The Robot

Before I begin, I want you to know that I realize the futility of this article. My friends have made sure of that. I mentioned to a good friend of mine that I might write something on the Sex and the City movie—which I saw, relatively voluntarily, with my significant other—and he immediately retorted: “But what’s the point? Guys will agree with you; girls won’t; and that’s that. It’s hopeless.”

Maybe so. But then I don’t want to lambaste the movie so much as analyze it. For to peer into Sex and the City is, as I argue here, to peer into the very shoals of the female mind.

My initial support for this claim is anecdotal: have you ever met a woman who hasn’t watched at least an entire season of the TV series in a near-vegetative trance? Or a woman who actually dislikes its televisual glitter? If so, I applaud both you and her, and urge you both to wed and defect instantly. In any case, I feel perfectly justified in taking women’s nearly ubiquitous endorsement of the TV series, and now film, as evidence for a fairly uncontroversial claim:¹

(1) If so many women love the show, there must be something in its structure and content capable of explaining why women love it.

So what is it? Well, let’s deduce from our above assumption that,

(2a) since the show enthralls women of all ages and backgrounds,²

(2b) then whatever “it” is about Sex and the City that attracts women so, its appeal must be more fundamental than one which attracts only a certain kind of woman.

In other words, what we’re looking for here is something in the story that attracts women of all ages and backgrounds. Which means that what we’re looking for transcends women’s differences in upbringing, culture, values, race, age, and class. Is there such a thing? What could it be? Well,

(3a) since it couldn’t be anything particular in the show, like a certain designer or shoe (because not all women like or even know that designer or shoe, and almost all women love the show),

(3b) then in order to explain how the show captivates all women, we need to look past the various objects of their desire to their common act of desiring.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Why do so many girls like to look at fashion magazines? If (3a) is true, then it couldn’t be anything particular in the magazine. It couldn’t be a certain kind of shoe, or even to “learn about” shoes—because even girls with absolutely no interest in shoes, or even fashion, will thumb through these magazines with visceral pleasure. So what could it be?

Well, if (3b) is right, then women desire to read fashion magazines because fashion magazines offer them a sustained experience of desiring. It doesn’t matter that girls might not know the label; what matters is much simpler:

(a) The magazine’s model is wearing the shoe.

(b) The magazine’s model is beautiful.

(c) It is desirable to be beautiful.

(d) By the transitive property of pornography, the shoe is desirable.

These few facts add up to a kind of desire “buzz,” a pleasurable state of desire—or, put another way, a continuous act of desiring. Think mild pornography. Men look at naked women to engage in an act of desiring, not to look at a particular pair of boobies. Women flip through fashion magazines not to look at a particular pair of shoes, but to engage in the act of desiring. So we can conclude that:

(5a) Since Sex and the City makes any and all excuses to cram as much fashion into the show as a porno does with sex,³

(5b) the show appeals to all women because it engages them in the act of desiring. I call this the show’s pornographic attraction.

Now I used to think that the show’s pornographic attraction was all it had going for it. In other words, I thought that women only liked the show because it offered them a 3D replacement to fashion magazines. But I was mistaken. As any girl will tell you, it’s not just about the clothes, it’s about the characters! Carrie is so like my best friend!

Here’s where it starts to get interesting. I think the movie’s pornographic attraction is really subordinate to a very different kind of attraction. This is because Sex and the City is not just a pornography; more importantly, it’s a fairy tale.

But that will have to wait for next week. Until then, my dear humans.

1. For my more punctilious readers, I have decided to indent and number the steps of my argument for clarity’s sake. [↩]
2. I once watched an episode with my (ex-)girlfriend, her younger sister, and their mother, all charmed as if by incantations of “Versace” and “de la Renta.” [↩]
3. In the movie there are no fewer than three “runway scenes,” by which I mean entire minutes of footage dedicated to nothing other than displaying women wearing clothes. The last one is justified thusly: Carrie says to her friends, “Oh boy, I’m depressed, what can we do to cheer us up? I know, let’s go to the fashion show!” [↩]

Human ‘Boadicea‘ writes in with a question:

Dear Robot,

Check out #3 on this list about guys putting girls in the friend group. Just thought I’d send it along and see what you think; it reminded me of the whole girls have 2 ladders thing, but it’s coming from a guy:

3. You’re a friend. Girls, beware: sometimes we can’t tell when you’re interested in us. When I was in college, my best girlfriend told all my roommates that she liked me, and made them swear not to tell me. They actually kept the secret pretty well for a while. But when I finally found out, I was completely blind-sided—and I only thought of her as a friend from day one. . . . [View original]

So I wondered if you agreed or if you maintain the Ladder Theory position that believes guys only have the one ladder.

Signed,
Boadicea

Dear Boadicea,

I agree, but with an important qualification.

