“I cherish my independence,” Bunny says.

“I feel powerful because my body has never been broken into.”

“I’m scared.”

“Is it weird if people want to date me from what they see online? I do all these horny things and then I don’t look or feel the same when people actually meet me.”

“I’m really not even that beautiful, or that smart. I don’t know what I’d do if I wasn’t talking about makeup all day – shades of gold, electric blue, blood red – they can change a lot of things, you know, like your whole face, your whole mood, your whole belief system. Is that a skill?”

“My sister, who is way prettier than me, wanted to be an influencer but she didn’t have the energy. Her captions were bad, people didn’t feel her, I don’t know. She works in PR trolling people like me to inject cachet into her company. I don’t really know if this is smarter or more beautiful than what I do. We don’t talk about our forks in the road because she thinks mom and dad love me more.”

“What was your question?” I ask.

“Why are you a virgin?”

My mom has never talked about the Virgin Mary but she has always talked about spirituality. She must have felt guilty about all the alcoholism, how violently it paraded through our farmhouse, clinging to our little bodies and tiny souls while we made our own yogurt in clay jugs and invented weed soup from the wild greens that choked our strawberries.

“Your father was studying to be a priest before he met me. It’s different in Bavaria. People stand in a circle and hold hands in churches. It’s very warm. God isn’t so unforgiving there. You know all about Dionysus,” she trails off. She often leaves sentences unfinished to insert a maybe into everything, trying not to burn any bridges, slam any doors.

We had a bust of the wine god’s head in plaster of paris by the grand piano in the living room. His long coiled hair reminded me of snakes. Snakes made me think of Eve’s conversation with the serpent at the Tree of Knowledge. Nobody ever said what they really talked about.

“Alcohol was invented by the mystics,” said my mom. “Monks spent most of their time fermenting things, turning regular organic materials like wheat and hemp and rye into godly liquids that altered consciousness. They got addicted, too, who could blame them? Altered worlds make a yearning person thirsty.”

Bunny is Jewish. Her nose glides sensually towards her lips, making them appear plumper than they actually are – even with all the filler and lip liner sponsored by companies that pay for her BMW 5 series upgrades.

“I want a nose job,” she tells me. “I’ve always wanted a shorter nose.”

“I actually don’t even know if I can stand it anymore – not having the nose that I really want.”

“Why shouldn’t I sculpt the nose I was randomly given into an image I can choose for myself? You don’t have to stay what you were born as, you know. Look at everyone swapping their pussy for a cock, their cock for a pussy, I’m not even going that far. It’s so minor.”

“Should I tell my followers? Should I turn the surgery and the nose reveal into an ad campaign? It would be like an art piece, an immersive experience. It could go viral, and you know what that means. I’d get a hot beef injection of followers and more endorsement deals.”

“Makeup is art. Surgery in the name of beauty is art. Nobody can argue this. Nobody knows what art even is – it’s like the hand of God touching us. It just feels important but we don’t know why. Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Well,” I say, sucking on a CBD mint. “Your nose has been passed down to you by a legacy of strategic mating. If you make your nose like Tinkerbell’s, that’ll disappear. Not saying that’s bad or wrong, just wondering if you want to sacrifice your individualism for factory-made beauty.”

“You think I’m an individual?”

My mom’s mom gave me her statue of the Virgin Mary. It was an elegant baby blue, perfectly suited to my silky golden windowsill, my brass poster bed – as close to my dream of a fairy princess bedroom as my mom would allow me to have. We never talked about the Virgin or why I loved her because my mom disapproved. Her dad had chosen her as his protégé; he invented low temperature heat transfer using liquid helium. A formula that is now used in the jet fuel of the most prized fighter jets, in the extreme cold beauty treatments used by Victoria’s Secret models and Hollywood’s elite, in the cryogenic body preservation techniques that promise us immortal life.

Because of her dad’s extreme brilliance, my mom never used a calculator. She’s ferocious with numbers but doesn’t believe in beauty. She is very beautiful. She knows and doesn’t care. She never told me I was beautiful.

“I didn’t? I didn’t tell you?” she says. “Well, of course you were, but all I ever wanted was for you to be smart.”

There’s a meme thread snowballing through the internet, a conversation that gets longer and longer as it’s passed from account to account. It goes, “you think because you’re the lead in a play and you know all the lines and you’re the star that holds the story in place that you’re hot. But we will for real choose the stagehand with the nice ass, girls don’t get that.”

When Gloria Steinem said, “I don’t mate well in captivity,” during the peak of first wave feminism, another wave, one of not mating, went cresting, too.

Animals don’t mate well in zoos or science labs or fluorescent lighting, either. Mating is a wild act. The wilderness of girls who have worked hard at school after being told they aren’t beautiful has extended a wilderness of hibernation that just had a different flavor before liberation. Sixty years and several feminist waves on, women are still earning an average 77 cents on the white male dollar, but they’re working later than ever, even on Sundays.

Bunny’s sister had a boyfriend who couldn’t get a hard-on. He could while watching porn, but not while having sex with her. She suggested they try mixing things up and watching porn together so it could help them have sex. He put his favorite video on his laptop in their bed. The video featured very young girls. Bunny’s sister’s boyfriend got hard looking at their prepubescent bodies with exaggerated womanly add-ons – hot air balloon tits, nipples like doorbells, perky silicon asses.

“Okay, do that to me now,” Bunny’s sister says.

Her boyfriend reaches for her and loses his erection.

“What’s wrong?” She asks.

“You’re too real,” he says.

Caia Hagel interviews artists, deepfakes, internet demi-gods, and monsters in search of the sublime. Her digital anthropology travelogues and fashion forecasts appear across media and her presentation on Selfies at Forum D’Avignon Paris contributed to a Bill of Digital Human Rights. Memoirs of a Phone Geisha is coming soon.