Uncanny Valley
Trust, Polarity, and the Uncanny Valley: Why She Won’t Follow Him Unless He’s Real
Note: For the spirit in which this essay should be read, see my prefatory post: “Shitposting to the Point of Tears,” https://www.respectthekayfabe.com/p/shtposting-to-the-point-of-tears.
Something from our evolutionary past could have, maybe, instilled in us the dread, at an instinctual level, of all things that appear to be real but strike one as off.1
Not congruent… or too perfect to not be real.
Whether that was a signal for early man to keep away—maybe due to a contagion spotted in others,2 or a reminder of mortality due to something corpse/zombie-like that evokes existential dread,3 or that it moves without communicating intent.4
Something about this gut reaction is what triggers the same revulsion whenever a writer, especially if he is a man, writes with clarity and logical precision about the dynamics between men and women.
When a man breaks down the polarity that should exist between the sexes with clinical clarity, what remains isn’t practical insight, but potential training data—the kind that could be fed to chatbots designed to emulate women or men.5 And because training data can never pinpoint what it means to be human,6 just like the chatbot, a man analyzing without ever having experienced real polarity will speak of it as a technicality. Instinctually, it’ll feel like an echo to the soul rather than something lyrical—written by a man who is a poet, whose words would signal true understanding.
That’s why women will always, as a matter of their survival, avoid men who, through their responses, show they don’t understand—they value data and the perception of what’s deemed by them to be truth, rather than showing they have a spirit that’s capable of empathy… capable of devotion, the kind that’s irrational and can’t be out-logicked. For we, all men, are born with that—and are not golems.7
The truth in this situation is better served by an Orpheus than by a Frankenstein.8
And for this, I must be your Orpheus. That means in these essays that I will be publishing here and on my other platform, there will be no statistics, no studies, no scientific breakdowns, and no accounting for outliers outside of generalities, when I will be approaching this as a novelist, a poet, a lover, and, most of all, a street philosopher whose understanding of human nature is borne out of his time as a Dom in consensual power dynamics in BDSM clubs. There’s no room for ambiguity in those settings.
As such, my use of man and woman to denote sex as gender is deliberate, without caveats or apologies.9 How else am I to show you the power of polarity if, through these essays and my novels, I don’t create that with you, the reader, and do so with the clarity that’s demanded in exchanges rooted in consensual power dynamics?
The worst time for a woman to find out she’s dealing with a Frankenstein instead of an Orpheus would be the moment she discovers the monster is unable to read body language and doesn’t stop when it’s clear he should—all because he’s from the Uncanny Valley, still waiting for her to utter her safe word.10
When She Lets Him Lead Her In
In The Desert Road of Night, Sylvia Hadid James leads Andrés de León into the Labyrinth—because he knows how to listen when she says the safe word, and when her body says what words can’t. And for that reason, they affirm their soulmate connection—one that would last a lifetime and beyond. It’s available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Smashwords, and most major retailers.
Masahiro Mori, “The Uncanny Valley,” Energy, vol. 7, no. 4 (1970): 33–35. The concept refers to the discomfort felt when humanoid figures are almost—but not quite—lifelike. It has evolutionary psychology implications.
Mark Schaller and Justin H. Park, “The Behavioral Immune System (and Why It Matters),” Current Directions in Psychological Science 20, no. 2 (2011): 99–103.
Ernst Jentsch, “On the Psychology of the Uncanny,” Angelaki 2, no. 1 (1906): 7–16; republished in English translation. Sigmund Freud later expanded on this in “The Uncanny,” 1919.
Karl F. MacDorman and Hiroshi Ishiguro, “The Uncanny Advantage of Using Androids in Cognitive and Social Science Research,” Interaction Studies 7, no. 3 (2006): 297–337.
Bender, Emily M., Timnit Gebru, et al. “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, 2021.
Hubert L. Dreyfus, What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).
See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976). Bettelheim uses the golem myth as an example of soulless man-made imitation lacking love or spirit.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), represents the archetype of man playing god and creating without soul.
Intentional provocation—because tension is the basis of polarity, and polarity the basis of desire. Esther Perel, Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence (New York: Harper, 2006), 24–27.
Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Nussbaum explores how moral perception relies on emotional intelligence and embodied cues—particularly the ability to read another's suffering or discomfort without explicit verbal signals.