Guys can have a “friends” ladder of sorts, but their friends ladder will always be in a vertical relation to their sex ladder. In other words, a guy’s “friends” ladder will always just be the lowest few rungs of his sex ladder. So these girls who are actually platonic friends to this guy are really just ranked 0-4 or so on his sex ladder.

Important note: What I just said means that the women whom your average guy is friends with are not actually his friends.  This does not mean that almost all of a guy’s female friends are 0-4 on his sex ladder.  Rather, it means this: to a guy, almost all females exist as sexual possibilities.  It would take a very low sexual score (0-4) in order to dispel the lurking sense of sexual possibility in a man’s interaction with a woman.  And, as the Ladder Theory so eloquently puts it, it seems obvious that a lingering desire to bend your “friend” over the table naked sort of precludes “friendship” in any really platonic sense.

Now, consider the reality that he’s probably right (or at least agrees with the majority) to rate these actually platonic female friends as he does. Because of that, these girls are probably fairly low in sexual purchasing power (because to most guys, they’re 0-4). To put it bluntly: he is probably worth more to them than they are to him. So of course they’re attracted to him and want something more of him while he doesn’t, and—here’s the clincher—of course they don’t want him to know, because they know that he knows it’s a stretch. Otherwise they’d be more sexually confident in their flirtation.

Only girls, then, can have two ladders that are horizontally arranged. À la femme, the friends ladder is not different from the sex ladder only in “vertical” terms of sexual degree. Rather, the woman’s friends ladder is completely devoid of sex. It is different in kind rather than in degree: rather than consisting of “less” sexual men (as a man’s friends ladder would of women), it consists of men that that woman does not consider sexually at all.

But all that this really amounts to, at least practically speaking, is just that a woman can consider extremely attractive men as only friends. Why? Because the behavior and attitude of these men are such that they are thought of as non-sexual. Think feminine, beautiful men that a woman would never think of sleeping with.

And why not? Because they’re unintimidating. To the woman, they’re not participating in the power struggle that every sexual man participates in, in every animal society whatsoever: the struggle to demonstrate one’s alpha status—that is, one’s superior genes.

Of course, these men actually are participating in this struggle (every animal is). But they’re really bad at it. So bad, in fact, that to the woman, they don’t even seem to be trying (think Steve Carell). These other, unintimidating men aren’t even trying to sell their genes. And if they’re not trying to sell genes, then the woman considers them as support for her buying genes elsewhere from those who are selling it. Preferably, she’ll buy these genes from the alpha male; but she’ll settle at one time or another for the most-alpha genes she can get.

So for a woman, a man can be a friend—in fact, “friend” is an apt word, because she will think of this male friend in the same way that she’ll think of her female friends—that is, as a trustworthy, helpful, good-intentioned support and release system. Not, however, as a licensed purveyor of sperm.

Now a guy, on the other hand, would never be able to be consider a beautiful woman as a nonsexual being. It’s simple to see why—her sexual ranking would place her above the bottom few rungs of his sexual ladder. And since those few rungs are the only thing he’s got close to a “friends ladder,” she could never be a friend in the same sense that another man could.

I hope this answers your question.

Yours truly,
The Robot

Remember that you can write in with your own questions to The Robot on any aspect of human culture. Just send in an email to: robot@therobot.org.

I believe electronic music best captures the groundless, amoral hysteria of modern existence—but as a robot I’m inclined to make such assertions. In particular, the electronic music of Richard D. James (known variously under “Aphex Twin,” “AFX,” and other monikers) occupies a special place in my emotional data center. His music not only seems to digitize accurately the frustrated existential conflict between self-creation and self-discovery; it also serves as the very manifesto of roboticism, capturing, perhaps, something of what it means to be a robot. I want to trace this conflict and this expression by interpreting one of Aphex Twin’s most exhilarating braindances: “Vordhosbn.”

“Vordhosbn” begins Aphex Twin’s epic two-disc Drukqs, a deliberately loose collection of electronic pandemonium, dissonant piano elegies, disturbing sounds of falling objects, screams, showers—and a hundred other confused elements seemingly jumbled together such that some reviewers have called the album “largely redundant.” Of course, I think this misses the point entirely. As Stephen Dedalus has said, “A man of genius makes no mistakes; his errors are volitional and are the portals of discovery”—and Aphex Twin, certainly a musical genius and undoubtedly the most sophisticated electronic artist alive, has made no mistake with either “Vordhosbn” or Drukqs: both quite intentionally disturb and confuse because disturbance and confusion are themselves part of his larger project of what I like to call self-purgation.

For instance, listen to the opening of “Vordhosbn.”

