Google AI Gaslights my Puberty
Back in middle school — late ’70s, early ’80s — boys didn't find pornography on the internet. We didn’t even have the internet; we had the great outdoors.
And it was there, in all its unfiltered majesty, along dirt bike trails behind our moms’ apartment complexes, that we found porn.
If you knew where to look.
Under an old ripped tarp. Beneath an 18-wheeler tire. Tucked beneath a piece of plywood. Weather-beaten piles of Cherry, Oui, and Hustler — Playboy apparently being way too classy for this collection. No Norman Mailer essays on the dirt bike trail.
Nobody knew how the magazines got there. Only two kids I knew ever tried to take any home — both got busted by their moms within the week.
It was like a weird rite of passage. We’d huddle around the soggy pages, trying to make sense of both the photos and the strange universe of ads in the back.
That’s where I first saw it. Bold. Proud. Unblinking:
Spurious Spanish Fly!
I didn’t know what spurious meant — it sounded official. And with no internet, if you wanted to know what a word meant, you looked it up in a dictionary. So I did. It meant fake. False. Bogus. Even at eleven, I thought: WTF? (Though I did not yet think in such abbreviations.)
Are they just telling us it doesn’t work? Like they slipped the truth in, betting most readers wouldn’t be educated enough to catch it, or curious enough to look it up?
Flash forward to the future, where I asked Google AI: “So were they just counting on their dumb readers not knowing the word spurious?”
Here’s what I got:
It’s unlikely that the term “spurious” was used in the ads themselves…
The ads likely relied on the general public’s lack of understanding…
The “spurious” nature was likely a consequence, not an intention…
But they did use the word. Repeatedly.
That’s the whole point.
It’s literally how I learned it.
So either I hallucinated a whole section of late-’70s adult magazine culture…
or Google is politely rewriting my puberty to make it make sense.
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