Is every step on the road to heaven really heaven?
I have long believed this to be the case. The phrase "All the way to heaven is heaven, for Jesus said 'I am the way'" is attributed to Saint Catherine of Siena, a 14th Century saint noted for her devout faith and her organizational skills. (She wasn't martyred, she just got sainted because she got the Catholic Church's act together organizationally at a time when counting chickens after they hatched was considered a feat of mathematical genius. There is also talk of magically uncorrupted loaves of bread. Wooooo!)
Being a lifelong atheist, I have never taken St. Catherine's maxim literally and I skip over the Jesus part because who cares, but I still believe it holds great wisdom. The central idea is that if you have some goal or purpose you want to achieve, every step on the road to achieving that goal is the goal.
Let's take an example. Suppose you want to be a famous pop singer. You've got a good voice, you like singing, you did well in music class at school, and you feel you've done some good covers of classics. But so do a million other people. You don't have any contacts in the music industry, haven't been engaged in musical activity since school because everybody told you it was stupid to go for a career in music. Impossible dream, yadda yadda yadda.
So what do you do? Anything you can, that's what. You form a band with other buddies from school who like music. You play in a garage. You look for gigs. You play for friends. You make demo tapes. You make Youtube vids. Probably you have to work a crappy job to keep a roof over your head while you do this because you're making no money at it.
But you are singing. You are doing your thing. And whether or not the music industry likes it, you are part of the music industry, even if you are widely considered an awful part of it. You may not be where you want to be in the music industry... yet. But you're making progress. You are taking steps that will get you somewhere in the music industry that will make you happy, even if you can't be the famous rock singer you wanted to be when you started out.
And that progress may bring you happiness, i.e., you may arrive in heaven. You have the hope of heaven, you believe it is there, and that IS heaven.
Think of it in another way. Heaven, or musical stardom or whatever is not a place or a job, it's a process. You start out as you at Point A and you move toward Point Z, your goal. And as is the norm in most worthy goals, you encounter a lot of obstacles and detours that make things difficult for you.
And sometimes you discover that what you thought was a detour was actually your destination. Like, you discover that you aren't really interested in being a famous rocknroll singer, but that you really like doing jazz vocals as part of a group. Or that you like doing mixing on sound boards. Or you like promoting and helping other musicians find their place in the industry. Or whatever. The point is, heaven isn't always where you think it is when you are just starting out. You have to find it. But eventually you find it, or something like it, and you're happy, and you realize that you had fun at every stop along the way. Because every step on the way to heaven, is heaven.
Now let's get to the porn fans. I read a lot of stuff online about sex. I read the comments on pornsites, among other things. One of the things you quickly notice when you read the comments of fans on pornsites is that it's very clear that some porn fans have, in their minds, a personal relationship of some kind with the pornstars they follow. The dead giveaway for this, to my mind, is the sense of betrayal you get in the comments about pornstars who have changed their looks, most often by inflating the size of their breasts, followed closely by inflating the size of their lips.
I generally find that when pornstars do this sort of thing it rarely works out well for them in terms of improving their looks (though it sometimes does). But I never feel any sense of personal anger or betrayal about it, because I never feel that I have a personal relationship with any pornstars, probably because I DON'T have a personal relationship with any pornstars. I may like the way they perform in various porn videos, but I don't feel any sense of personal connection with them. They are performing for an audience, and that's not a personal relationship, gratifying as their performances may be in so many respects.
Some porn fans clearly do not get that. Their posts reflect a clear sense of hurt and betrayal when a porn star blows up her tits or lips or whatever. They vow never to watch her videos again. She has forever damaged something precious in their minds and very possibly, hearts. Also maybe other parts. It's a fairly common problem that's just not confined to porn fans. Lots of people mistake performances for the real thing in politics, in auto and real estates sales, in media and in the arts. They’ve mistaken the persona the performer projects in her performances for the real thing.
Which gets us to the comedian Whitney Cummings. Whitney is an actress and standup comedian who did a really clever thing in her standup special "Can I Touch It?" She paid a company called RealBotix to make a sex doll that looked exactly like her, and she included the Whitney sex doll in her standup. I was very interested, of course. I was hoping she would use the Whitney sex doll to play with the differences between her the person and her the media persona. She didn't do a lot of that unfortunately, she concentrated mostly on the differences between her as a human being and the robot as a construct that just happened to look very much like her.
Granted, it looked very much like her:
And it could speak and move its eyes and jaws a bit to make its speaking more lifelike, though its robotic voice was nothing like Whitney's. And as the photo illustrates, the doll looks very dead and doll-like next to a very lively and animated Whitney Cummings. And despite the fact that Cummings went for the obvious, basic material that was inherent in the Whitney sex doll, she did it in a smart, funny and hilarious way that sometimes did have elements of the routine I had envisioned.
Then from somewhere out of the whirling nebulousities of my subconscious mind came the question: “Well what if some guy were a total Whitney Cummings fan and his idea of heaven would be to be Whitney Cummings’ boyfriend/husband/whatever? And suppose that guy managed to buy a Whitney Cummings lookalike sex doll? Would he be closer to his heaven if he had a doll that looked just exactly Whitney Cummings, that he could fuck? I mean, he wouldn’t be THERE, not by a long shot, but wouldn’t be closer to being Whitney Cummings-adjacent?”
That’s a much tougher question than it looks like, because neither “no” nor “yes” are easy answers to arrive at honestly.