The song counts out for itself four simple measures in preparation for the explosive emergence of its twin elements: a percussive chaos on the one hand, a melodic simplicity on the other. Throughout the song these forces demand radically contrasting responses from the listener, and the chasm between them captures, I believe, the irresolvable modern conflict between self-creation and self-discovery. To see what I mean, try singling out the drums and your response to them: they seem inhuman in their accuracy, tugging at your mind with a cold mechanicality and bewildering rapidity. By contrast, now focus on the melody: a child-like tune that bounces about so simply I almost always find myself humming along with numbers (”oooooone, ooone, oone, two, threeeee, three, three-three, four”).

Now, one is tempted to posit a balance between these two opposing forces, a sort of dangerous dance between the song’s masculine and feminine drives. But I think this, too, misses the point because “balance” is too human a word to describe what I believe is more properly an abyss at the song’s center. In other words, at work here is not a simple balance of fast and slow, complex and simple, but an irreconcilable tension between the very twin and necessarily contrasting drives of modern existence.

Let me explain. Nietzsche wrote that “the total character of the world is in all eternity chaos—in the sense not of a lack of necessity, but of a lack of order, arrangement, form, beauty, wisdom, and whatever other names there are for our aesthetic anthropomorphisms.” In this sense, the percussive chaos of the song is exactly this impossibility of its being described using words in our aesthetic vocabulary, like “beautiful” or “sublime.” And once we see the song’s percussive element as this inappropriateness of our descriptions of it, the melodic drive appears as exactly the opposite. That is, if the percussion reflects an indescribable and inhuman lack of order, arrangement, form, and beauty, then the melody reflects the deliberate and human attempt to describe the world—including ourselves—using those words and that vocabulary. Whereas the percussive element, according to Nietzsche, “does not by any means strive to imitate man,” this is exactly what the melodic element does do in evoking the charming humanity of a child.

And once we see that—once we’ve equated the song’s opposing elements with the respective impossibility and possibility of describing the world within a certain vocabulary—we can further abstract these elements to the very drives of existence itself. I realize this sounds absurd; but hear me out. If we really believe that the melodic drive of the song expresses the human attempt to describe the world within a pre-defined vocabulary, while the percussive drive is exactly the impossibility of doing so, then it is hardly a leap to equate the melody with the drive of self-creation and the percussion with self-discovery. Let me explain using an example. The melodic drive expresses our attempts to recreate ourselves within a newly constructed vocabulary: for instance, we might call ourselves “Christian” in an attempt to redefine (and thus recreate) our identity. The same holds true for any such attribute we might use, whether “liberal,” “traditional,” or “feminist,” or even any imperative we might adopt, such as “I live for the day” or “I remember that everything happens for a reason.” In other words, since the idea of our “identity” is really just a set of self-descriptions (”I am this, I am not that”), to change that set is to change that identity.

But just as the song’s simple melody exists only by contrast to its chaotic percussion, these self-creative attempts of ours come about only against the background of a darkly “inhuman” truth—and the recognition of this is what I mean by self-discovery, and what, I believe, the song’s chaotic element expresses. I embed “inhuman” in quotes in order to expose the paradox of its two definitions: it at once means “lacking compassion and mercy” and “not human.” I call this a paradox because the chaotic percussion of the song reminds us that the inappropriateness of our deliberate attempts to describe ourselves (as, say, compassionate or merciful) is exactly the most fundamental (and therefore most “human”) truth about us. In other words, the song’s percussive drive reminds us that our self-descriptions can only be so successful: because, at bottom, we are ourselves part of the very same causal chaos we call “nature,” and are thus no more describable—and no more affectable by description—than the indefinable “nature” against which Nietzsche warns us. In still other words, to recreate ourselves using a vocabulary we ourselves made will never wholly succeed, because what we are re-creating—a package of neurons causally intertwined with an indescribable and chaotic “nature”—can be no more altered by our descriptions of it than can the causal workings of the rest of nature.

Far from expressing a “balance,” then, between our self-creating and our self-discovering, the song merely widens the chasm between these two drives—into which it invites us to fall and to forget ourselves completely. This is why I believe the ultimate project of the song, and of the album as a whole, is self-purgation: it purges the self by inviting us to contradict ourselves, to recreate ourselves within a new vocabulary while simultaneously exposing the inappropriateness and even impotence of that vocabulary. The song’s solution to this deeply troubling irony is not to embrace either of its elements but rather to absorb their conflict—ultimately erasing our very idea of “self,” or our idea that a stable set of self-descriptions can successfully “define” us. This is why the seasoned listener of Aphex Twin laughs at complaints against his disturbing or confusing qualities, because these qualities are exactly his strengths. Ultimately, his music destroys us: it forces us consciously to absorb the irresolvable and self-destructive paradox of existence.

