The Sophist 10: The one about Jeff's loving explorations

“Loving exploration?” asked my friend. “Jeff Bezos says he’s split up with his wife after a period of loving exploration?”

It means shagging around, I replied. She knew this, of course, but she was still surprised that he had said it almost out loud, because she is British and lives in Britain, whereas he is Billionaireish and lives on the West Coast of America, where it is now completely normal to open up your floundering marriage in an effort to save it, and to talk about that out loud. It is also completely normal that after opening up your floundering marriage, ie doing the shagging around, and talking about it out loud, you will get divorced, with a statistical likelihood of roughly 100%, but hell, why let that rob you of the opportunity to tick some of the creepier boxes on OK Cupid?

People just like doing the Loving Exploration shit. They do. They like it because it involves neither Love nor Exploration, but a real life role-playing of everything they ever watched on Porn Hub with the volume turned low while their resentful spouse tried to sleep beside them and the sky above their marriage turned to a cold dark shade of sulk. Now they get to try out those peculiarly hairless pubic exercises with somebody else, a real person, but not so real that they’ll ever have to introduce them to their mother, which is ideal because the specific Milf roleplay they had in mind actually involves - oh never mind.

(Illustration by Louise Androlia)

I spend a lot of time in LA, because my day job involves interviewing Hollywood celebrities, because life is pain, hashtag my struggle etc. And I can tell you that Conscious Uncoupling is a thing there, it is real, but so is this Loving Exploration stuff, which is why it’s odd that we in Britain have picked up on only one of these phenomena (to take the piss out of). Clearly, the two things come as a pair, because the only way you can really have a harmonious divorce is if you’ve had some great sex beforehand, and if you were having great sex with the person you were divorcing then you probably wouldn’t be divorcing them, so this is where the Loving Exploration comes in. It lubricates the parts of the divorce that other mediators can’t reach.

But do let’s also take the piss, because this is Jezz Bezos, a man so wealthy that he shits money into money and flushes with more money, while his warehouse staff have to piss urine into cups because they’re not allowed toilet breaks. And because last year I interviewed his friend Jill Soloway, a brilliant TV creator who was so brilliant on so many subjects, but who claimed, when it came to Bezos, that he had become the richest person in the world entirely by accident, as if he’d just been looking for the lavatory himself and tripped over 150 billion dollars on the way. And I’m still annoyed about Jill saying that.

And let’s also take the piss because, according to the Enquirer - not the most journalistically rigorous of sources, but still, it might be true, it must be true - Jeff has allegedly been sending texts to another woman that say things like: “I love you, alive girl. I will show you with my body, and my lips and my eyes, very soon.”

Can we just read that text again? That first comma cannot be ignored: I love you, alive girl. It’s almost as if this were a man who tends to fornicate with sex robots, or maybe inflatables? Or just, you know, dead people. But now he has found Alive Girl, he can make an animé film about her (Amazon Prime, to be released early 2020) and soar. He is going to show her with his body and his lips and his eyes, exactly like Keith Harris did to Orville. And when it’s done, he is going to ask Alexa to order him some wet wipes and a 10ml bottle of Optrex. Or perhaps Alive Girl is Alexa - the upgrade. Perhaps this is what he's been trying to tell us all along.

In another text he apparently wrote “I want to smell you. I want to breathe you in. I want to hold you tight…. I want to kiss your lips… I love you. I am in love with you.”

Now is it just me or does that declaration at the end, of being in love with her, sound like the first time he’s ever said it to her? And is it also just me, or does that perhaps smack of someone more used to cavorting with robots, to first declare his love in a sext? I mean it’s fine if you’re 17 and shy and were raised by the internet instead of parents and you cringe to the point of developing an ulcer when one set of human eyes meets another set of human eyes. Alright, 27. Alright, 36. But the man is 54 and he owns most of the internet, so he should probably learn to speak out loud, but he can’t, because Alexa will accidentally order him another sex robot if he so much as mutters the word love, so he has to type it.

It is at this juncture I should probably say that if I ever wrote a TV show and Amazon wanted to buy it I’d sell it to them in a heartbeat, seeing as I give them my money all the time and am a rampant hypocrite. I’d probably make sweet sweet love to Alive Girl too, if she asked, although I think the whole point is that you ask her, or rather tell her, and also tell her what songs you’d like to be playing during the act, and while she’s up could she dim the lights and order more bin bags and put the oven on at 220 degrees for a jacket potato after.

Wait, do you remember in the Royle Family where Denise and Dave were driving off to the caravan, and as the female voice of the GPS continued to direct them along the motorway in her dulcet tones, Denise got increasingly angry, accusing Dave of fancying the satnav?

Maybe it was Alive Girl who ended the Bezos’ marriage. Or maybe this is actually the next product launch from Bezos and the whole sexy divorce story is just a massive marketing ploy to get us all to buy one.

And that is the end of The Sophist, which is back after a, cough, brief holiday. Back!
The illustrations are by my beautiful friend Louise Androlia who might paint a picture for you if you’re bloody lucky.