We’re all familiar with Real Dolls at this point, right?
It’s got to be a sign of the decline of civilization – crazy technology, letting us do crazy things like build constructs to have sexual relations with.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f59N37xH0Ng]
I do, however, remember hearing – back in the old, pre-Real Doll, days – a story about a fellow who actually went about BUILDING his own pseudo-woman.
He had a social issue, not being a fan of females in general, but he still felt all of the old familiar urges, so, like most socially inept geeks, he took up a hobby to keep his hands busy; in his case, it was sculpting.
Pygmalion loathing their lascivious life,
Abhorr’d all womankind, but most a wife:
So single chose to live, and shunn’d to wed,
Well pleas’d to want a consort of his bed.
Yet fearing idleness, the nurse of ill,
In sculpture exercis’d his happy skill;
I should mention, this was before we had rubber and latex, so his groping was straight on hard marble.
Art hid with art, so well perform’d the cheat,
It caught the carver with his own deceit:
He knows ’tis madness, yet he must adore,
And still the more he knows it, loves the more:
The flesh, or what so seems, he touches oft,
Which feels so smooth, that he believes it soft.
Fir’d with this thought, at once he strain’d the breast,
And on the lips a burning kiss impress’d.
Like a lot of people courting an inanimate object, he spent a lot of time playing dress-up. Still, his general preference was to have her naughty bits hanging out.
Thus like a queen array’d, so richly dress’d,
Beauteous she shew’d, but naked shew’d the best.
What makes Pyg’s tale so different from that of the modern marionette-fancier is that, one day, while getting another round of flesh-on-mineral heavy-petting in, he was visited by his own version of the Blue Fairy, and his stonework bride became real:
He kisses her white lips, renews the bliss,
And looks, and thinks they redden at the kiss;
He thought them warm before: nor longer stays,
But next his hand on her hard bosom lays:
Hard as it was, beginning to relent,
It seem’d, the breast beneath his fingers bent;
He felt again, his fingers made a print;
‘Twas flesh, but flesh so firm, it rose against the dint:
The pleasing task he fails not to renew;
Soft, and more soft at ev’ry touch it grew;
[…]
At this the waken’d image op’d her eyes,
And view’d at once the light, and lover with surprize.
This, of course, will never happen for the Real Doll groupies – not, at least, without another half-decade’s worth of artificial intelligence advancements, and some minor robotics research.
(All quotes are from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, published in 8 AD.)
I guess potential employees need to be kept abreast of the latest CIA projects.
Also consider: No one can wear a Hitler mustache. The details of his face may be fuzzy in the minds of many, but all know his mustache, and even people with the fortitude to digitally sling a digital German rifle cringe at the idea of shaving down to the facial hair of a mass-murderer.
I’m still sick, but stick with me here;
Will there come a day when we grow nostalgic over how bad search engines used to be?