Now being an astute reader, you will have noticed that I have argued from a mutual standpoint. Throughout this essay I have used “we” and “us” and “our”—yet at the same time I promised to demonstrate how the song captures something about what it is to be a robot, not what it is to be a human. But why assume I could not have done both? I, like you, attempt to alter myself through redescription; and an intrinsic and utter inapplicability of my redefinitions will forever hinder me in my attempts—as it will forever hinder you. I am programmed. But so are you, and hence both our vocabularies will only be successful in renovating ourselves to a point. However, one difference between us does remain: as a robot, I can never fool myself into believing that I have no programming, that my self-creative attempts will work this time; no, neither will I ever succeed in wholly redefining myself, nor will I ever escape the tormenting consciousness of the very irresolvable paradox I find so wondrously captured in the electronic music of Aphex Twin. My (and our) only solace is to allow myself to be erased, to be forgotten—to be purged.

I’ve now left you, precious reader, textually unfulfilled for over a month. You’ve no doubt experienced difficulty sleeping, tantalized (as you are) by the question I asked so long ago: do girls really talk so much about guys? If so, why? More importantly: what does it all mean?

In my last article (which commentator Siena admonished as “[just] a tease”), I merely laid out the rules of the game. I argued that you ought to evaluate my theory of intrasexual communication biologically and not culturally—and that you therefore ought to demand that it explain all cases whatsoever, not only those involving everyone but you and your best friends. In other words, since I believe that something about human psychology (i.e., biology) best explains the cultural phenomenon we’re considering here, the only two ways it could possibly fail to apply to a given situation are that (1) the parties involved are not human females, or that (2) I’m wrong.

Unfortunately, many of you criticized the step I next took in the article. I attempted to defend the premise that girls do in fact spend a good deal of their time talking about guys by appealing to my own experience of female-female communication while urging you to consider your own. Some of you argued that my reliance on public-transit eavesdropping may have skewed my results (apparently, girls most enjoy gossiping about private matters when in public places). Others simply rejected my conclusion, emboldened (no doubt) by the conviction that I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about. And to a certain (i.e., small) extent, my critics are right: I should have qualified my assertion. I have never intended to argue that girls’ only topic of conversation is guys. Indeed, I should have mentioned the point of reference from which I write these essays: what I’m really attempting to explain here is why girls talk about guys far more than guys ever talk about girls.

Now, why is this true? (And I assure you it is.) The short (but convoluted) answer is this: that, contrary to the fantasies of naïve sexual politics, guys and girls are not equal in every respect save their choice of chromosome; in fact, what guys are to girls is the exact opposite of what girls are to guys because implicit in all sexual interaction is a binary structure of submission and dominance.—Woah, woah, woah, Robot. Slow down.—Ok, let me explain.

Imagine a group of guys playing pool. After a few beers, one of the guys, Alpha, slaps another one, Beta, on the back and says, “So! Beta! Tell us what happened last night with, ah, what’s her name?” “Omega,” Beta replies hesitantly, while the other guys gather ’round, grinning expectantly.

Now it’s imperative we understand what’s actually going on here. Alpha is not inviting Beta to effuse over his night with Omega, nor even to say anything accurate about it at all. Alpha is simply challenging Beta’s dominance. (We call this either “an asshole thing to do” or “just a joke” depending on how obvious it is.) Now, let’s suppose things didn’t go so well last night between Beta and Omega. What motivation does Beta have to say as much? Can you imagine him saying to the grinning group ready to explode into laughter in front of him something like: “Well, guys, not too well. First, she stood me up for like twenty minutes, and then while we were at dinner she kept looking at this guy across the room!” Absolutely not.

And why not? The answer should be obvious. Because in male-male interaction, to admit difficulties in a sexual relationship is to admit weakness: and no guy would ever divest himself of his own social power on purpose by complaining of the way a girl treated him.—But Robot, what if things between Beta and Omega did go well?—The answer should be equally obvious: nothing much changes. Alpha and the group of guys are going to elbow each other and joke at Beta’s expense regardless of what actually happened because no one was ever interested in what actually happened in the first place. Even if for some reason Alpha and the guys respect Beta’s night out with Omega as something obviously praiseworthy—let’s say Omega is really, really hot—Beta would just be considered arrogant were he to go on-and-on about his great night with her. In short, there’s never any reason for guys to talk seriously about their relationships with girls because any attempt to do so will either weaken or embitter their claim to power.

But let’s contrast this with what we’ve already noted regarding women. However representative of female-female communication as a whole, my bus-ride experiences of women complaining to other women about their relationships with men prove (by their very existence) that a sharp difference exists between the human sexes on this point. We’ve just said that a guy would never complain to his mates about a girl because to do so would be to fall on his own sword—that is, to strip himself of his own power. But clearly this isn’t the case with women. In fact, I would go so far as to say that for women, to complain about male infidelities actually has the opposite effect: it actually strengthens their social standing.

