A few months back, the New York Times ran an alternately fascinating and creepy story about Japanese men who were in love with their life-size anime plush dolls, and shamelessly took them everywhere—to the beach, to karaoke (perhaps singing Aerosmith’s “Rag Doll”?), to the all-you-can-eat salad bar. Today, Boing Boing touches on another bizarre Japanese dating trend, this one two-dimensional: a video game girlfriend.

Boing Boing interviews Koh and Yurie, a Japanese couple newly transplanted to San Francisco, who dealt with some relationship issues when Koh found himself getting sucked into Love Plus, a popular Nintendo DS dating game, during a business trip to Toyko this September. Love Plus starts the player off with three mini-skirt donning, high-school-age girlfriends to court, and eventually the player whittles his choice down to just one. While most other dating sims end there, Love Plus continues with the chosen girl whispering sweet nothings, eventually mimicking the player’s likes and dislikes, and demanding physical affection. Yep, physical affection:

Q: Koh, what do you and Rinko do together?

Koh: OK, this is pretty embarrassing. The DS has a mic and a touchscreen, so ... one time, she asked me to say "I love you" a hundred times into the mic. I was on the airplane when she asked me that, so I was like, no way. There was also this part where you have to hold her hand on the touchscreen. If you touch her hand with the stylus, you get to hold her hand. And then there's the part where you have to kiss her.

Q: Did you do it?

Koh: No, no! The girl's face shows up on the screen, and you have to touch her lips to give her a kiss. That's pretty weird ... this is embarrassing. I'm sweating right now just talking about it.

Koh’s wife Yurie seems to be only slightly fazed by Koh’s virtual indiscretions, commenting, “If we were to get into a fight over this, it would be less about the content of the game and more about how much time he spends playing it.” As someone who's passed by a Best Buy on the day of a big Xbox release before, I’m alert to the great, mostly harmless love between a man and his console. But this particular case seems to straddle the line between permissible hobby and cheating of sorts. (Tangentially, I’m pretty sure Liz Lemon would call this kind of high-level video game addiction a big DEALBREAKER.) It seems that the crux of the issue is whether one can really develop feelings for what amounts to a computer program.

And according to Koh, one can:

Koh: The danger I felt when I almost got sucked into Love Plus was very human. If I was single and had gotten too into this ... I don't know, I recognized that there was a me in there that could have a real attachment to this artificial character on the other side of the DS screen.

Tags: 2D dating, boing boing, love plus, new york times

It’s been a whole day since I first read Jason Whitlock’s Foxsports.com column defending ESPN baseball analyst Steve Phillips, who was fired from the network after having an affair with a 22-year-old production assistant, and I’m still not sure what to make of it.

Whitlock’s main point is that “[a] little off-the-books nookie should not infringe on man's ability to discuss bats and balls in October.” I’m going to set aside the obvious fact that a job at ESPN is a privilege, not a right, and if an employee does something to embarrass the network, of course he can be fired. (Yep, the woman got fired, too.)

If I didn’t know better—if, say, I didn’t know that Whitlock has riffed on this before and that we did not have the Internet thousands of years ago—I’d say this column is a fossilized relic from the Neanderthal era. Reluctant as I am to steer traffic toward it, you really must read it for yourself. America’s hardworking men are locked in “battle against Pussy Galore.” Phillips is merely a victim to the forces in society like “women enter[ing] the workforce” and “Viagra, exercise, makeup, perfume, hair extensions, shaved legs, clothes that revealed cleavage.”

In Whitlock’s world, monogamy is outdated and men—heterosexual men, especially—should not be constrained by it. It’s not their fault, after all, if they can’t honor their marriage vows, what with all the hussies in the next cubicle. And why should little wifey mind, as long as she’s getting enough money to buy groceries and clean aprons? And well-off men positively deserve extramarital sex: “[A] moderately famous man earning between $250K and $500K a year should be allowed a mistress he can see weekly, one week-long, $8,000 vacation he can take with his mistress and five strip club nights with his boys a year.” Double those income parameters, and Whitlock grants the man two more strip club nights a year and a love nest for his little tartlet.

Seriously, Jason. What about a woman earning $250,000 or $500,000 a year? If you think sex outside marriage is a right for everyone, why do you keep talking about men as victims of women? Why don’t you throw in just one little reference to the extramarital desires of women?

What is particularly galling about Whitlock’s Don Draper shtick is that he should know better than to say such stupid things. Whitlock wrote a column (since pulled from Foxsports.com) saying that Rush Limbaugh shouldn’t own an NFL team because Limbaugh had said that slavery “had its merits” and that James Earl Ray deserved a Medal of Honor. Of course, Limbaugh had never said any such thing and Whitlock had to apologize.

But Whitlock can’t hide from these comments. They’re attached to his byline. And he should know that sexism is just as bad as racism.

Tags: espn, Jason Whitlock, racism, Rush Limbaugh, sexism, steve phillips

About Obama's hoops game for boys, reader Matt DeBord writes:

One thing that's been overlooked is how spectacularly, epically terrifying it is for most men to be asked to play any kind of sport with the boss. Sometimes if you're really, really good—like if you played golf in college or something—they want to have you around as a kind of permanent pro-am staffer. But if you're a mere mortal ... Yikes! It's psychologically and emotionally draining. In fact, I think the accepted old rule was to always let the boss win, no matter what (the boss understood this and would usually flip for the drinks afterwards to acknowledge the gesture). My question is: Are the boys playing ball and golf with Obama actually having any fun? I suspect they're trembling ...

Hmm, I wonder. They always look like they're into the game in the photos. But maybe those brows furrowed in concentration match serious performance anxiety.

Tags: obama's all-male basketball game