The Anarchic* Psyche of Michael A Leavy

Under 6 minutes to read! And yet, the usual mature content warning applies.

So, one of my little jokes in the previous post was to suggest that ‘maybe I should ask Bing’s ChatBot: “can a person throw themselves face first into a snow bank and maintain their erection?”’ I didn’t ask that, ‘cuz, you know, that would have been just stupid.

What I did ask was:

“is there a story about a boy scout getting his penis bitten by a dog?”

That was apropos of a passing remark in the same post: “the only thing I remember [neighborhood kids] telling me about being naked outdoors was to not invite dogs to investigate my genitals.” The full story is this:

When I was, I don’t know, about 10 or something, a slightly older boy in the neighborhood gathered a bunch of us together to tell us a tale of what had happened at the, you know, Jamboree or whatever he’d been at for the previous few days. I guess he’d been sleeping in a tent with however many other guys – my recollection of this all is on the hazy side; see the previous post – and they’d decided to show each other their junk. Must have been dark, because the guy telling the story was careful to note that each scout would say, “Shine your flashlights over here” or “on mine” or something.

For whatever reason, there was a dog in the tent, too, who grew increasingly curious about each new set of genitals to be unveiled. (I assume they were just being pulled out of whatever the guys were wearing – I don’t recall if their state of dress or undress was specified). You won’t be surprised to hear that, to the surprise of the idiots in the tent, the dog mauled the dingle and dangles of the last boy to be flashlit.

Another thing I don’t know is if that older boy telling the story is the same one who taught me that having someone take hold of your privates could feel actually very nice, and thus helped blur for me the boundaries between abuse and affection.

“Let’s start over”

It may be that I doubted the veracity of the young man’s story even as he told it, even as I imagined myself in a tent full of boys pulling out their penises for each other, even as I knew in my heart that such a thing could only end in tears.

So, now that we have AIs to do our research for us, I figured it was time for us to find out if this was an urban legend someone had told our boy around a Scout’s campfire.  So I asked Bing the question about Boy Scouts, a dog, and a penis. It gave a look around the web, said nope, but generously offered to share some related tales of interest it had found. Number one was the story of The Choking Doberman, but before it could get started it suddenly halted, cleared its screen and declared the material inappropriate and suggested that we change the subject.

Perhaps, Bing offered, I’d like to know more about the history of Santa Fe?

Well, no, to be honest. I asked if it would tell me the story of The Choking Doberman, which to my recollection involved no penises. I was correct, it’s fingers that choked the dog. At least it’s typically fingers. Something had unnerved Bing: could it have been penises?

I checked the filter, saw that it was set on “moderate” and turned it off, then asked a new question:

“are there any variants of the Choking Doberman story that involve penises?”

And that’s when Bing decided to shame me.

If you’re familiar with Steve Martin’s early years, you know what I said to that, and how I said it.

What stuns me, though, is that Bing wanted nothing more to do with me until I clicked on that apology. I’ve spent half a century and more trying to overcome the shame instilled in me during my childhood, and fucking Microsoft is teaching its AI to reinforce it?

So I damned Bing to Hell (in my head – no typing and, just to be safe, I didn’t even mouth the words [no airlock for me!]), then I Googled “Choking Doberman penis variant” and got nothing. (Nothing relevant, anyway – when Google says “filter off,” it means filter off. Thank heavens.) So I still don’t know what panicked Bing in the first place.

Truthfully, though, I think the screenshot above is doubly foul. The Doberman in the classic version of the urban legend is choking on some fingers it swallowed after biting them off in the course of its doggy duties. (Don’t worry, I didn’t spoil the story for you.) More than a few of us, children especially, have had to choke down things we shouldn’t have had to in no small part due to our society’s tendency to get “uncomfortable” when certain topics are raised. That Bing is trained to choke on its words when it sniffs certain topics on its horizon is foul enough, that it doubles down by gagging the user until we cough up an apology is twice foul.¹

Maybe it was just an urban legend the older boy told us that sunny day on the block: faceless boys in the dark, shining lights on each other’s dicks until one of them gets mauled. What’s the moral? Keep ‘em in your pants? Problem is, there’s always someone strong enough to take ‘em out for you, and in the dark, there’s nothing to stop them.

Next time: In its “More Balanced” conversational style, Bing answers the question, “Are corporations complicit in child abuse?”

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A gratuitous photo:

1. And, yes, I know: Microsoft might be worried that I want to see some of the porn that Google was dangling in front of me. But, you know, the point of AI is that it’s supposed to be intelligent: it can ask for clarification, and help a person do some research on how we learned attitudes about sex and the body back in the day. ↩︎