An Enemy To All Other Joys

The oldest profession was also the last to be fully automated. No, it isn’t prostitution, it’s marriage, even male monkeys give meat to their mates. I love you as I love all women, but we’re living in a scientific age and so we can’t help but regard our lives as mechanistic, as proper objects of optimization. We are living in the frenzied evolutionary war of machines, and man was not designed for this fever of innovation—woman even less so, and the whole nature of man presupposes woman, spiritually and physically, so you can sort of see the problem, I hope.

Even love is a proper object of optimization in our scientific age. In the cold light of science, every woman is an angel of God sent to teach me his will. It’s not with your song that you teach me, but rather through the suffering you cause me, through the prayers that I pray when I long for deliverance from you. Bouchard wrote that the sharpest suffering, and the deepest well of inspiration, is a beautiful and forbidden woman, what man could think otherwise?

And it’s not just that I love you as I love all women, it’s that I could only love you once I learned to love all women. A fetish is when a single part—a breast, a mouth, a foot, or worse—a shoe, a hairstyle, a medical apparatus—a single part becomes a proxy for a whole. In the act of sex an individual woman becomes all women.

For you to love me as a man, you must elevate me above all other men, but for me to love you, you must become every woman at once. You want to be loved in a way that’s intelligible to you, which is why all women struggle with this question: why did he choose me? It has to be for some transcendent reason, some metaphysical eternity, ancient starfusion in hyperspace burning indelibly since the old gods were born in fire. Anything less, you think, and I might leave you for someone younger.

So why you? As I stood alone in my bedroom, watching the ghosts of Spectacle mill through my studio, I thought of the empty days stretching out in front of me and I listened to the pointless social noise of my friends. I could no longer sympathize with it, I could no longer bear it! The sexbot is a kind of pacifier and in absence of her touch I was instantly restless, out of tune from the rhythm of my virtual life, voracious but lacking appetite.