“No” is difficult because central to my idea about “all the way to heaven, is heaven” is that any move toward a goal is a good one in the sense that it gets you on the path of achieving that goal, even if it’s completely in the wrong direction. The important thing is to get moving. As you move toward your goal (or away from it, if you start out in the completely wrong direction) you’ll develop a clearer idea of what direction you need to move in, make the necessary adjustments, and eventually, bob’s your uncle or to be more precise, Whitney’s your girlfriend.
Let’s take the Whitney Cummings sex doll case, because it’s a tough one. (And to get back to the pornstar fans who feel a personal relationship with pornstars, an almost identical situation exists with pornstars. They even sell latex casts of their genitals for fans to fuck.)
The problem is, the world supply of Whitney Cummings is very limited. There’s only one of her. There’s a huge amount of Whitney Cummings media properties available that have created a media persona of Whitney Cummings, but there’s only one real, actual Whitney Cummings.
Now suppose you gather some money and buy yourself a Whitney Cummings-like sex doll. (While doing research for this essay I read an article that said there were many eager would-be buyers for Whitney lookalike sex dolls after her Neflix special came out, but that the company couldn’t make it because Whitney Cummings’ likeness and image are legally protected, as is normal for celebrities. I mean, can you imagine all the products and services celebrities would seem to be endorsing if their images didn’t have legal protection? But the demand certainly proves that a lot of people would certainly buy a Whitney sex doll if they could.)
And so that fan can have a sexual experience that is a lot more like fucking Whitney Cummings than just imagining it. He can fuck something that looks very much like Whitney Cummings, that kinda feels like Whitney Cummings (I understand that the vaginas on many sex dolls are very well done) and (if he’s the obsessive type who tracks down what kind of perfume Whitney wears and buys some) kinda smells like Whitney Cummings. He could also edit tapes of Whitney’s comments from the many, many hours of speech available from her podcasts and have the experience of hearing Whitney Cummings moan and cry out and so forth while he fucks the Whitney sex doll.
And my answer long-term would have to be “Yes” a man who has bought a Whitney sex doll is closer to Whitney heaven than one who has not. Because where does he go from there? He may not be all that close to marrying Whitney, but that was never a high probability event, given the scarcity of Whitney Cummings. (And the exact same thing is true of all the porn fans who buy latex casts of their genitals. Yes, that's a thing.) But it’s reasonable to suppose that the fan will have learned a few things about himself once he has slaked his lust on the Whitney Cummings sex doll.
He might for example realize that he’s not all that attracted to Whitney in particular, he just likes fit brunettes with merry smiles and so he eventually starts dating fit brunettes with merry smiles and eventually finds one who fits him to a T. Or that he was attracted to her for her humor, not her body, and so eventually he finds a short, chubby blonde who cracks him up for the rest of his life. Etc., etc. Or he could discover that he’s perfectly happy with the Whitney sex doll, so much so that he loses interest in the real Whitney and is very happy living alone with his doll.
There are a lot of ways the story can go, and so long as it leads to more happiness and personal fulfillment, it’s the way to heaven.
But the Whitney sex doll could lead to the fan realizing that the Whitney sex doll just doesn’t get it for him, that only the real thing will do, and so he concocts a plan to kidnap Whitney and botches it (because plans like that never work out well for anybody) and he spends the next 30 years in prison writing letters to Whitney which are read only by the prison psychiatrist. This is not the way to happiness or personal fulfillment. Not the way to heaven. That’s one way, an extreme way, that the answer might be “No.” It’s a very rare thing but famous people have been kidnapped or murdered by fans in the past.
The more common way the answer would be “no” would be that the sex doll experience alienates the fan from his own and others’ sexuality. That is, his sexual experience with the doll leads him to think of women as animated sex dolls to a certain extent. Even worse, women reject him because they sense that about him. He loses the ability to connect with women as human beings and becomes something like an incel, perhaps an incel, period, unable to form a relationship with a woman that involves give and take. He has gone far from heaven.
Of course, this technology will evolve. Whitney Cummings discussed that in an interview with Joe Rogan (she brought her sex doll along for the interview so it could truly be an pen discussion). Joe didn’t like the doll at all. He found it creepy. But Whitney pointed out, and Joe agreed, that the technology on the dolls would evolve. That one day sex dolls that look human and move like humans and talk like humans would exist.
Whitney said she and other human women will destroy the sex dolls at the point. “I will be a savage about it,” she said. “I will wait until you fall in love with it, and I will destroy it.”
But I don’t think Whitney and Joe thought this through. Why would you stop perfecting your sex dolls when they reached par for human women? Why not make sex dolls that were better in every respect than human women? Better conversationalists, able to move like the best dancer ever, smelling like she’s horny all the time, BEING horny whenever you want her to (because she’s programmed to) and looking like the most beautiful woman you’ve ever seen. Plus all the sexual skills you ever wanted and no inhibitions. And an innate desire to clean house when not having sex? Better yet, an innate desire to suck cock for hours.
The technical problems in creating such a doll are difficult and we’re a few years from surmounting them, maybe a couple of decades, maybe a century. But there’s no reason to suppose any of these hurdles are insurmountable. They all seem well within the scope of human achievement if climate change doesn’t kill us all off.
And I think the man who had a sex doll like that would be in a very happy place. Except, you know… no children.
I think at that point, the population problem for the human race might become maintaining a population of human beings. Those last few generations of human men would be very happy, though. Human women, much less so.
So there you have it. A Whitney Cummings sex doll might indeed lead some people to heaven, meaning St. Catherine’s saying still holds true. But a truly advanced Whitney Cummings sex doll might also portend the end of the human race. That’s what you call “problematical.”
