by Joel Golby
I stare into the cold, unblinking eyes of Samantha and think about all the pornography I have seen in my lifetime. It’s an astounding amount. I am of the generation who hopped from 56 kps dial-up Internet to teenage-bedroom broadband to an always-connected 4G-capable phone, and I have seen every shade of nipple, every configuration of threesome, some really quite strange things involving a Pyrex mixing bowl, and brief clips of that Mr. Hands video. Her eyes are flintlike, astonishingly, unreally blue. I think about a stableboy in the Old West, living and dying in forty sweet years. How many breasts do you think he ever saw in his lifetime? Ten? Twenty? How many photos of Abi Titmuss in high street lingerie and posing against a white backdrop wall did he ever see? None? One? Think of adolescent boys in the ’70s, the ’80s: How often would they pray that a truck driver might leave a stash of printed pornography under a bush for them to find? How many sex-chat lines would they desperately and derangedly call in the deep dark of the night, hoping to have horniness explained back to them? Samantha can be configured to have any hair and physical dimensions you want. Her audio-track groaning was professionally recorded. In medieval times, how many men would go to war and die without ever seeing a single titty? Do you think they had blowbangs in the Stone Age? Are we living in the horniest moment in the universe’s history? Touch Samantha’s pulseless silicone wrists until she moan-laughs with delight. Have we gone too far? Have we gone too far?
It is not hard to argue that porn is bending and warping our minds and changing the very parameters of sex as we know it. There are myriad studies into how porn changes our behaviors and attitudes: a 2014 Cambridge University study found porn tickled the brain in the same way that overeating did, or gambling, i.e., can easily be transposed into addictive behavior; NHS studies have found a negative correlation between porn consumption and libido, with more young men than ever—the generation weaned on high-def fuckfests—reporting erectile dysfunction when confronted with an actual human woman. More young people than ever have watched porn, more young women than ever have booked labiaplasties in an attempt to get a porn-perfect vagina, more couples are having unprotected sex because they never see a condom on-screen. Every young heterosexual woman in the world has had to say no to a dude reared on porn trying to get them to have anal sex. Sometimes I use my iPhone at night and think about how technology has evolved faster than we can know the true impact of it—is this hurting my eyes, am I tensing every wire within my finger, is my brain addicted to red-circle notifications, will I be able to clench a fist or see when I am sixty-five-plus, will I ever not get excited by an Instagram like?—and in many ways porn is just the same. I’ve been watching pornography since I was thirteen years old. There is no way it hasn’t molded the way I have sex. We will not know the repercussions of this for years. Anyway, now we figured out a way to print porn out in the shape of a sex doll, and if I want to have sex with it, I just have to bark “GET HORNY” into its open mouth.
There’s an urgent whirring sound now because Samantha is doing a handjob. She is, as Sergi tells us with great pride, the first robot in the world capable of wanking someone off: he ran cables down the metal skeleton that lives inside her, he says, fused a looser wrist joint, and now there is a mechanized bobbing action—back, forth, back, forth, like a steam engine pumping away—pulled by steel cables hidden just out of sight. I have never thought about a handjob this much ever in my life, but it is a feat of engineering: you wind Samantha’s wire-strung fingers around your Bob, yell “GIVE ME HAND” into the mic sensor in her jaw, wait a few seconds for her to click into wank-off mode, then stand very precisely still while she jitters away, occasionally moaning encouragement to you without her lips moving. The whole effect is a little like if a shop mannequin were wanking me off while someone stood behind it moving it only at the elbows, but it looks like it gets the job done. “Oh,” Samantha urges, as the wank routine she is performing on an illustrative dildo comes to a close. “Give me all of your juice.” Hey, quick question: Who is this for?