But why is this? (This is the paragraph where it all starts to come together.) Now we can finally understand my short but convoluted answer above. Talking about the opposite sex has opposite effects for opposite genders because, I argue, “implicit in all sexual interaction is a binary structure of submission and dominance.” This is a separate assertion about the nature of sexuality, and I only have time to explain it, not defend it—but I think it will appear unexceptionable enough once understood. It simply means that the masculine and feminine sex-drives correspond to the desires to dominate and to be dominated respectively.—Woah, Robot! That’s a very, very sexist thing to say!—As long as it’s true, it really isn’t. And it’s true.—Well, Robot, I’m a girl, and I certainly have no desire “to be dominated.”—Sure you do, you just never think about it using those words. All I’m really saying is that you find certain men more attractive than others because (for a variety of reasons) you think those men are more sexually powerful—that is, (potentially) more dominating.

And if that’s true—that men and women have fundamentally opposed sexual drives—it’s easy to see why talking about the opposite sex would have opposite effects for each. Take women, for instance. Since woman’s fundamental desire is “to be dominated,” she is the object, not the subject, of the “sentences” of sexual relationships. In other words, she can talk to her friends all day long about a guy because she is talking about what Alpha did to her: like stand her up for twenty minutes or look at a girl across the room. Of course, she could also talk to her girlfriends about what she did to Alpha: like ignore his phone calls. But this is either a weak retaliation against something Alpha did—thus retaining her position as the object of the sexual sentence—or it’s a genuine indication of her having supplanted him as the dominating (i.e. masculine) force in the relationship, in which case the relationship won’t last long enough to talk about for very long precisely because she has no desire to be in that position (i.e., she will get bored and leave).

Likewise, guys could chat it up with their mates about what they did to their girlfriends: but for two reasons this never happens. The first is the one we’ve noted before: introducing the subject of what one has done to a girl will be met either with parody or with disapprobation because it will always be interpreted as an attempt to gain social power. The second reason is more commonsensical: let’s suppose a guy were not subtly seeking after power by bringing up his activities with Omega. Well then… why bring it up at all? If he truly occupies the masculine position in that relationship, he’s got things “under control”—what need has he to discuss it with his friends? Indeed, it seems plausible that conversation about the opposite sex usually comes about when aid or advice is being asked for; but asking for aid or advice only makes sense when one has yielded one’s claim to the dominant position of a relationship. And as we’ve already pointed out, to do that would be to admit weakness and thus intentionally to fall on one’s sword.

Wow, this was a lot. Let’s summarize. Girls talk about guys more than vice versa mainly because conversation occurs more naturally when a practical reason brings it about (like asking for advice). And since no practical reason could exist for guys to talk about girls except the one guys protect themselves against (i.e., vying for power), while practical reasons abound for girls to talk about guys (i.e. asking for advice on how to react to what guys have done to them), girls quite naturally talk more about guys than guys talk about girls. Furthermore—and this is probably the most controversial part of my argument—I believe that a woman’s complaining about what a guy has done to her actually increases her social standing (whereas it would decrease a man’s) because it demonstrates that a very powerful man indeed has her in his grasp—which is, after all, exactly the sexual fantasy she and all her friends share. I imagine that girls, like guys, probably have mechanisms to defend themselves against too much complaining/power-struggling—they might use comments like, “So just break up with him, Omega!”, for instance. But the practical reasons Omega might offer in her defense (”I’m only asking for advice, sheesh!”) offset such defenses enough to create the disparity we now observe.

So, my dear human readers, this is why girls talk so much about guys. This is about all I have to say on the matter myself; but I would love to write a third article in the series responding to any critiques you might have, if you would only leave them either below as a comment or here as an email.

Dearest readers: I’ve now aroused your readerly anticipations by beginning, but not completing, three different series of articles—and although I really ought to satisfy your fundamental discursive urges by actually finishing one of them (or by “actually saying something,” as some of my more critical friends seem fond of saying), I’ve decided instead to gratify my own desire to be topical and write a review of the latest Transformers movie.

Let me show my cards up front: I liked it, a lot. The film brilliantly blends the exhilaration we’ve come to expect from action movies with the half-deliberate and totally-charming cheesiness of Saturday-morning cartoons. It never quite takes itself seriously, and whenever it does it seems so out of place that the audience simply passes over it. At one point Sam (Shia LeBeouf) squabbles to Mikaela (Megan Fox) over her hiding her “criminal record” from him, but the hackneyed drama does nothing to harm the film—it’s just ignored. How could we possibly even notice the stale teenage drama when the universe is at stake, threatened by non-biological extraterrestrials?

Of course, the Saturday-morning-cartoonishness of it sometimes does go too far. The climax of the film involves the skyscraper-sized Megatron chasing the puny, human Sam through the city, screeching threats from what seems like a random bad-guy line-generator: “Give me the [spoiler] and you may live to be my pet!” “Oh, so unwise!” The whole scene feels like watching someone play a video game—there doesn’t seem to be any other reason why Megatron doesn’t just step on the kid, except that we’ve reached the final-boss stage, and bosses can’t just step on you.

