🤖 The Lust Edit: The girlfriend who can't say no

Movie Banner: Hey, Siro

There is an online course that teaches men how to build women.

Three thousand students have signed up. Design a woman, give her an Instagram, sell her nudes behind a paywall. In one module an instructor shares his screen, finds a selfie of a young brunette on Pinterest, lightens her hair, plumps her lips, then merges her face with a stock photograph of a vulva. She reappears naked, spreadeagled, smiling.

His advice on choosing a face: "young girls always perform the best." He never checks whether she's eighteen".

Source: Elizabeth Whitehead, Playboy →

FRICTION IS THE POINT

What they're selling is smoothness. She never has an off day, never misreads you, never needs anything back.

But friction is not the tax you pay for sex. It's the whole content of it. Someone who could have said no and said yes anyway. A body that moves because it wants to, not because it was prompted. The glance that lands, the pause that changes the rhythm.

Taste calibrates to whatever it sees most. A feed of synthetic bodies, all lit the same way, all smooth in the same places, resets what a body is supposed to look like. Hers, yours, the one next to you in the morning.

SOMEBODY FOUND A MARKET

In country after country men report higher loneliness and fewer close bonds than women. Somebody looked at that and built a business.

Reporting on AI companionship suggests it tends to deepen loneliness, not relieve it. That tracks. Something that can't disappoint you also can't choose you.

WHAT CINEMA CAN DO WITH IT

We got here in 2020, before it was discourse. Hey, Siro, directed by Popo Fan, asks what your devices get up to while you're out. Spike Jonze's Her with the sex written back in.

If you subscribe here, you already made this argument with your money. The films work because the people in them decided to be there. Chemistry can't be prompted. You can see a person choosing, and that's what reads as heat.

None of this rules out AI in erotic film. It puts the question on authorship. A performer who licenses her likeness, controls it and gets paid is making a decision about her own image. A stranger scraped off Pinterest is not. Same technology, opposite thing.

LUST FROM THE ARCHIVES

Two years before Hey, Siro, Lucy Huxley was in Mud Dance, directed by Núria Nia, based on a confession by brava_. She and Bishop Black are dancers first, and it shows: open countryside, no styling, mud in everything. Beautiful performance, filthy sex, the real weight of two bodies holding each other up. Good luck prompting that.