Reduction to Absurdity

Reduction to absurdity is a basic rhetorical argument and if you read the news or follow any form of political punditry, you’re probably familiar with it: “If we let a man marry another man, what’s to stop a man from marrying a dog, or a lamp shade?”  The irrationality of the assertion is by design, and it’s been a favorite talking point from hard line conservatives, associating same-sex marriage with a concept so ridiculous that it allows them to seem like altruistic defenders of traditional values while still being assholes. While I believe that proponents of this view are wasting everybody’s time on an issue of basic human rights, I don’t think they should abandon the matter altogether. They merely need to retrain their focus on a group deserving of vilification, because there is a much more severe threat to the national social structure. I’m talking, of course, about sex with robots.

Go ahead and laugh, but it’s going to happen, and for no other reason than the inherent laziness of my species: impressing women, and the ceaseless dick-measuring that that entails, are man’s only sources of motivation (for life, in general). Men are shameless, perverted, and impulsive animals, which is why there is no doubt in my mind that one of us will be (or already has been) the first to philander a robot .  To us, women are the world’s most complex puzzle, like a giant labyrinth that reshuffles itself every twenty minutes, giving you just enough time to gain your bearings before turning the world on its head. There’s a steep learning curve in talking to girls, and it’s a skill that requires a fair share of vulnerability and rejection:  two things to which my gender doesn’t take kindly.  Therefore, I can earnestly identify with the desire to avoid such humiliating social circumstances by finding other means of gratification.

I’m not saying girls are an impossible undertaking, or even improbable, as a large part of the male population overcomes such odds on a daily basis. However, the difficulties are sufficient enough to dissuade the more apathetic of our kind from making the effort, and nothing caters to that instinctual disinterest more than technology. One of modern society’s greatest ironies is the fact that there is a small percentage of our population working tirelessly to ensure that the rest of us never have to tire from working. Not that it’s hard to deter people from exercising their will power, but the mental back flips we can accomplish to justify laziness can be quite remarkable, especially when sex is on the brain. There have been dozens of times (mostly in college) in which I was attempting to get laid, and decided to throw in the towel and jerk off from sheer lack of motivation. I can only imagine the activities I would be tempted to abandon if I had the convenience of an anatomically correct model of Emma Watson waiting in my closet: a man could easily justify that as nothing more than an expensive sex toy.

Even so, the dispassionate masses are not the only ones under suspicion here. You may be asking yourself what type of person would be lonely enough to realistically invest in a sex robot. Well, nothing says complete lack of social skills like the ability to create robots. Let’s face it, ever since the movie Weird Science, nerds have been itching to score themselves some artificially intelligent ass, and anyone who has played video games in the past five years can testify to that. As the game graphics have improved, female characters have gotten hotter and hotter, as they’re given increasingly larger breasts complimented by inversely proportioned waistlines. It’s unrealistic to believe that women with boobs that big can perform the level of physical activity necessary to be that thin. Their backs just wouldn’t support it. I remember playing a level in God of War on PS3 in which I had to make love to a goddess while two of her female servants watched, and those servants would (depending on my performance) become incrementally more aroused before eventually hitting the floor to start their own party. Mind you, this whole scene had absolutely nothing to do with the arch of the plot. It was there solely for the sake of animated porn.

This fundamental, and even glorified weakness of our nerd community is evidence that men are susceptible on every level of the social ladder, from the best and brightest all the way down to our inert legions of armchair champions. If we’re not careful, mankind may be headed for a (not so) far off dystopian future in which the men have been willingly confined to underground burrows, each of us with a robotic sex surrogate that the ruling class of women uses to harvest our seed and keep us collectively pacified by our own emotional simplicity. To avoid this future of passive captivity, I desperately urge my species to stay vigilant, follow your heart and make sure your larger head stays in control, otherwise we’re doomed to be imprisoned by our own immoral inclinations. However. If you think I’m overreacting by taking a simple issue and drawing a string of hypothetical social circumstances before reducing it to a single absurd scenario, I completely understand. After all, that’s kind of the point.

9 thoughts on “Reduction to Absurdity

  1. I’m not going to dodge a bullet by not coming out and saying this first off: It’s really good and I really like it. I didn’t find it confusing, but it is dense, and usually blog articles aren’t. That being said, all the sentences make sense; a second read-through goes smoothly. As a whole it’s really complete. I love the image of women being a labyrinth that reshuffles every twenty minutes. I also like the line about the group out there that works tirelessly creating technology that allows the rest to tire from working (check that sentence though, I think there’s an extra “never” in there but I drove myself crazy trying to rework it, so you do it). I like that the piece makes a smart full circle by calling yourself out on reducing to absurdity, linking yourself to the conservatives you introduce and criticize in the first paragraph. It’s like an in-your-face, shove-it-conservatives-I-can-not-only-use-that-argument-but-become-that-argument outcry. I’m not sure if that’s how you meant it, but if you did, it comes out in a hidden sassiness that not every reader will pick up on, and if you didn’t, then it comes out for people who are reading into it for being more than a social commentary on the direction we’re heading towards robots, and on the species of men.

    Most blog articles are skim-able, and while I would argue that it’s something to be proud of that you can write well enough that people have to really take the time to read your articles, it goes against the current internet culture of browsing. Your blog is not something I would stumble on while browsing, but I think that’s a good thing. Your writing is heavy and ironically thought-provoking, probably because it’s so honest. My advice to you: Keep writing the blog, your friends and family appreciate it. But start submitting to literary journals if you haven’t already and before laziness sucks the desire straight from your brain.

    • I feel like I should get a handicap though, seeing as that vagina of yours gives you a considerable advantage.

      • Supposedly the point of your essay, it’s easier for me to get ass than you simply because I don’t have a y chromosome. Well at least I can comfort you in knowing that so far there are men out there that are taking your advice and continuing to court and pursue instead of taking to robot sex.

        • And nothing’s more comforting than the reassurance that other guys (plural) are sleeping with your ex-girlfriend. Combine that image with a hot cup of cocoa, and I’ve got myself a cozy little evening.

          • While I’ve enjoyed diverging from your original post long enough to discuss your comfort with my sex life, I’m going to happily go back to my own smitten secrecy. Back to the original blog, I think it was one of your better posts.

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