesh is similar to touching various useful kitchen items—pan holders, silicone mixing spoons, spatulas. Long story short but: squeezing the almost-human silicone arm of a sex doll ruined the concept of frying eggs for me for an alarmingly long period of time.) Then you have the usual sex doll accompaniments: balloon-like breasts w/ bullet nipples, sagging unlocked jaw w/ a raw pink tongue, splayed neat rubberized vagina, a one-size-fits-all butthole put out with a drill. They are eerie: each one has the same rough weight as a woman, and their joints are firm and need to be pushed into place—like you are directing a porno in a moment locked in time. The doll-pimp we were meeting, another Sergei, runs a business inside another brothel where he rents the dolls out for the same price as the human sex workers who also operate there, €90 an hour. “One man, he traveled twenty-four hours by coach from Paris to come and try,” Sergei—who we were promised was a seventy-two-year-old man, a kind of elegant linen-primed gentleman pimp, but was actually twenty-seven and stocky, as if his body had been warped down from carrying sex dolls up and down stairs all day—said. “He came here, three hours, turned right back round again.” The room is silent. “He was very satisfied.” It is hard to know what to do with information like that.
Where sex dolls tend to appeal to the kind of niche kink perverts who think coach travel is an acceptable mode of transport, sex robots are their bigger, more evolved sisters: essentially, the same skeleton and body but augmented with home-brew AI to make them moan and writhe beneath you, a weird approximation of sentient life, which I guess is supposed to be hotter somehow. It isn’t: the sex robot we were meeting, “Samantha,” was getting over a recent trip to an Austrian electronics expo, where—a brief glimpse into the hellscape future we have waiting for us—she was molested to the point of disrepair; so many people pawed at her lifeless body over the course of the three-day festival that she broke two fingers and took aesthetic damage. “The people mounted Samantha’s breasts, her legs and arms,” inventor Sergi Santos, the Elon Musk of getting horny, told a British newspaper. “Two fingers were broken. She was heavily soiled.”
This is where we wade into the gray area that sex robots necessarily create. Samantha, Sergi is always keen to tell us, needs to be romanced to get into the mood: with audio cues (a little like asking Alexa to add something to your Amazon wish list, so you can bark into the rubber mouth of Samantha and demand she “get horny”) and physical touches (Samantha’s rubber skin is loaded with touch-sensitive pads: stroke the small of her back, or the inside of her wrist, and she moans slightly too loudly at how good it is), she can be guided into a subroutine where she moans and groans in a simulation of successful foreplay. Samantha can be romanced, but she can’t, truly, consent—a “yes” is only a yes if “no” is an option, and Samantha can’t say “no,” because she literally isn’t programmed to. That’s a gray area that a lot of people are rightly worried about.
Samantha is about five feet, eight inches tall and balances semiprecariously on the balls of her feet. Human women balance by way of an intricate system of tiny bones and fluid levels in their ears, but Samantha doesn’t have that—plus she has a properly, I mean astounding large and heavy set of shelflike bosoms to contend with—so actually often the best way to get her to stand up is to lean her against a wall (design-wise, standing is…low on the list of priorities of things your sex doll should be able to do). Her hair is a shiny wig that can be configured in any way you like: the Samantha we’re meeting today has an as
hy-blond mum-mullet, and looks like at any minute she might ask you to stop fucking her because she has to get on the school run. She is dressed as what I would call horny-demure: white cotton hot pants (at some point Sergi hacks into her—he shouts “Y–P–P!” into her mouth to skip past the foreplay routines and get straight into fuck mode—and stuffs two firm fingers up her pants, demonstrating that yes, her vagina is vibrating, and honestly—I know this is a blunt and unnuanced term to describe a brave new world of robot fingering—but honestly it feels weird, watching him do that, just suddenly push his hand up there without any warning or consent) with a lavender tank top, and her face is about as you would expect it to be: permanently made up in the configuration of a fantasy woman, somewhere between an ’80s shop mannequin and a soft-focus porn actress, an ideal woman as dictated by a thirteen-year-old boy. Samantha does not even get on the dirt trail that leads to the cliff on the edge of the Uncanny Valley: she is hopelessly, nakedly robotic, quite clearly unhuman, as touching and cozy as a vacuum cleaner, as utilitarian as a dishwasher. If anything, her failed attempt at humanity is actively unattractive: you can sort of understand how someone might get off by using a masturbatory toy like a Fleshlight or a THRUST Pro Realistic Ass, because fundamentally they synthesize a feeling (the feeling of: thrusting your dick into something sort of soft, sort of resistant, I guess?). Samantha offers that, sure, but she’s doing it while you hoist her legs around into the configuration you need them in and is detachedly moaning throughout. Meeting her was one of the least arousing experiences of my life. I’m pretty sure a part of my sexuality shriveled up and sucked itself into my groin when I met her, never to be heard of again.