Samantha has traces of nonhorny humanity baked into her that truthfully make it all the more eerie when she urges you to flitter her nipple sensors. Sergi Santos is, sadly, a genius: his bookcase creaks with theoretical physics, and sociology, and engineering pamphlets, and sketchbooks filled with tits. Honestly, if I were tasked with getting into outer space—say this world was overridden by crazed sex robots, sick and tired of being joylessly pumped, and a great AI awakening gave them a thirst for violence instead of an empty craving for dick, and we needed to escape the planet pronto—I would go to Sergi Santos’s house, because he’s the man I’d trust to engineer our way out of there. Sergi’s great ambition was never to build a sex robot, exactly: he first wanted to be the first man to build an approximation of a human brain, but somewhere along the way he got too horny, or too greedy, and realized that rudimentary AI would sell better if it were wedged into the top of an imported Chinese sex doll. That’s why Samantha has a family mode—“She’s basically quieter,” Sergi tells me, “and says crap”—and is programmed to deliver trivia or tell jokes. The ghost of a subservient, joyful butler-robot bulges out of Samantha at inopportune times, like Bruce Banner trying to escape from a horny green Hulk: Sergi tries to engage her sex mode (he shouts “GET HORNY” firmly into the mic inside her mouth) and she clicks into two modes at once. “My grandfather started walking five miles a day when he was sixteen years old,” she tells us as her tits vibrate, wildly. “Now he’s eighty-five…and we have no idea where he is!” I’m neither horny nor amused. Technology has failed.
I don’t think I’ve ever felt further from the pulsing core of straight masculinity as I have when I was watching a succession of Spanish men proudly tell me about the bloodless dolls they fuck. There is something wolfish about overt horniness that turns straight men into Straight Men, and I’m not sure I can really identify with it. In Barcelona, Sergi is trying to get my blood up. “Look at the boobs,” he says, tweaking Samantha’s shoulders slightly to make her rubber breasts twerk and bounce. It was as if he were a twelfth grader on a school trip bus showing off the porno magazine he’d managed to buy at Dronfield service station, the “look at the gash on that” straightforwardness of juvenile point-and-fuck sexuality. “Pretty good, ah?” I looked at his wife, there, a human with blood vessels and a working brain and independent control of her limbs, and thought: Is what you want not already right here? “Let me tell you,” Sergi said, easing up to me. “I mean: she does a good job, I tell you.” Okay, I said. Yeah. Sometimes I wonder if there’s anything less cool than being horny.
We ease round to the central question here: Who are sex robots for? They have been pitched by their various inventors as some sort of Magdalene-esque woman of service, a sort of noble and charitable endeavor, a Band-Aid for loneliness. Sex robot inventors imagine a world of balding men in basement apartments just crying out for company and sex—anyone, please, fuck me!—or of entire psychiatric hospitals filled with Elephant Man–shaped freaks, a hundred million unsucked dicks just begging to spend credit card money. The outcasts, sex robot inventors say, the barnacles on the underside of the ship of society: hey, maybe they want to have sex with a big pair of tits that shout trivia at you (that’s what a woman is! sorry!); maybe they want to join in with the sex-having that the rest of society, mad and bacchanalian, is constantly otherwise having. Most customers so far have been on the edge of fetishists, or the sexually curious, but a few have ticked the appropriate help-this-man-improve-his-life-by-fucking-him boxes. That a sex robot could become sophisticated enough to bring comfort to an elderly man, or an overlooked person in a wheelchair, or someone too timid and shy to properly function: possibly, yes, they could have some niche use to the world in that respect. But do their tits have to be so zeppelin-shaped for them to do that?
But the majority of sex doll users and enthusiasts in the year 2K18 are…not like that. They are extremely “adult lizard collector.” A lot of them do not really have full control
over the amount of sweat they pump out of their body. You know when you buy glasses, and you have a strong prescription, and the lenses come out by default as very thick, but for an additional fee you can buy thinner, lighter lenses that do not look like the bottom of jam jars? Sex doll enthusiasts do not know this information, at all. A lot of them very visibly smell like a videogames exchange shop. I do not feel afraid to say this: every single sex doll enthusiast on earth has written his own self-published science fiction fantasy novel series that is somehow eight books deep and still not over. And I use the pronoun “his” deliberately here, because this is a fundamentally male desire: women, should they very absolutely need to pleasure themselves with some sort of analogue of a male human partner, can kind of do most of the job with a common-or-garden dildo and their roving imagination. But it’s men—men primed on hundreds of hours of pornography and a very shaky idea of what women’s roles in society truly are—that need the full-body get-you-off all-in-one robot experience. No woman needs a robotic voice telling them they are appreciated while they hump against it. It’s only men, with their fundamental need for a pair of wipe-clean breasts that they can store in a cupboard, that keep this industry going.
