I. Spishak and Kyle

I want to tell you about two young men.

First, there is “Spishak,” the online pseudonym of a 28-year-old living at his parents’ home in Los Angeles. Spishak considers himself a pornosexual, which is exactly what it sounds like. He is a virgin whose carnal relations involve thousands of videos and no carbon-based life forms. As the journalist Daniel Kolitz describes in a Harper’s Magazine essay, Spishak’s room is a shrine to erotica, where 27 separate pornographic videos play simultaneously on eight tablets and three monitors. Asked about his relationships, Spishak tells Kolitz that he’s never been “good with talking to women,” and the pandemic arrested any development on that front. What most frightens Spishak about sex between two people “is the impossibility of ever knowing what’s really going on in your partner’s head.” “I just feel like it’s exhausting,” Spishak says, “for both parties.”