Alexa, Order Me the Thing I’m Too Ashamed to Ask For in Person

There is actually something good about the internet!

I spent the summer after my second year of college working in a factory in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. While there in the early 1990s, I made some friends around my age, some of whom worked at the factory. Occasionally, we would go to bars, and one night we ended up at a dance club called Metropolis.

That night was particularly memorable, even though I didn’t remember much of it. Evidently, I ended up slow-dancing with a girl to an aggressively loud and fast Nine Inch Nails song. I don’t recall any of this, but my friends still bring it up, so all I can do is concede there is a better than 50 percent chance it may have happened.

What I do know is that I ended up with the girl’s phone number, and I called her. We went on a couple of completely pleasant, innocent dates. Eventually, after seeing her a few times, I was talking to her on the phone, and it was pretty clear I was…how to put this delicately…being “waved in.” The green light was on. The Berlin wall had fallen and my little East German citizens, under oppressive rule for years, were finally being invited to mix with her freedom-loving West Germans. It was go time.

The date and time was set, but I was missing one important requirement: Protection. This was the early 1990s, after all, and we had spent our entire childhoods being told that if you even looked at another person in an overly amorous way, you would probably die of a sexually transmitted disease. And rumor also had it that the mixing of Germans (as you have graciously agreed to call it in this essay) could lead to more baby Germans, and at 20 years old, who needs that? (Kinder having kinder, etc.)

I shouldn’t have been as horrified as I was to go buy birth control. In high school, I had worked as a clerk at a drugstore and rung people up for them all the time without judgment. There are two types of men who buy rubbers in a drug store: The ones who buried them under a pile of other items and acted surprised when you finally got to them (how did those get there?), and the guys who bought only condoms, proudly announcing to everyone in the store they would soon be getting laid. Take that, celibacy Stasi!

But I have always had a phobia of people judging me for things I purchase. At one point in high school, I bought three R.E.M. CDs at once, and the record store employee who rang me up asked me, in a somewhat teasing manner, “So, you really like R.E.M., huh?” I was appalled and darted out of the store. I have spent my life feeling better by convincing myself he was probably a big Milli Vanilli fan. (To me, it feels like every store employee is Jack Black in High Fidelity hectoring the customer for wanting to buy Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You.”)

Condoms were no different. What if I saw someone I knew while in the store? What if there existed a secret network of drug store clerks who would pick up the phone and report me? (This would later become something called “the internet.”)

If you know anything about Milwaukee, you know Highway 94 stretches from just about the shores of Lake Michigan to the west, with Madison being about an hour away. So I got in my car and started hitting gas stations along the highway, hoping to make my big score there. But every time I got out of my car and started walking around, I felt as if the gas station attendant was glaring at me. I felt the heat of their stare on the back of my neck, but I had to buy something, so I would just grab a 16-ounce bottle of Mountain Dew and get out of there.

I kept heading west on the highway and kept chickening out. Eventually, around Delafield (20 miles outside of downtown), I looked at the seat next to me and realized I had nine bottles of Mountain Dew next to me in the passenger seat. I had to finally engage in some toxic masculinity and just buy some condoms or I was going to end up in South Dakota with sparks trailing from the back of my car because of the weight of a million ounces of soda.

Finally, I stopped at a gas station in Oconomowoc. I bit the bullet and just did it, forcing myself up to the counter. Everything seemed to go fine. To my knowledge, there is no framed photo of me on the wall alerting people to look out for the Mad Fornicator. (Also, the liberation of the East Germans never happened, due to an event so unbelievable, I used the story in my book. Let’s just say law enforcement was involved - I got “cop blocked.” Buy the book to read more!)

Believe it or not, there is actually a point to all this. I spend a lot of time writing about how much the internet horrifies me (more below), but for personal privacy, the internet is a godsend. If you do it right, there is no more walking into a store and being judged by some eye-rolling teen for what shirt or magazine you buy. Purchasing embarrassing items - erection pills, stool softener, Meghan Trainor albums - can all be done via anonymous transaction. (You can even purchase truly humiliating goods, like my book, without anyone knowing!)

I should note, regarding the story above: I understand that my personal mortification must pale in comparison to girls attempting to obtain birth control, which often requires a personal talk with their mother to declare themselves sexually active. I would rather walk into the lion exhibit at the zoo wearing Lady Gaga’s meat dress.

Sure, the internet is mostly horrible, and no reasonable person would prefer to grow up with their life on the permanent record - especially if you know videos would exist of you slow dancing to an industrial metal song with a strange woman at a dance club.

But I recently saw a commercial for a drug intended to help men with crooked…uh…appendages. This was demonstrated in the ad by a bent carrot, an affliction known as Peyronie’s disease:

The ad promises the drug Xiaflex (editor’s note: ugh) will “gradually reduce the bend” in your crooked wiener, although it warns one of the side effects could be “penile fracture.”

OK, let’s take this one issue at a time. First, diseases are typically named after people notable for having the affliction. Can you imagine the international board of disease-naming doctors telling Mr. Peyronie of his honor?

DOCTORS: “Mr. Peyronie, we have great news!”