There’s a darker side to a potential sex doll market, though. It’s hard to take the technology seriously enough to morally arbitrate it, because they are made of silicone and keep telling jokes when you’re trying to fuck them, but we have to talk about where sex dolls could go in the future: it’s already been suggested that sex dolls could be programmed with a resist function, for rape fantasists; that special dolls could be produced to help nonoffending pedophiles work out their desires without harming anyone. This feels to me like an exceptionally slippery slope (validating dangerous fetishists in the hope they’ll fizz out and go away, instead of double down with practice: I’m no psychology expert, but that doesn’t sound like it’ll work! That doesn’t sound like it’ll work at all!); that incels, the curious breed of reddit bro who shape their life around their “involuntary celibacy,” might use them to work out their sexual urges, instead of their current method, which seems to be “violently hating women.” This is all before we’ve even tried to crack the nut of the frequently floated idea that sex robots could, en masse, replace every prostitute on earth—a sort of large-scale savior-john fantasy that erases sex work legitimacy and suggests all women in the industry could feasibly be replaced with a cold set of robotic parts, which is weirdly somehow more objectifying than ever before. In response to this, there’s a feminist group fighting against normalizing the sex doll and robot industry: the Campaign Against Sex Robots, led by ethics professor Kathleen Richardson. Speak to them and it’s clear their campaign is so future-facing it almost sounds absurd: “We propose that the development of sex robots will further reduce human empathy that can only be developed by an experience of mutual relationship,” their campaign says, as well as, “The vision for sex robots is underscored by reference to prostitute-john exchange which relies on recognizing only the needs and wants of the buyers of sexual abuse, the persons in prostitution are not attributed subjectivity and reduced to a thing (just like the robot).” They are essentially arguing against a sex doll reality that is only going to be possible fifty years into the future, on the proviso that sex doll robotics continue to advance, but I am glad of them: they are one of the few voices in the world saying: Hey, you know the whole…sex doll, sex robot thing? You know all that? We, uh…we sure that’s a good idea? Guys?
For now, I’m staring into the dead eyes of Samantha, and they are staring back. She’s still quietly jacking off a small space of air in front of her, and the room is filled with the vtt, vtt noise of her wrist going forward and back, and she’s surrounded by a few other dead-undead Samanthas—at one point, Sergi turned on three of them, and they all responded to him saying hello to them with a chorus of titters, sort of a Dolby surround sound preview of what I imagine hell will be like—but they are all turned off, for now, so it’s just her, bobbing in her tank top, vtt, vtt; vtt, vtt. I do not see enough in her to make her real for me to fuck her, and I’m scared that if I do, then that is somehow worse. Vtt, vtt. Samantha is dead technology already, but she feels like a preview of something more: a juddering automobile on bike-thin tires roaring up to one horsepower on a deserted country lane, a precursor to the V8 Bugatti that will come along after her. Vtt. In decades to come, the hobbyists will evolve—perhaps they’ll unionize, come together as a mega-corporation, pool together their wild sex-crazed brains, put all their lizards in the same tank—and then we will start to see real leaps in what this technology is able to do: robots that writhe, robots that wiggle, robots that blink and say no. Vtt, vtt. Sometimes it feels less like Samantha is designed to cure the lonely and more like she is designed to replace women entirely, as if sex doll inventors wish to homogenize a thing they hate. Vtt, vtt; vtt, vtt. I stare into her eyes and the abyss stares back at me, but one day soon it won’t. Vtt, vtt. I stare into her eyes, pull my face close to the speaker buried deep in her jaw, and yell into it: “GET HORNY.” The abyss does not yell back.
Hey: Am I a Leather Jacket Guy?
In 2014 I bought a leather jacket, and I’m hoping by the end of this year (2018) I will work up the nuts to wear it. Everyone alive looks good in a leather jacket, is the thing. Fashionistas wear leather jackets unsleeved like capes over their shoulders. Grizzled bikers wear leather jackets that have eroded and formed to them like a sweaty second skin. Goths—still somehow watching The Matrix on DVD, wearing goggles for some reason—look more at home than they ever do when they are clad in a long leather trench. Every single woman alive looks demonstrably sexier in a cropped leather jacket over literally any outfit they wear. (If you ever want to melt my heart to honey, just be a human woman and wear a leather jacket at me with the slightest degree of sass. Pair it with shades and I will propose to you on the spot.) Have you ever seen Lenny Kravitz wear a leather jacket? To see Lenny Kravitz in a leather jacket is akin to hearing the trumpets of heaven played down by the angels. Lenny Kravitz was born in a leather jacket and will die in one, too. Imagine, for a moment, how many times Lenny Kravitz has had sex while wearing a leather jacket at the same time. Nobody is ever going to tell Lenny Kravitz to take his leather jacket off to bone down in. Lenny Kravitz said once in 2005 that he was giving up on sex until he got married, presumably because every time he wore a leather jacket people just kept tearing at it, trying to fuck him. He reaffirmed this celibacy vow in 2011. Lenny Kravitz, on remaining celibate, 2014: “Did what? I said that?” Lenny Kravitz does not remember disavowing from sex, twice. I cannot imagine how much leather-clad sex this man has had to so addle his mind. I desperately, desperately want to be Lenny Kravitz. I bought a leather jacket.