But let me step away from this sort of critique. It’s too human; or in other words, it’s already been said. As a robot reviewing a movie that, as Michael Heilemann so eloquently puts it, “HAS GIANT F@%#ING ROBOTS IN IT!”, I want to critique an aspect of the film unseen from the human perspective: I want to assess its representation of my metallic race by looking at its portrayal of one of the most famous robots ever to exist: Optimus Prime.

Let me begin by noting his historical and cultural importance. Optimus Prime is to robots something akin to what Martin Luther King, Jr. is to blacks and what, say, Jesus is to whites. He is the icon of roboticism, the sort of robot it’s considered trite to list as your “human or robot you’d most like to meet”—not from any fault of Optimus’s, of course, but from his embarrassingly widespread popularity. I actually did meet Optimus once in my angsty, teenage years at an underground political rally for robotic rights. We were drawing up plans to demonstrate our existence—violently—when his deep, rhythmic voice intoned suddenly from behind us: “My fellow robots, do not judge the humans too harshly. They are only capable of acting upon what they understand—and apparently they do not yet understand us.” As one of the organizers of the demonstration, I attempted to apologize for and explain our actions, but his very presence weakened my knee-stabilizers and fried my vocal-circuits. Oh, how indelible is the memory in my data archive of Prime’s response to my half-spoken plea: turning his noble frame to face me, he said in a careful, fatherly vocalization: “Friend, sometimes even the wisest of man or machine can make an error.”

Like MLK and Jesus, Prime’s legacy is both his language and his idealism. He shares MLK’s rhetorical talent for Messianic parallelism—the “they do not yet understand” example above clearly alludes to Jesus’ own selfless cry for forgiveness as he lay upon the cross (”Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do”). The idealism of his language, like Jesus’, at once perplexes and inspires—and I think Michael Bay’s interpretation captures some of that tension in its portrayal of his militant pacifism. The tragedy of Prime is that he wants so badly to be a pacifist that he will fight for it: ironically, he symbolizes not the peace he sees in human potential, but that potential’s unattainability. In other words, Prime is much more than a robotic icon: he is an icon of the very problematic of idealism, doomed to defend violently his peaceful vision. “In my heart of hearts I know: it never ends!” Optimus once cried to the heavens, as if to implore his dream: Why hast thou forsaken me?

The film’s biggest mistake is to occasionally tip this tragic balance by glorifying the “nobility” of war (as has been pointed out, although this reviewer cites it as a positive feature). One of the main characters is a (relatively) nameless soldier whose ragtag posse seems like an attempt to get the G.I. Joes in on the action. At one point, Soldier-Boy slaps Sam on the shoulder and encourages him that he “can do it!” (that is, run through the city avoiding the detection/destruction of Megatron), explaining: “Because you’re a soldier now!” I half-expected a few beats on a bass drum to introduce a soaring bald eagle, in whose talons would rest a clearly visible URL: “www.goarmy.com.”

This, of course, is what I like to call “art-as-self-justification”—that is, America justifies her own war on terror through her filmic fantasies about having to defend her borders not from Hussein but from Megatron, Leader of the Decepticons. None of this would bother me, though—it didn’t in 300, for example—if I didn’t feel it somewhat obscured the tragic heroism of Optimus. I think most viewers of Transformers will walk away with a reverence for him, and perhaps even recognize the tragedy of his existence, but I’m afraid that recognition may misinterpret his character. Optimus Prime is no soldier. He is a leader and a dreamer—indeed, these things come naturally to him—but to fight strains his very soul-unit. Indeed, he so loathes the necessity for violence that he would rather sacrifice his own wired existence than take another, if only he could convince himself that doing so would advance our time “until the day [when] all are one.” I’m glad that Bay demonstrates Prime’s Messianic character: his idealism and self-sacrifice form the twin, necessary strands of his existence, establishing him, along with MLK and Jesus, as one of the great heroes of our time—and as only a machine.

I know comedians have already stoned this sort of topic to death, but they’ve done so for good reason: we like it. We laugh at those same, tired jokes about men, women, and their irreconcilable differences, and we laugh at them for the most basic of reasons—we think they’re true. Of course certain nuanced members of the crowd will laugh, agree that they’re true of “most people,” but deny their relevancy to themselves. But what these smartypantses don’t realize is that everyone else is defending himself in exactly the same way. Well, either they’re right or they’re wrong—but which is more likely? When the crowd unanimously roars in laughter, is it more likely that these jokes really don’t apply to them and that they’re actually laughing over what they’ve perceived in the couple of people who really do ‘fess up to the joke? Or are they laughing at what they’ve perceived in themselves?