MR. PEYRONIE: “Oh yeah, what’s that?”

DOCTORS: “We have named crooked penis disease after you! It’ll be like Lou Gehrig’s Disease, just for wayward wieners.”

PEYRONIE: “Uh…no thanks, I’m good.”

DOCTORS: “Sorry, the paperwork’s been filed.” (Unfurls giant banner that says “PEYRONIE’S DISEASE” with his picture next to it.)

PEYRONIE: “Oh God no. Please. No!” (Shuffles out of the room at a sharp angle to the left, given that’s the only way he can walk.)

And from then on, every time he had to claim his reservation at a restaurant, the maitre d’ would say “THE Peyronie? and slowly look down.

Also, I know ads are required to list potential side effects, but “penile fracture?” Can I have some odds here? Is it like one in three, or one in three million? What is an acceptable percentage for you to take a drug that might break your crank in half?

But for the purpose of this column, think about what the process of treating this disease would be in the past. Going to a doctor, having it diagnosed, then going to a drug store and having to talk to a pharmacist about it while a line of impatient customers wait behind you and listen to your every word.

(Related side note: The internet tells me Peyronie’s disease was first described in the year 1561 by an Italian priest named Gabriele Falloppio, which feels like it has to be some sort of joke.

Also, the fact that I was able to find this information anonymously on the internet sort of proves the whole thesis of this piece. If you had to call a friend and ask “hey, what’s that crooked penis disease called,” it seems likely you would find a lot of bananas on your desk at work the next day.)

Sure, not having to shop in actual stores anymore might collapse the U.S. economy, but as long as I don’t have to risk buying something embarrassing, that’s a chance I am willing to take. No more walking into the Gap and being barraged by employees asking you if you’re finding everything okay, as if you had never been in a store before. “I’m sorry, I’m having trouble finding chinos that fit my pet iguana,” you tell them to ensure they leave you alone.

Think of all the minorities who typically get unfairly harassed while walking around stores, who now get to just browse online in peace. Think of the people who want weight loss or hair loss drugs but who are too ashamed to talk to a doctor about it - now they can just get some doctor to Zoom in from his beach house to give them the video once-over and get the drugs mailed to them. (Should Ozempic and other GLP1s be over-the-counter? Maybe!)

So go ahead, young people - bask in the glory of never having to subject yourself to buying embarrassing things in public. This is generally why your parents are so cringe: We were used to suffering personal humiliation in front of others - sucking it up and getting on with it is just our nature. Unlike the legendary Mr. Peyronie, we are just able to get to the point.

ALSO:

With that praise for technological innovation out of the way, now it’s time for some dread.

As you may have heard, Google has launched a new AI product called VEO 3, which lets anyone plug in a prompt and receive a short, almost completely lifelike video depicting what they wrote.

I immediately grabbed a couple of lines from my novel to see how they would look in movie form:

And:

(Trust me, it makes more sense in context.)

It only took a few minutes after the initial excitement of seeing my words in film to realize that we are about to enter an entirely new world. For one, why hire expensive, difficult actors and full film crews to make your movies when they can be generated with a few keystrokes? Why hire writers to write your movies when AI can do that, too?

Sure, it will be cool when we can all make movies. I certainly have ideas. But the entire movie-making industry is about to go up in flames. The era of the movie star will soon be over - instead of Jennifer Lawrence and Ryan Reynolds, we will have digitally-created actors that we can just drop into our own films if we really want to see them.

But even if you’re not in the mood for eulogizing the film industry (it has, indeed, created some of the worst people on the planet), we haven’t fully grappled with what is going to happen to the world when every video clip circulated online is suspect. Informational egalitarianism is cool until you realize that will elevate mistruths that are going to cause people to commit violence against each other. (This is the premise of the new movie Mountainhead on HBO/HBO Go/HBO Now/HBO MAX/MAX/HBO MAX.)

If I can make people say dopey things from my book, then malign actors will be able to make videos of world leaders saying things they never said in order to inflame tensions. This is already happening - a fake video of the new pope denouncing Vice President JD Vance rocketed around the world before fact-checkers realized it was false.

We are about to live in a world where everything we see could be fake and nothing is verifiable. You or I might be able to spot a fake, but what about the hundreds of millions who either can’t or refuse to because it doesn’t comport with their politics? President Trump used a digitally altered photo as evidence a man who committed no crime should be thrown into an El Salvadoran prison camp - as they say, a lie travels around the world while the truth is still getting its boots on.

And, of course, the leaders of large tech companies forge ahead with all this because if they did slow down, they would fall behind the pack. The way society re-orders itself once all truth is negotiable isn’t their problem - they are too busy downing Ketamine and repopulating the planet.

FINALLY:

As I noted on social media, the choices in style and music made by Gen Xers were a protest against the culture of their boomer parents. So I then wondered what Zoomers have to rebel against, given everything their Gen X parents did was obviously awesome?

Take, for instance, The Prodigy, who was cranking out bangers that still hold up 30 years later. Here’s “No Good (Start the Dance)” from their groundbreaking 1994 album, Music for the Jilted Generation.

How do you rebel against what was already, by definition, rebellion? By being boring?