Science & Tech Quote by Al Goldstein

Goldstein takes a familiar bit of locker-room hypocrisy - the “lady in public, whore in private” fantasy - and detonates it into something uglier and more revealing: not the desire for sexual variety, but the desire for control so total it abolishes the other person. The punchline isn’t sex; it’s the power switch. By swapping “hooker” for “Sharper Image robot,” he strips away even the pretense of mutual appetite and lands on a cold, consumerist endpoint: a partner as appliance, a purchase with an on/off button.

The joke works because it’s too blunt to comfortably pass as a joke. “Sharper Image” is doing heavy lifting here. It’s a brand shorthand for late-capitalist gadget lust: glossy, slightly ridiculous, marketed as sophistication. Goldstein yokes that aesthetic to misogyny, implying the logical conclusion of certain male fantasies is not eroticism but automation - intimacy without negotiation, sex without another will in the room. “Turned off” doubles as sexual innuendo and emotional erasure: when she’s inconvenient, she simply stops existing.

Context matters. Goldstein, as a porn publisher and provocateur, made a career out of saying the unsayable to scandalize and sell. This line reads like brand-consistent shock comedy, but it also accidentally functions as critique: it exposes how easily “sexual liberation” can become a consumer’s rights manifesto, where a woman’s desirability is measured by her ability to perform, please, and disappear. The cruelty is the point, and the point is the cruelty.