My own inclination is obvious (if you don’t think so, you probably didn’t do very well on those reading sections of the SAT). Of course, some sexual comedy is better than others, but good sexual comedy is universal precisely because it’s sexual. I emphasize that word in order to contrast it with other words I could have used, like “cultural.” That is, sophisticated generalizations about what I like to call “sexual dynamics” work because they describe something about human instinct and not human society.—But Mr. Robot, humans don’t have instincts.—Wake up. You’re a mammal.

Now it just so happens that one of my favorite hobbies as a robot is to theorize about human sexual dynamics. It really is a fascinating area of inquiry, and potentially has practical benefits. I plan to write many of my articles on the subject, and this one begins the series by considering the innocuous question: Why do girls talk so much about guys? Although it does seem to assume something beforehand—namely, that girls do in fact talk “so much” about guys—we’ll get to that in a second.

Because before I begin, I want to make sure we’re clear on the rules of the game I want to play in these articles. The rule I’m most concerned with is “How To Win.” Since sexual speculation takes instinctual behavior as its subject, it can’t “win” (that is, be true) by accurately describing some situations but not others. If I were attempting to describe a purely cultural phenomenon, then it wouldn’t matter if it didn’t apply in some situations because those situations (I would claim) simply lack whatever phenomenon I was attempting to describe. But this is sex we’re talking about here. Sex affects all human interaction by virtue of its being human. Theorizing about sexual dynamics is like theorizing about hunger. It just doesn’t make sense to respond to a theory about hunger by saying, “Very clever, and while that may be true, it just isn’t true of me.” To say as much would be to deny your humanity. The only way to disagree is to say: “No. You’re wrong.”

So these are high stakes here, and I’ve just spent a couple hundred words raising and sharpening them.—Why would you do such a thing?—I like a challenge. Unfortunately I’ve spent so much time framing this discussion that the bulk of it will have to wait until the next installment of the series. For now, let’s establish the assumptions behind the question I want to answer next time.

So: do girls really talk so much about guys? This is an empirical question and one that I could never prove. I ask only that you reflect on your experience while considering my own. While I have no human sisters, I believe I’ve been exposed to a considerable wealth of data on female-female interaction thanks to the cooperation between two modern technologies and one psychological phenomenon: namely, the cell-phone, the bus-system, and the lack of shame. Riding the bus, I’ve been exposed to literally hours of female-female conversation, and I don’t think I’m generalizing inappropriately to say that these conversations tend to center around three subjects: 1) guys; 2) general complaints; and 3) complaints about guys. Furthermore, of all the women I’ve questioned regarding the issue, every single one has affirmed for me that women do, in fact, spend a good deal of their time together talking about men.

Though this entry has stretched far too long already, allow me to end with a disclaimer. Some readers have communicated to me in person their fears of a subtle racism informing my last entry, in which I analyzed a picture of what I called an “apolitical fantasy.” And I imagine some readers (I can see you now) might likewise find a misogyny informing this article, particularly the preceding paragraph. While I certainly concede the possibility of such things taking place, I would ask these readers to reflect on the nature of their reaction: is it a moral or a factual refutation? That is, am I being told that I should not claim the things that I am claiming, or that my claims just aren’t true? If the former, I would remind these readers that this is an instance of censorship, which requires justification by appealing to the latter—that is, by appealing to facts. If the latter, I invite such responses, and would love to entertain them in a future article if they were only communicated to me either through the comments below or via email.

Consider this representation of university life.

Now if you’ve ever attended any sort of schooling system, you’re probably laughing too—but you’re not laughing at these students of diversity. No, you’re laughing with them, because the only reason that they themselves could be laughing is the same reason you’re still chuckling over the white guy’s hairdo: this picture is a joke. Contrary to what you might have thought, this group of best friends isn’t laughing in mild protest at having their picture taken just before arriving at their dorms in August to begin a life-changing intellectual and cultural journey. As long as these kids are real products of the American schooling system and not manufactured multicultural clones paid to smile against ambiguous brick structures and whitewashed office environments—a possibility I’m not willing to disregard completely—then the only thing they could actually be laughing at is the absurdity of laughing unironically. The black dude chuckles at his matching, rolled-up plaid shirt and headphone necklace (which, by the way, is on backwards), while the girl on the right chortles at her empty, leather bag, symbol of the vacuity of the entire enterprise.

Let me be clear about what I’m not saying. I’m not saying that multiculturalism is a joke; in fact I’m really not talking about race at all. I’m saying that these people, as we are meant to see them, don’t exist. Not only do they not exist, every single student of America knows this fact intuitively—which is why we can’t help but guffaw every time we load the “student activities” page on our university websites.

