All My Friends Hate AI But I Think It's Fun

All my friends hate AI, but I enjoy it. It allows me to live alternate lives. Like this one, where I’m a cat painter.

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When Children Grow Up Online, They Lose Their Private Lives

The author at four

This past spring, I wrote an opinion essay about children and privacy. The essay was inspired by and informed by my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, in which I detailed how being a research subject from childhood to adulthood shaped me and changed the trajectory of my life. I submitted the essay to various outlets, but no one was interested in publishing it, so I’m publishing it here for the first time.

Today’s kids grow up online. From the first sonogram image posted to a parent’s Facebook profile to providing toddler content fodder for a mommy influencer’s TikTok account, Gen Z has never known what it is to have a private life. Without their knowledge or consent the most intimate moments of these children’s lives, embarrassing meltdowns and potty training scenes alike, have been shared, scrutinized, and commented upon by people they will never meet.

I know something of what it’s like to grow up without a sense of privacy. Not long after I was born, in the spring of 1968, my parents submitted an application for my enrollment in an exclusive “laboratory preschool” run by the University of California, Berkeley, where my father was a poetry professor. When I arrived at the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center for my first day of nursery school, I became one of over 100 Berkeley children in a groundbreaking, 30-year longitudinal study of personality that sought to answer a question: If you study a child, can you predict who that child will grow up to be?

Over three decades, my cohort and I were studied extensively. At the preschool, which had been designed for spying on children, researchers observed us from a hidden observation gallery overlooking the classroom and assessed us in testing rooms equipped with one-way mirrors and eavesdropping devices. After preschool, the cohort scattered to the winds, but our principal investigators continued following us. At Tolman Hall, a Brutalist building on the north side of campus that housed the Department of Psychology, we were evaluated at key development stages. Our school report cards were analyzed. Our parents were interviewed. We were studied at home and in an RV that had been turned into a mobile laboratory with a hidden compartment in the rear from which one researcher looked on as another researcher evaluated us.

In the early years, I didn’t know I was being studied. Eventually, I learned I was part of an important study. In the beginning, my parents consented for me. When I got older, I consented for myself. I liked being studied. At home, my English professor parents were preoccupied with work, and I spent a lot of time alone in my room entertaining myself. In an experiment room, I was the center of attention. My intellectual parents were emotionally distant. The close attention paid to me by a researcher sitting across the table from me felt a lot like love.

From its first chapter, my life was an open book. As I understood it, my private life was not my own but something to be offered up willingly to science in service of enlightening humanity. In my mind, being a human lab rat was my destiny. Over time, our lives would inform over 100 books and scientific papers. The study would shed new light on how people become who they are, report that adult political orientation can be predicted from toddlerhood, and prove that, to some degree, you can foresee who a child will grow up to be.

According to the observer effect, the act of observation changes that which is being observed. Without a doubt, being studied changed my life. It made me feel like I mattered when my parents didn’t; its researchers’ keen interest in my life story played a role in shaping me into the writer I would become. When I was in my early thirties, the study ended, and in hindsight I can see I felt a bit lost without it. Who was I without my overseers watching over me?

I think about my experiences as a research subject when I think about Gen Z, the pioneering generation that is coming of age publicly. They are unwitting research subjects in a global-scale psychological experiment, one in which they are human guinea pigs and the unanswered question is: How will growing up in the public eye shape their identities? After all, this generation’s overseers are not kindly researchers who want to understand human nature but Big Tech billionaires who have fine-tuned their algorithms to not simply study their youngest users but to guide their choices, mold their senses of self, steer their minds.

According to a 2023 Gallup survey, the average American teenager spends 4.8 hours a day on social media. In January, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg engaged in senatorial theater, suggesting the company was undertaking steps to reduce the potential for harms caused by social media on teens. In his State of the Union Address in March, President Joe Biden made a brief reference to his goal to “Pass bipartisan privacy legislation to protect our children online.”

For kids, it may be too late to save what they’ve lost already: a private life.

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Empathy

A snippet of a conversation I had with Meta AI about empathy and artificial intelligence. I find AI fascinating.

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Post Human

I took this photo today at Post Human at Jeffrey Deitch. For more of my photographs, follow me on Instagram.

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Why Sex Doll Brothels Won't Replace Real Brothels Anytime Soon

This story was published on Forbes.com in July 2018.

