And then someone made a product called "Masturbation Cream." Is that a proper way to start a paragraph? Gods no. And it's a horrible way to name a product. Listen, anything with a viscosity somewhere between tap water and toothpaste is properly masturbation cream in waiting, it doesn't need to be called out publicly though. You just use it for that purpose and then go back to Star Wars Angry Birds after petting the dog to clean your hand like a normal person.

The website for Stroke 29, which is the proper name for the lube du jour here, features this image:

gunoil.com

Hey soldier, nice foxhole.

Now there is definitely a population of dudes who will see Captain Stabbin' here and think, "Hey, that's just swell" and want to try giving an Indian burn to the Commish. But is that the core demographic? Shouldn't that be a lady? And instead of the words "solo mission" shouldn't "Why not spend five minutes looking at clips of girls who went to L.A. to be in a Fall Out Boy video" be emblazoned on the screen?

Marketing strategies aside, we now live in a world where someone was all, "Let's sell dick-rubbing cream" in front of a room of coworkers, and they all nodded and shook hands.

This is officially called the "ThenCry" pillow, and there are two possible ways to deploy this product, both of which should make your stomach drop a little, like when you're on a rollercoaster, but instead of having that feeling immediately overwhelmed by exhilaration, it should just stay down there and wallow with the kind of cramps you get if you consume nothing but coffee and energy drinks for three days straight and now you're afraid if you use the toilet you'll literally die.

The name suggests this pillow is to comfort a crier. So maybe you just fought off some terrorists John McClane style and one of them shot you in the liver and now that they're dispatched and the EMT's put a bandage on your shoulder or forehead or wherever doesn't mask how totally bad ass you still are, you go home and lie down after drinking a warm scotch (which is a terrible idea just now) and you weep a little because getting shot in the liver hurts. Lucky you, the pillow has Kleenex right in it!

But of course that's not what this pillow is for at all. First, John McClane would never cry from that, he would just patch it with a bit of wood. But also, this is for someone who just broke up with their boyfriend Atticus and needs a good cry to remember they're still a good person. And what kind of boyfriend never asks if you want extra quinoa anyway? Or. Or this pillow is for the lazy, multi-tasking masturbator who would like to jack it but doesn't want to worry about remembering to bring an extra half-crusted sock or roll of TP into the boudoir with them. Neither one of these people are good in a spiritual sense. And not because they need to have a good cry or masturbate -- hell I save time by doing both at once most days -- it's that they optimized the experience with this pillow. They knew that, in the future, it would be handy to have a pillow that had the ability to sop up bodily fluids, so they bought one. That's so sad Steven Spielberg should make a black-and-white movie about it.

In Asia (also in other places but of course it seems to have started in Japan) there are services where you can now pay to rent a boyfriend or girlfriend for an hour or two. This is a person who will pretend to be in a relationship with you, engage in small talk, and attend events as your date. I want to now sit with you for a small but very important aside. A tangent, if you will.

The rent-a-girlfriend services allow you to pay to experience the feeling of being in a relationship, for an hour. To have someone attend a wedding with you or a dinner date with coworkers. Or just a Friday night out, whatever you'd do with a real boyfriend or girlfriend if you had one. A hooker is a person who will taste your genitals if you pay them to. One of these is apparently considered socially acceptable, and one is not.

You can go to dinner with a prostitute, or a wedding, a bar mitvah, you can even pay a prostitute to reenact scenes from movies with you. Plus, they will still taste your goodies. A rental date will not do that last part. Who's being silly here?

I'm not begrudging lonely people their loneliness or the ways they seek to overcome that loneliness, but if you have to choose between a prostitute and a rental friend, the sadder choice is the rental friend, because at least your prostitute relationship is based on honesty. Even if they escort you out as a date and you lie to your friends and the wait staff at Red Lobster, you still know the score. If you pay to rent a girlfriend you're pretending you have a relationship and you're still ending the night with your Stroke 29 on a tissue-dispensing pillow because you can't stop lying to yourself. That's like Hyper-Lonely. Physicists can only study lonely like that if it's held in place with electromagnets. Don't ever do that to yourself.

This is the cyber-aged equivalent of telling your friends you have a girlfriend who is a model from two towns over and she's busy on a shoot in Fiji right now so they can't meet her. Also, does anyone say "cyber-aged" anymore? I used my Netscape to look it up on the Alta Vista and couldn't find anything. Ha ha ha, old references!