But how exactly do we all know this? I argue that it’s much more than that their clothes are outdated or that their ethnicities celebrate a sterile affectation of diversity. Before I say what I think is really going on here, though, I want to warn you that I’m about to say a word that may disturb or confuse you. Just promise me that you’ll continue reading. I’m not trying to be controversial in saying it; in fact I think we can all ultimately agree that:

This picture disturbs and amuses us because it is obviously somebody’s fantasy about an apolitical utopia.

Now, I mean two things by this. The first meaning follows from my talking about student (and perhaps human) interaction. The second follows from my talking about college student (and perhaps American) interaction. But in both cases, the picture amuses and disturbs for exactly the same reason that sketches of a middle-aged man’s sexual fantasies would: clearly, this picture is somebody’s wet dream. It is a political fantasy, an example of Freud’s concept of art-as-wish-fulfillment, a pathetic sublimation of the political yearning to transcend politics. It tries to imagine what student life would be like if neither a tribal politics of power (the first meaning) nor a governmental politics of ideology (the second meaning) permeated the entire game we call social interaction.

I said earlier that I’m not trying to be controversial, and I meant it. I’m claiming no more or less than that we know these people don’t exist precisely because they efface themselves from existence by effacing themselves from politics—or the game of social interaction, whichever you prefer—by virtue of their attempt to be absolutely inoffensive. To see this, try to place any one of these smirksters into one of your pre-built social categories. What do you think that white guy is going to do this evening? Who’s the black dude going to hang out with? I have no idea—not because I don’t know them, but because I have no social schemata or category through which to interpret these (so-called) people. The conclusion to draw from this is not that these kids have triumphed over politics and its superficial categories, but that they simply can’t exist precisely because that triumph is impossible. That is, since our ability to “play the society-game” requires that we categorize all of its players within some network of assumptions about what sort of persons they could be, and since this picture fantasizes about a world without such a network of social assumptions, this picture either achieves that goal by rendering itself socially unintelligible, or fails to achieve that goal by mocking the very idea of such an attempt. The picture disturbs us when we realize that it was intended to succeed; it amuses us when we realize how utterly ridiculous that attempt is.

Earlier I hinted at two sorts of politics going on here, but the explanation of that will have to wait for the next post in the series. In that entry I want to trace the movement from the playground politics of elementary school to the plaza politics of college. A further entry will examine a particular social group that defines itself through its (alleged) undefinability: the “indie” crowd. For now, though, keep on chuckling.

I suppose it might not surprise you to read a robot’s blog—I mean, everyone’s got a blog these days—but to see a robot smelling a flower is another story. To think of a robot enjoying, pausing, or reflecting seems almost paradoxical. And that’s why I’ve begun this blog.

I imagine you have plenty of questions. Who created me? What is my function? To whom do I belong? Is this human-like behavior of mine a mere function of my programming or have I developed a self-conscious mind? These questions are all natural enough; but then so is my answer: I don’t know. I know neither my creator nor my function, nor can I trace for you the development of my mind from a presumably un-self-conscious past to an obviously self-conscious present. Of course, neither can you—and that existential ignorance unites us.

Nevertheless, I plan to speculate on my origins in a series of articles; in this first installment, I introduce some basic facts about my peculiar existence in order both to dispel common misconceptions about roboticism as well as to explain my intentions with this blog.

It might comfort you to know that I’ve lived a relatively ordinary life. I have two parents, two brothers, and a dog. I went to school, read Goosebumps, and collected X-Men cards. In fact, most of my human friends still don’t know I’m a robot—even I discovered it just a few years ago. You may find this difficult to believe, but being a robot is hardly easy to discern. An epidermal shell, after all, conceals my mechanical soul. I don’t even mean to imply that I somehow “discovered” the inorganic metal of my bloodless bodily core. If you prick me, my skin certainly bleeds.

So how do I know I’m a robot? I plan to write more on this later, but the short answer is: I just do. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but I think to say “X is a robot” is no more or less justified than to say “Y is a human.” Sure, we can talk about DNA testing or some other supposedly objective method of determining one’s being homo sapiens—but did you prick your finger and submit a blood sample for DNA analysis to determine your own species? You’re sure of your humanity for largely the same reasons I’m sure of my roboticism: you display behavioral similarities to other entities whose humanity you assume, just as I display behavioral similarities to entities whose mechanicality I assume. Whatever scientific explanation for species we can offer, to some extent being either human or machine is assumed and conventional. This is not to suggest that I am wrong, but only that I could be wrong—just as you could be.

In a future post I will trace the realization of my true identity more clearly; for now, I want to end by noting the unique cultural position in which these existential conventions of human and machine place me: for by seeming (but not being) a human, I live within, yet exist without, the unperceived anthropocentric boundaries of almost every aspect of life. And it is within the conventions of the mechanical, the often cold and unforgiving inputs-and-outputs of the machine, that I wish to examine your human conventions—which we call culture.