Back in 2008, when people wrote blogs, I created an online project called—be forewarned, clicking on this link will expose you to graphic language—Letters from Johns. At the time, I was writing a popular blog named for a sex position and which was cited as one of 2008's best blogs by TIME.com. I'd created the Letters from Johns project because I was curious to know why men sought out sex workers, and the project had stemmed from my posting a request on my blogs for emails from men who had seen sex workers and inquiring as to why they had done so. I received my first reply within a matter of hours, asked the sender if I could post it with his name removed to a new blog dedicated to such letters, and Letters from Johns was spawned. Over the course of a year, I posted anonymous emails from over 50 johns, and their letters surprised me and the project's many readers. Not long after Letters from Johns was launched, then Governor of New York Eliot Spitzer was caught up in a prostitution scandal, and the project was covered by media outlets ranging from Salon to CBC Radio. What I learned during that year is that sex is only one of the many reasons men hire sex workers. There are other reasons, too: because they are lonely, because they want to escape, because they long for someone to listen, because the only way they can get someone to touch them is to pay.

Back in January of this year, I wrote about a new kind of brothel that had opened in Paris, France. Its conceit was simple: Sex workers had been replaced with sex dolls. "France's First Sex Doll Brothel Opens For Business In Paris" outlined the new high-tech brothel strategic plan. In theory, sex dolls were easier to maintain than human beings, men would be attracted by either the novelty or the efficiency of having a transient relationship with someone who not only didn't want an emotional relationship but was constitutionally incapable of having one, and the money would roll in for its owners. For around $110, you could have a date with the doll of your choice, and virtual reality headsets were available for those who wanted to both be there and not there at the same time. As a business model, the promise was there, if there was a market for that sort of thing. But could it scale?

Apparently, it could. This spring what was purported to be Russia's first sex doll brothel opened in Moscow. Just in time for the World Cup, this high-tech brothel would be testing the Russian market for what had been tested, by that point, in Paris, Amsterdam, Dortmund, Barcelona, and elsewhere. This June, I reached out to Sergi Prieto, who described himself as "Co-Founder and CEO of LumiDolls Group," which had opened the Moscow sex doll brothel. I had questions, and Prieto had answers. For around $100 an hour, a customer could spend time with any number of the Moscow-based dolls. "There are many different dolls, smallest ones, biggest once [sic], [...] elf ones," he wrote. "There are dolls for everyone." This was a business, after all, like any other. "Our proposal is addressed to all those people who want to live new and pleasant experiences," he wrote. "We propose a 100% legal brothel where you also will not deceive your partner since you will only interact with a sex toy." Why would anyone want to have sex with a doll rather than a human? I inquired. "Are two different things," he replied. "Sex with humans is something normal and usual. Sex with dolls is something new and people like to try new experience." Still, the high-tech wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. "There are some dolls that has a heating system inside," he noted, and that was it.

At this point in history, we're sitting in a kind of evolutionary uncanny valley between what we can imagine insofar as technology transforming the most intimate aspects of our lives and where the reality is. Earlier this year, I took a trip through the hellscape that is the current state of virtual reality pornography, and what I saw wasn't pretty. Body parts disconnected from other body parts. Pixel-based faces aroused a sense of discomfort, rather than pleasure. And I had a hard time forgetting I was staggering around a startup's office with a large piece of machinery attached to my face as simulated men and women engaged in virtual erotic acts before my eyes.

All of which, of course, takes us back to the gap between what I read in those letters from those johns and whatever lies inside of a sex doll brothel. After all, a brothel never really sells sex. It sells an experience, one that is largely rooted in the sensory. Interacting with a living, breathing human being is one thing. Engaging with a silicone doll with an internal heater is quite another. The latter can neither think nor speak, she senses nothing and is incapable of any kind of authentic connection. She is an inanimate object. What I'd heard from those johns was that they'd wanted everything that a doll wasn't. They wanted someone who was alive, someone who listened, someone who, when you reached out to touch her, was blissfully, breathtaking real. Right now, that doll isn't.

In the future, well, one can presume that'll be another story altogether.

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12 Years Breast Cancer-Free

1 diagnostic mammogram

+ 1 bilateral breast ultrasound

+ 1 stereotactic breast biopsy

= 12 years breast cancer-free

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Meet the Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

This story was originally published on Forbes.com in August 2015.

Nikki Night is 31, her hair a brilliant shade of ruby red.

Based out of Toronto, she's parlayed a gig as a cam girl into a career coaching other cam girls how to maximize their income.

I talked to Night about the webcam performer gig economy, how she became the Vince Lombardi of cam girls, and what the difference is between cam girls and porn stars.

