BattleBots in the bedroom

At a San Francisco porn studio, industrial sex toys run rampant.

By Katharine Mieszkowski

Feb 12, 2002 | In a San Francisco loft, a guy who gives his porn name as "Tony Pirelli" brandishes a buzzing power drill with a huge dildo twisting on the end. The Drilldo's technical specs: 18 volts of power producing as many as 1,400 revolutions per minute.

Gesturing with this tool of titillation -- or torture -- Pirelli explains, "Some girls really need a good solid performance."

This is what passes for a technology demo in San Francisco in February 2002.

The BattleBots have invaded the bedroom, courtesy of a pornographic Web site that streams videos of women having sex with monstrous machines. It's a twisted garage mechanic's fantasy of what sex would be like if all the men had been replaced by mechanical bulls.

"This is the grown-up version of Legos!" says Pirelli, the Web site's clean-cut producer, as he shows off a fleet of fornication machines at the site's South of Market porn studio.

The studio is the former headquarters of a now defunct dot-com, complete with hardwood floors, brick walls and exposed wood beam ceilings. But where computers once hummed are couches covered with white sheets and potted plants -- all easily movable for scene-staging. A wire rack holds bottles of lubricant, condoms and dozens of dildos -- each with a hole drilled in the end for easy attachment to the love machines.

Here, sexual prowess is measured in torque and horsepower. And compared with the more menacing machines, the Drilldo is a baby-faced sweetheart.

The Hammer, weighing in at 80 pounds, looks like a recumbent exercise bike bucking backwards. The Intruder could have been a rowing machine belonging to a good family in Greenwich, Conn., before it went AWOL from prep school to pursue porn infamy. And the Trespasser is literally a KitchenAid mixer gone bad, with assistance from some obliging plumbing pipes.

Maybe the most absurd of all is the Goat Milker, which happens to be an actual goat milker bought from an unsuspecting farmer in Oklahoma, now repurposed for repetitive nipple stimulation. Are we to believe the goats miss it? In any case, so far no adventuresome woman has deigned to be the guinea pig for that barnyard perversion.

At FuckingMachines' headquarters, everything begins to take on a naughty cast. That squat, hulking black machine with the long tube twisting out of it? What's that for? You pervert! That's not for sex. It's just an industrial vacuum cleaner used for nothing more erotic than cleaning the floor, Perilli explains, almost apologetically. "Mind you, we could probably turn it into one," he adds.

Along with the Internet came no shortage of frisky sexual cyborg gadgets, as adventures in teledildonics and Real Dolls prove. Technology would make everything better, even sex.

But post-dot-com blowout, there are no true believers anymore, so, for 2002 we have a tech-sexuality stripped of artifice: machines that fuck. No need to dress up them up with false eyelashes and painted-on lipstick. They're just jittering, gyrating, rotating, rumbling masses of raw thrust.

"The eroticism of the big gizmo is undeniable," says local sexologist Carol Queen, who has featured similar monster machines at her own play parties. "It's a variant on robot sex."

There's a certain perverted nerd logic to it. If Survival Research Laboratories made watching humongous machines blow each other up the pinnacle of geek art, isn't bedding down with massive machines just the next step?

"To me, this is like the next-generation of vibrator or dildo," says Susie Bright, the sexpert whose cred includes being the editor of "The Best American Erotica" series. "Somebody just thought of something even wackier, even weirder, even nuttier."

Next Page: Gynecological torture chamber or turn-on?

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