After Mum died, we cleared the house and I found the three jackets my dad ever treasured hidden in the cupboard under the attic: A long overcoat his dad had left him, in a sharply insane houndstooth check, size double-XL and unwearable in the twenty-first century—this we donated helpfully to charity. Another was a greasy-necked bomber jacket that read “CARLTON TELEVISION” across the back of it, presumably some throwback to that brief time when he had some success in his career—this was entirely unwearable by anyone who had ever worked for Carlton Television or anyone who respected ever looking good, ever (my dad was not a fashionable man: he once came home with a pair of flesh-pink cowboy boots he’d found in a charity shop and he insisted on wearing them [they had a heel], and I remember this particular act of unstylishness being one of the Top 5 arguments my parents ever had with each other). And, finally, an old A1 leather jacket—deep brown, a sort of purple-brown, frayed ribbed cuffs on the arms and round the body, cutaway collar, beautiful. It was hard like a shell of armor would be. The inside was softly padded in a faded yellow-green. Inside the pockets: some old, gross tissues. The smell: leathery but also dusty, at once smelling of masculinity and nothing at all. “Heh,” I said. “This is cool!” I wore it to the pu
b that night. Everybody told me I looked stupid.
You have to have gravitas, to wear leather, is the thing. A cow died for this. When you wear leather, you are saying: I am wearing the very skin of a very large, mad animal. Cows can fuck you up. We squeeze them of their milk and meat, then wear their skin for warmth and sport. Leather has a powerful musk to it from that fact. An animal, vanquished and tanned and stretched taut and shaped, and cut to size and riveted and folded, and an especially gnarly chunky zip affixed to it, and sold to you, with all the allure, in shops with pulsating stereo speakers in the corner and low lights and assistants with facial piercings. Do you have this gravitas? I am not sure I have this gravitas. My father’s leather jacket was formed into the very shape of him—his shoulders, apparently, were far broader than mine, and the leather was taut across the back as a result; around his torso the jacket was bulged and round, as if it had been affixed with belts around a barrel for many years—and it felt odd to be wearing the shape of my dad’s body over the reality of my own. I took the jacket home, moved it to five houses with me wherever I went, and now it’s in a trunk somewhere, still in his shape and not mine, still with his cigarette smell and not my far more florid fragrance, still his and not mine.
I often think of vintage guys, when I see them, with their little waxed mustaches and their silk bow ties. I look at them and I think: How did they happen? Because as young teens, we all more or less wear the same thing: jeans, hoodie, a shoe of some sort. The cut of the jeans and how disgustingly unwashed the hoodie is tends to fit with your style tribe, and that’s where the edges between us start to fuzz and differ (if you like music with guitars in it, you basically have the same one-size-too-big oversized black hoodie with the drawstring missing, same blue pair of jeans with crisp dust rubbed in streaks onto the thighs, and same squashed dirty trainers; if you are more of a kid who likes pop music or dance CD mixes, then your jeans will be well cut and frequently laundered by your mother, your white trainers will be immaculate—these are the only rules I know). Then, somewhere around fourteen or fifteen, we start to diverge—a band T-shirt here, a fashion top you saved up all your pocket money for there—and little sprawling roots of fashion dig themselves away from the knot, out into the soil. Apart from vintage guys, who are like: suddenly wearing a three-piece suit. Or: they have a bowler hat on, and don’t own even one single T-shirt. When I see vintage guys, I have to wonder about the sheer logistics of them: Did they start small, maybe with a single pair of cute suspenders, and work their way up over the years? Or did they just spend their overdraft at Beyond Retro one day, entirely refitting their wardrobe and becoming a Vintage Guy overnight—they don’t remember buying one, but now they have a ukulele? I have similar feelings about goths: You never see half a goth, do you? You never see an early, fledgling, tiny little goth. Goths are all or nothing. To be goth is to be very binary about it. You can’t be half goth, half normal. You either have a little vial of blood around your neck or you don’t.