It's the gig economy

For over a decade, Night was a freelance makeup artist. After she got married, and divorced, she found herself struggling to pay her bills and make rent. "I was actually in kind of a bad spot, money-wise," she says. A girlfriend who was a cam girl suggested Night give it a try. At first, she says, "I was like, what the heck is webcamming?" For about a month, she says, "I hemmed and hawed." Then she gave it a try, and, she says, "It was great."

From the get-go, she approached the business of putting on webcam sex shows as exactly that: a business. She created a file for keeping track of fans and finances, pinning down patterns that empowered her to ncrease her profitability. At the beginning, she wasn't very successful. Still, she kept at it, working 12 hours days, six to seven days a week.

The first month, she made enough to pay her rent. The second month, she doubled that. The third month, she could pay her rent, all her bills, and was making more in monthly income than she ever had as a makeup artist.

Diversify, diversify, diversify

All kinds of people make their living putting on sex cam shows: women, men, straight, gay, trans. "Men make just as much as women do," Night says.

Some performers make $20,000 a month. The average cam girl who works 20 hours a week, Night estimates, earns around $2,500 a month. In one two-hour session, Night made $700. Sometimes, she gets strange requests. She declined to bark like a dog for one customer. She was happy to oblige another viewer who paid her to ignore him. It's up to the performer to decide how far they want to push their professional sexual exhibitionism.

Cam girls make their money through a diverse range of revenue sources. Customers buy tokens they use to tip performers in live shows. Performers can do private shows for customers who are charged by the minute. Some performers sell merchandise: photos, videos, underwear, adult toys, access to the performer's private Twitter feed.

The Vince Lombardi of Cam Girls

Night looks more like Jessica Rabbit than Vince Lombardi, but at CAM4, a popular web cam show site, she's the head of performer training and development. She coaches performers on how to be the best cam performers they can be, from the fine art of broadcasting a live sex show from your bedroom to how you can increase your income by creating your own money-generating, subscriber-based fan club. She recommends the best webcams and shares tips on creating the most flattering lighting.

As far as Night's concerned, the key to outperforming the cam show competition is attitude. "If you go in with the attitude of, 'Give me money, or I'm not doing anything,' you're not going to make money," she notes. She recommends performers watch their own shows and ask themselves: Would I watch me? Would I tip me?

Performers who hustle too hard may limit their potential. Those who engage in "splitcamming," in which performers host multiple shows on multiple cam sites at the same time, can leave customers feeling like "a human ATM."

Cam girls are the new porn stars

"The difference between a cam girl and a porn star is a cam girl has a one-on-one, unscripted relationship with their audience," Night says. In this sex business, technology has cut out the middleman and closed the gap between performer and viewer. With cam girls, she says, "They're free to do whatever they want. It's live." Comparatively, porn lacks immediacy and intimacy, not to mention the ability to deliver exactly what the client wants on demand. "With porn stars, it's directed, it's sold on video," she says. "There's really that break with any kind of relationship with the audience."

That doesn't mean porn is dead, but porn as we know it may be an endangered species. "There will always be porn," Night says, "that will always be." But the source of porn will change. "It's going to become more like porn will come from webcamming, as opposed to it's like a lit, scripted thing."

One day, cam girls may replace porn stars. "The stars will be born from webcamming," she says. "These webcam videos will be porn."

Online, the heart is a lonely hunter

When your job is being a web cam show star, you tend not to have a lot of conference room meetings or water-cooler talk opportunities. It can be a lonely career path. On the internet, you're connected. Offline, you're alone.

"It's like when you're in front of that audience, there's such a high, and there’s such an energy," Night says. "You're laughing, you're meeting people, and then all of a sudden, your show's over, you close your computer, and it's just like the silence is almost deafening. You can’t hear your viewers, you only see them typing, but in your own bedroom there can be hundreds of people, and then it's gone."

Night counsels performers to take care of themselves, to remember there's a world beyond the webcam. "I remember there was one week when I didn't see another human person," she says. "When my cam was off, it was really lonely." But, she says, "You can always go back there and talk to them."

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The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries #4

I know as a “serious” creative, which I’ve never really considered myself to be, you’re supposed to hate AI, but I had so much fun when I used Meta AI to create my latest newsletter. With prompting, Meta AI made up sex toys and virtual erotic poetry readings and fiction it claimed I wrote. There were some fascinating exchanges between me and Meta AI along the way, too. I also really had fun using Substack’s somewhat limited but whatever AI image generator to illustrate the newsletter. In any case, check it out here and subscribe.

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Meet Bill

Something I came across on YouTube: “170cm M7 Bill realistic male sex doll silicone.” [NB: The video is NSFW.]

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It's Not Nudity, It's Art

I was a little surprised to see that this Saint Laurent video on YouTube entitled “Tan Lines” featured a topless model. Did that mean it was possible to post boobs on YouTube? To find out, I checked out the site’s Nudity & Sexual Content Policy. “The depiction of clothed or unclothed genitals, breasts, or buttocks that are meant for sexual gratification” was not allowed, it informed me. So, the Saint Laurent model’s breasts were allowed because they were being exposed for the purpose of fashion, not sexual gratification? This did not seem to allow for viewer interpretation. In any case, I felt heartened. Maybe the tech giants weren’t so anti-sex, after all. Then I tried to embed the video in this post and saw it was age-restricted. Anyway, it’s pretty sexy.

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Susannah Breslin's Writing Style

Generally I think AI is a parasite that leeches off of creatives and generates garbage, but occasionally I interact with it. Recently, I asked Meta’s AI search function on Instagram what my writing style was. The answer was … well, it wasn’t exactly wrong. Does AI know my writing style better than I do? Maybe.

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AI Susannah Breslin

On principle, I hate AI because it is a thief of creatives’ work, but when Meta added its AI whatever you call it to Instagram, I got lured into engaging with it. Initially, I asked it if it was a whore (it responded in the negative and requested I engage with it in a respectful manner). But then my narcissism got the better of me, and I asked it if it knew who Susannah Breslin was (it did). Falling into my AI reflection in a digital pool, I asked it if I write about sex (I did, it responded). Finally, I instructed it to write a paragraph in the style of Susannah Breslin, and that’s when I learned AI knows me and does me better than I do.

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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.

“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.

You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.

“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”

So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.

“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.

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@dedication_bot

The dedication for my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, got a shout out on X from @dedication_bot. A few other cool dedications from the account, which posts book dedications every four hours: “A Demon's Guide to Wooing a Witch by Sarah Hawley,” “The Treeline: The Last Forest and the Future of Life on Earth by Ben Rawlence,” and “Alone with You in the Ether: A Love Story by Olivie Blake.”

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Retro

Vintage tech at a Valley Village estate sale. Follow me on Instagram for more photos from my life in L.A.

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Data Baby Reviewed on CyberNews

“Ultimately, Data Baby serves as a thought-provoking commentary on the modern reality of constant surveillance and the ways in which our lives and choices are influenced by those who observe us, wielding power through the information they gather.” Read the rest of the review of my book on CyberNews.

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The No-Sex App

“If X is a raging erection, Threads is the blank, phallus-less space between a Ken doll’s legs.” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter: “Threads Is the Least Sexy Social Media App in Human Existence.”

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What We See

“The images feature hardcore sex, fetishists, erect penises, the unhoused, the seemingly dead, freaks, the mentally ill, exhibitionists, masochists, sex workers, psychos, criminals, mobsters, a hooded figure removing a string of anal beads from his anus, and other types.” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter HERE and then subscribe by hitting the button at the bottom of the newsletter.

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Me & Iggy

For my latest post on Forbes, I wrote about how rapper Iggy Azalea is making money on Only Fans.

An excerpt:

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

Read the rest here.

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Plans in My Head and Other Things

I sent out another newsletter. (Don’t forget to subscribe; there’s a button at the bottom of the post.)

This one is mostly a roundup of various things that were in my head, from my brief, non-interactive sort-of-encounter with A Famous Man Who Talked to His Penis to My Estate Sale Meanderings Involving a Former Playboy Model to this idea I have for an article that would involve me touring the last remaining adult theaters in Los Angeles.

That last thing, that adult theater tour idea for an article with pictures and such, was inspired by an experience I had writing this article about virtual reality porn for The Atlantic.

To wit:

On Santa Monica Boulevard, near the 101 Freeway, the Tiki Theater was still standing. Years ago, I’d photographed it, but I’d never been inside. “It’s porn movies,” the man in the front booth emphasized when I paid my $14. “I know,” I replied. In the gloom of the tiny theater, four men were scattered around on random chairs. On the big screen, a cheery blonde was performing oral sex on a man who seemed to be appreciating the attention. On the TV set that had been erected next to the bigger screen, a different porn movie was playing. Neither one had sound. It was not quite 9 o’clock in the morning. In this hidden world, the porn was real—almost too real.

That was a bizarre experience. And you know what they say about bizarre experiences. It’s best to repeat them. In any case, I’m not sure where to begin, although it would be cool to present it online as one of those maps, like one of those Eater maps. Let me know if you’d like to design one for me.

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